Her smile broadened as she checked out the back of her dress in the mirror. “Aren’t you gonna try on yours to make sure it fits?”
I didn’t bother to look at my dress hanging on her closet door. “Maybe later.”
She scrunched her nose. “You don’t seem all that excited about prom.”
“I’m more nervous than excited.”
“You don’t have to have sex with Derek, you know. It’s not, like, a rule or something.”
I thumbed through Instagram. “Derek and I have been dating for three months. There’s a rule, unspoken, but it still exists. Plus, I already told him I would.”
She unzipped the low-cut back. “Do you want to have sex with Derek?”
I chewed my bottom lip, trying to forget the feeling of his tongue jabbing into my mouth. “I do want to have sex, yes.” I left out the “with Derek” part. Statistics had shown that girls rarely ended up with the guy they lost their virginity to. Derek was there and available. It made sense for it to be him.
“I didn’t ask if you wanted to have sex. I asked if you wanted to have sex with Derek.”
Totally ignoring her question, I tossed my phone across the bed and hopped up. “I’m gonna grab a ginger ale. You want anything?”
She chuckled, shaking her head. “I’m good.”
I headed down the hallway and slowed as I approached Reed’s old bedroom door. He still came back here for summer and holiday vacations, but he usually went away for spring break, which was this week. In five months, he would be a senior at Bentley University, and I would be off to UMass Dartmouth.
Tracing my fingers over the door handle, I pictured his tattered poster of The Killers’ Hot Fuss album hanging on the wall by his desk. Reed’s taste in music was generally more obscure, but The Killers were one of the few bands he loved that made it mainstream. They’d been his first concert when he was sixteen. I was thirteen and jealous I couldn’t go, too. Not that he’d have wanted me tagging along, but I did beg my parents to take me. Instead, I’d stayed in my room and downloaded any live songs by The Killers I could find onto a playlist I titled “My Imaginary First Concert.” I’d lain down on my bed and dreamed I was there with him. My stomach still fluttered at the fantasy of him lifting me onto his shoulders so I could see better, my fingers gripping his black hair.
Gawd, I read way too many romance novels.
It had been a while since I’d been in his room, and the urge to go in there overwhelmed me. I missed him. I missed hearing his music blaring through the door as if earbuds were never invented. I missed his smell, like sweat and grass and something spicier and a little sweet. I turned the handle and let the door fall open. His room was messy but neat at the same time. Reed was never the type to leave clothes on the floor or dirty dishes in the sink or take-out containers lying around. His kind of mess involved paperbacks and notebooks. He used to go to thrift stores to pick up old books. He had some on his Kindle and iPad, but he said there’s nothing like being physically present to search for a new book, holding it in your hand, reading the back covers.
I had a little collection of my own, too.
Reed’s closet door was decorated with odd trinkets and stuff I imagined meant something to him. Patches, concert tickets, movie tickets, pins. There was even a blue paperclip, but I had no idea what it meant or why it was important. He would never tell me.
But my absolute favorite thing was his infamous “Wall of Quotes.” Reed had some posters up like most kids, but he had a whole wall dedicated to book quotes. Whenever he came across a good line in a novel he loved, he used to write it down on a sticky note and tape it to the wall. I noticed a few that had fallen to the floor, so I picked them up. He never wrote the full book title, just its initials. I grabbed tape from his squeaky desk drawer and stuck the first sticky back on the wall while reading it aloud:
“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.” - HPOP
I smiled, knowing exactly what the initials stood for: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
The next one I knew right away. It was from Anna Karenina and was one of my own favorite literary quotes:
“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” - AK
The last one I had trouble with. I had no idea what book title the D stood for. This quote should have seemed romantic, but somehow, it made me feel a little sad, as if Reed felt that he was the darkness and someone else was a light.
“There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.” - D
“Is there a reason you’re in my room?”
The voice was familiar but even deeper than I remembered, and I spun around to find Reed standing in the doorway, a large duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The sleeves of his black T-shirt clung to his biceps as he hoisted the bag onto his bed. His thick black eyebrows rose above those cool blue eyes, awaiting my answer.
My first thought was about how glad I was that he didn’t tan like Paige. I loved his pale color against his black hair. It made him look like a vampire, cold to the touch. My second thought was about how to deal with the humiliation of getting caught…although it wasn’t the first time.
My cheeks flushed with heat. “Sorry. Some of your quotes fell, and I rehung them.”
He crossed his arms against that beautiful chest of his. “What? You had a premonition that they fell off the wall?”
His mouth was perfect. Full, kissable lips. I imagined he didn’t taste like roast beef sandwiches or strangled a girl’s tongue with his own.
“Something like that,” I finally choked out. “What are you doing back, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be getting boozed up with frat guys while girls do their walk of shame in the morning?”
“Not my scene.” Reed’s eyes traced over me, and he frowned before turning away and unzipped his bag. “You can go now.”
A frown and a get-out-of-my-room welcome. Nothing had changed. He still saw me as a little high school girl—or, worse, an annoying, fake little sister he’d like to get rid of.
I held my head up high, refusing to let him make me feel small. “‘A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.’” I brushed past him and looked his way over my shoulder. “That’s Oscar Wilde, by the way. You should hang it up on your Wall of Quotes.”
He smirked. “‘True friends stab you in the front.’” His eyes cut through my own. “Another one by your man, Mr. Wilde.”
“Then I guess that makes us besties,” I added with a touch of venom and slammed the door behind me.
Reed
Dinner was unbearable with Tabitha there. All that talk about prom and hotel rooms. My jaw clenched so tight, I was surprised I could open it far enough to get a few bites in. All I could think about was what she wrote over three years ago, how she wanted me to be her first on prom night. Complete with stupid rose petals. She really did read too many romance books.
I knew I shouldn’t have read her diary, but after that entry that I teased her with, after I realized it was about me, I couldn’t help but want to know more about her and how her mind worked. It’s not like she didn’t sneak into my room to steal glimpses of new quotes I taped on my wall or to peek into my notebooks. My room was my private space, and she entered it freely, as if she belonged there. I pretended like I minded, but the truth was I liked it. I liked that she was into a part of me that my friends—and girlfriends—never cared to know or ask me about.