Mayhem Read online

  “Aw, come on, Ro! Pleeease? You need this! WE need this!”

  Instead of telling her the truth, which is that I’m just not ready to put myself back out there after having my heart crushed under Brady’s heel, I make up an excuse. “I already told Leti we’d hang out with him this weekend.”

  She narrows her eyes suspiciously, and I know she can tell I’m bullshitting, but she lets it go. “Leti had better be amazing,” she warns.

  “He is.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I love you.”

  She rolls her eyes playfully and straightens in her seat. I’m relieved she’s not fighting me on this, but I guess she must realize that I’m just not ready to be thrown back into a social life. Soon, though, I know she’ll start pestering me. She is Dee, after all.

  After class, I spend my walk back to the dorm reading all the text messages from Brady that I’ve been ignoring. He left me another voicemail too, and I make the mistake of listening to it while out in public.

  “Baby . . .” He sighs. “I messed up bad. I know I did. I . . . I don’t even know what to say. I’m not going to try to defend myself. I just . . . Jesus, baby, I’m a broken man here. I feel like I lost my best friend. I don’t deserve for you to call me back.” He chokes up, and it brings tears to my eyes. “I never deserved you, but hell if I don’t love you, Rowan. I love you so much, baby. I don’t think I can go on without you.” After a long pause, he says, “I hope you’re liking school.” Another long pause. “I love you, Ro.”

  By the time the message ends, silent tears are rolling trails of heat down my cheeks. I roughly wipe them away, angling my face toward the ground to avoid the stares of ­people walking past me on the sidewalk.

  When Dee gets home, I’m a shell of her best friend, my face a tear-­stained mess. My body feels utterly empty because I’ve cried every last shred of my energy out. Macy left the room to give me some privacy, and for the last half hour, I’ve just been sitting on Dee’s bed staring at my phone. She immediately sits down in front of me, her knees practically on top of mine. She wraps her arms around me. “What’d he say?”

  I give her the gist of the message, because I just can’t bear to play it again. She sighs, and her eyes search mine. “You’re not thinking of calling him, are you?”

  I chew on the inside of my lip. Because I am thinking of calling him. I want to talk to him so badly. Each time I hear his voice, he puts another chink in the wall I’ve put up between us, and I can feel my anger fading.

  “Oh, babe.” Dee frowns. “Do you honestly think he’d never do it again?”

  “I don’t know, Dee.” A sob escapes my throat, and I bury my face in my hands. She rubs my back.

  “You know I’ll stand by you no matter what you do, but . . . you know what I always say.”

  “Once a cheater, always a cheater.”

  She kisses the top of my head and then sits with me in silence until I gather the strength to show my face. “Sorry about bailing on the party.” I haven’t decided if I’m going to call Brady back or not, but I’m tired of talking about it. This is something I’ll have to work out on my own.

  “Don’t be. I’m excited to meet this super-­gay friend of yours!”

  I love how easily she can make me laugh. “I don’t think he’s super-­gay. I think he’s just regular-­gay.”

  “Well, he’s gay, and you like him, so he must be super . . .” She stares at me expectantly.

  “Super gay?”

  “Super gay!” She stands up, yanking me off the bed. Her slender fingers straighten my too-­depressed-­to-­be-­bothered-­with hair. “What do you wanna do for food today?”

  Dee blasts girl-­power music in the car all the way to the closest fast-­food joint, and we pig out in the car, laughing and screaming karaoke—­because what we do really can’t be called singing. She serenades me with her soft drink microphone, and I play drums on her dashboard with my fries. By the time the song ends, I’m playing with only one fry because I ate the other halfway through my solo. I toss the last one into the air and catch it in my mouth, taking a bow when Dee busts up laughing.

  “There she is!” she says with a contagious smile. “I missed you!”

  “Sorry I’ve been so blah . . . I promise I’ll lighten up and have fun this weekend.”

  “You’re not going to have a choice!”

  I text Leti later to ask if he can hang with us in Dee’s dorm room on Saturday, and he texts me back a cheesy picture of him making a goofy-­excited face and giving the camera a thumbs-­up. I chuckle and show the picture to Dee as we drive home, and she laughs too.

  On Saturday, he shows up wearing long khaki shorts, a tattered purple tank top, and rainbow flip-­flops. His sunglasses hang from his V-­necked tank as he spins around in Macy’s office chair watching Dee and I paint our toenails.

