While he’s at practice, I take water breaks from running drills for field hockey and watch him through the chain-link fence. He’s intense, playing like there is a scout observing, hanging his head and cursing to himself whenever he makes a mistake as if he could still be cut from the team, even though soccer isn’t even his main sport, just what he plays because it’s not lacrosse season.
At dinner, he joins his friends at the long table at the far end of the cafeteria. He stays only the ten minutes that it takes him to eat his entrée before he leaves, rushing out the side doors, barely saying goodbye and not looking back.
Theo is a different story. He’s impossible to track. He changes his route to class, the group he eats dinner with, even the times he arrives and leaves from water polo practice, always veering early or late. The only constant in his everyday ongoings is his best friend, Anastasia, who is never far from him.
At dinner that night, Theo and Anastasia are nowhere to be found. Jasper is doing his usual: eating quickly and readying his things to leave.
“Where do you think he’s going?” I ask Elena, nodding in Jasper’s direction. Elena Garcia is my roommate. She’s from Ann Arbor and is pleasant in a way that’s made the transition from only child to sharing a room quite seamless. So far, my lone complaint is that each morning I’m startled awake by her alarm blasting “Walking on Sunshine.” Elena will then proceed to bat at it absentmindedly until she manages to hit the snooze button.
I’ve been eating with Elena and her friends since classes began, and they’ve graciously accepted me and didn’t even question why I was tagging along or accuse me of not having appropriate roommate boundaries. Elena is the only person who knows I have a specific interest in Jasper, though she thinks it’s only a crush.
“Where who’s going?” Ruthie asks. Ruthie is Elena’s best friend.
“Jasper Mahoney,” I say, deciding it’s okay to tell them, my closest, if also my newest, friends. Maybe they’ll surprise me by having the answer.
“Oh,” Ruthie says.
“That’s who you like?” Elena’s friend Matt moves his eyebrows up and down.
“I find him…” Careful, careful. “Mysterious.”
“Jasper’s not mysterious,” Elena says. “He’s aloof.”
“Aloof isn’t so bad, is it?”
They all laugh—all six of them at the table. I’m not sure that’s the reaction I’d expected, but that’s part of the fun being here. Nothing is quite what I’d anticipated.
I generally like being with Elena and her friends. But they aren’t going to help me much. None of them play sports with Jasper; none of them have classes with him. None of them really know him or care to. And even as Theo seems to be friends with everyone, he doesn’t spend much time with them. None of his extracurriculars line up with theirs either. They are heavy into theater, and Theo’s life is already a stage.
We hear an eruption of laughter across the cafeteria. I know before I turn my head to look that Theo is the cause of such commotion. Theo has what Mimi would call the gift of charm, that ability to make people feel like they’re standing in the sun whenever they’re around you. The students flock to him, they really do. I haven’t quite gotten to experience him firsthand—yet—but it’s the kind of thing you can observe from afar. And he’s nondiscriminatory with this charisma, spreading it everywhere and to anyone. No one seems to mind sharing either, even if it’s crystal clear that Anastasia Bowditch is indeed his favorite.
“Should we start?” Ruthie says, glancing at her watch. “Are you ready?” For this question, they all turn to look at me.
“I’m ready.” Hopefully, this is the truth.
Elena and her friends like to play games at dinner. Sometimes card games, sometimes word games. Today, they want to play the game of bouncing quarters off the table and into a cup. Like all their games, the fun isn’t in the playing; it’s in the betting, and today, whoever loses has to drink from one of the truly disgusting concoctions that Matt mixed up during lunch. Things like French onion soup with chocolate milk and iced tea, or blue cheese dressing combined with fish sauce and mayonnaise.
I know. It sounds really juvenile and ridiculous, but after studying things like computer science and cryptography and organic chemistry for the past eight hours, this is a good way to unwind.
As the game picks up, I laugh so hard my eyes leak tears. They’re all laughing, too.
“What in the world is going on over here?” I feel someone touch my shoulder and turn to see Theo standing over us, one hand on my shoulder, one hand on Matt’s. We both slide over so he can join us at the table—welcoming him gladly into our already blissful conversation.
He edges a knee into the empty space instead of sitting down—an uncommitted way to join in. We tell him about the game, and he laughs, starts shaking the mystery cups like this will tell him something. He knows better than to smell them.
Across the room, where Jasper usually sits, I see a flash of him—messy curls, lean shoulders hunched under a maroon jacket. He’s back? His friends greet him, but he doesn’t stay long; it would seem he’d forgotten a book and had to return for it. As quickly as he was here, he’s leaving again. But to where?
“Are you staring at my brother?” Theo’s voice has a teasing tone and isn’t at all mean. But my face gets hot. If he’s noticed this slight glance, has he noticed all the other millions of times I’ve stared at Jasper since the start of the school year? At Theo’s comment, the entire table turns toward the direction I was looking to watch Jasper escape out the west exit.
“How mysterious, eh?” Matt laughs. He elbows me playfully.
“My brother? Mysterious?” Theo directs all his attention to me, and I must say, I do feel like the sun is beating down directly on me. Theo’s being as friendly as ever. But my face still reacts with intense heat and probably the accompanying redness.
I will my expression to relax into a smile. Play it cool. “Maybe you can clear up some of the mystery?”
Theo smiles and leans toward me. “I’d be happy to.”
This is a natural progression, I decide. This line about finding Jasper mysterious, it could be planting a seed. Adding to my story, so that in a few months, when Jasper is hopelessly in love with me, all of them will recall this conversation and think, Aha, I know exactly how this started for her. I can roll with this—yes. It’s better this way.
“What do you want to know about him? Go ahead, try me.”
“It seems like all he does is study.” This is also a guess as to what he’s doing when he leaves dinner early every day.
Theo laughs. “That’s all we all do.”
This is inarguable—even though it’s barely been two weeks, I am sometimes having to skip dinner myself, in need of extra time to do homework and finish reading assignments before the eleven o’clock bed checks, when lights must be out, no exceptions.
“But I never see him having any fun—I don’t know. That’s the impression I’ve had of him since he led my calculus overview at the start of the year.”
“Honestly?” Theo says. “Your initial impression of him being not very fun, uptight, and school-obsessed, with no work-life balance, is completely right. He’s not mysterious, he’s boring. And I’m allowed to say that because I’m family. So it comes from a place of love.”