  “Leti,” Dee complains as she paints her piggy nail glittery pink, “you really need to let us paint your toenails! You too, Mace!”

  Leti and Macy share a look. She’s sitting on her bed, curled up in the corner with a book.

  “I’m a dude,” Leti says.

  I snicker as Dee pouts. “Yeah,” she says, “But you’re . . .”

  The corner of his mouth quirks up. “I’m what?”

  “You’re . . . gay.” She says the word quietly, like it’s a secret, and I’m having serious trouble not cracking up.

  “Really?” Leti asks. “That’s news to me.”

  Uh, what?! I accidentally paint a streak of purple across the tip of my toe as my eyes dart up to his. “You’re not?”

  “I’d say I’m bi.”

  “You like girls too?”

  “Well . . . just one . . . in fourth grade . . . but she was a total knockout!”

  Dee laughs. “You’re totally gay.”

  “Whatever,” Leti says, spinning around again. “I’m still not letting you paint my toenails.”

  “Then at least let me paint your fingernails!” she says.

  “Oh!” His spinning suddenly jerks to a stop. “You can paint three on each hand! Black, like Adam’s!”

  “Adam who?” Dee asks, and my throat instantly constricts, threatening to suffocate me—­which would probably be for the best. How did I not see this coming?! Of course Leti would mention Adam! I still haven’t told Dee about our make-­out session or that he’s in my class. Oh, God. Oh, no. No, no, no

  “Adam Everest!” Leti says. “The lead singer of The Last Ones to Know!”

  I’m frantically trying to brainstorm a way to stop this train wreck of a conversation from happening, but I can’t think under pressure, damn it!

  Dee finishes with her first foot and moves to the other, having no idea how panicked I feel sitting only inches away from her. “You’re a fan? Ro and I just went to see him perform this past weekend! He is so hot!”

  “Oh, we know, trust me!” Leti says. “He’s the best part of French class!”

  Boom, the bomb’s been detonated. I cringe, waiting for the fallout.

  Dee’s eyebrows scrunch together in confusion. When she looks at me for answers, I sheepishly confess, “Shit, I forgot to mention that. He’s . . . in our class.”

  She leaps from the bed like shock catapulted her off of it, completely ignoring the toenail polish she’s probably smudging all over the place. “He’s in your CLASS? Adam Everest is IN YOUR FRENCH CLASS?!” She and Leti are both staring at me like I’m a lunatic for not having mentioned it. “You FORGOT to tell me that? How can you FORGET to tell something like that!”

  “Who is Adam Everest?” Macy peeps from the corner of the room.

  Dee whirls on her. “Only a freaking rock god!” She spins back to me, and I have no idea how she isn’t making herself light-­headed with all the spinning and pacing she’s doing. “I didn’t even know he went to school with us!
How did I not know this?!”

  “Dee,” I say cautiously, “your toenails are totally ruined.”

  Ignoring me, she braces her hands on my shoulders. “I need to be in your class! I need to make a switch!”

  “You can’t . . . It’s a two-­hundred-­level class. You would’ve needed to take French 101 first.”

  She curses under her breath and slumps down on the bed. “God, I am so jealous of you.”

  “Don’t be,” I say. “It’s impossible to concentrate.”

  Leti chuckles and props his feet on Macy’s desk, but she doesn’t seem to mind or notice. “It’s true. I’m pretty sure Ro-­bo Cop and I are going to fail.”

  “It’d be worth it!” Dee is all smiles as she dabs a cotton ball in polish remover and starts wiping all the glittery pink paint from her feet. “Have you talked to him?”

  I nearly let out an irrational giggle that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me. Talked to him? Uh, yeah, that and then some. I bite my tongue.

  “Nah,” Leti says. “He comes in last and leaves first and he’s always surrounded by bleached-­blonde bimbos.”

  “Ugh.” Dee rubs the last of the polish off and then begins to shake the pink bottle again, preparing to start over. “Ro, I swear I’m playing hooky one day just so I can walk you to class.”

  Not if I can help it! She takes my silence as agreement, but I’m already thinking of excuses to prevent that apocalyptic moment from happening. If Dee ever finds out I made out with Adam and didn’t tell her about it . . . Yikes.

  I get her mind off of it by telling Leti to slide his chair over to me so I can start painting some of his nails black like Adam’s. As I run the brush over his pinky, his ring finger, and his thumb on one hand, and his ring finger, his pointer finger, and his thumb on the other hand—­because I remember very clearly that those are the exact nails Adam had painted—­I can’t help wondering what it would be like to paint Adam’s nails for him. It’d be intimate and tender and . . . ack, I really need to get that deliciously slutty boy out of my head. I had my chance with him, and I didn’t take it.

  End. Of. Story.

  Chapter Seven

  “I’M BORED,” DEE complains a little after eleven o’clock. She, Leti, and I are all crammed on her bed. I’m sitting with my back to the wall and Leti between my legs as I braid his hair into a million tiny braids like we’ve time-­traveled to the nineties, and Dee is between his legs as he French-­braids hers into pigtails.

  “It’s late,” I counter.

  When Dee suddenly gasps, I jerk, accidentally tugging on one of Leti’s braids.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry!”

  Dee yanks her pigtail from his fingers and holds his spot while she spins around. “Your car!” she says to me.

  Oh no.

  “Your car?” Leti asks.

  After sobering up from the three margaritas she made earlier tonight, Dee is officially getting her second wind. Leti should have fled while he had the chance. “We still need to go get it!” she says.

  And that’s how I end up in the backseat of her car, leaning forward between my very best friend and Leti. “I don’t even see the point in this, guys. I’m not even allowed to keep it parked on campus.”

  “The point,” Dee replies, “is that it’s your last loose end. And you can keep it parked in the Walmart parking lot on Fifth Street. It’s not that far.”

  I groan and rest my head against Leti’s seat. Dee got him all caught up to speed on Brady and insisted he come along. He said he had nothing better to do, so we both waited patiently while Dee changed into all-­black clothing and tried to convince me to do the same. “We’re not stealing my car,” I told her, dangling my keys for her to see. She was one step away from donning a ski mask.

  “What if he’s still awake?” I ask as I nervously run my finger over the leather ridges of Dee’s center console.

  Leti shifts to face me. His hair is even wavier now that he’s taken out the last of his braids. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  When we park in the vacant lot next to the parking lot of my old apartment, the light in Brady’s window answers Leti’s question.

  “Shit,” I say under my breath. “I knew he’d be up.” Normally, he’d be in bed by now. But with the way my luck has been going lately? Yeah, there was no chance he wouldn’t be awake when we arrived for this impromptu black-­ops mission.

  Leti leans forward to stare through the windshield up to the third-­floor window. “Can’t you just run over there real quick, start your car up, and get the hell out of there?”

  I sigh. “Yeah, but if he comes out and I just speed away like a coward or something, that’d be really embarrassing. And awkward.” I fish my keys from my purse and give Leti my sweetest smile. “Can you go over there and get it for me? Please?” I do my best to look pathetic and needy, which means I don’t need to try very hard at all. I push my bottom lip out, curl my eyebrows in, and give him the biggest puppy dog eyes I can manage. “You can meet us at the gas station up the street and I’ll ride back with you.”

  He purses his lips at me, but then takes the keys I hand him. “You so owe me.”

  Dee and I watch as he walks to the edge of the lot we’re in, looks both ways, and then jogs across the street to my old parking lot. He glances back at us one last time before disappearing inside my car and driving off the lot. I breathe a sigh of relief when Brady doesn’t burst from the building’s front doors. Dee pats my knee, and I crawl into the front to sit next to her.

  “Well, that was easy,” she says as she turns her key in the ignition. Her ridiculous bundle of key chains jingles with the movement—­a miniature platform shoe, a ceramic flower, a feather, a pink glass square that says ‘sweetest bitch you’ll ever meet’.

  It sure doesn’t feel like it was easy, since my neck still feels like it’s been pumped full of steroids, but I guess it could’ve been worse. “I told you that you didn’t need to go all ninja-­mode.”

  “Well someone had to.” Dee logic: it only makes sense if you’re Dee. She karate chops my arm, but I’m too deep in thought to even crack a smile.

  At the gas station, I climb out of her car and walk to where Leti is leaning against my trunk, dangling my keys from his finger. Before I take them from him, I wrap him in a warm hug. “Thank you.”

  He pats my back. “No problem, Roast Potato.”

  I chuckle and take my keys. When I climb into the driver’s seat, I have to pull it way up so that I can reach the pedals. Leti climbs into the passenger seat and shifts his all the way back.

  “That was fun,” he says as I pull us onto the road. The look I give him says I would’ve rather had a root canal, but he just laughs. “Do you feel better now that you have your car back?”

  “Kinda,” I say, but I’m frowning.

  “Then why don’t you seem like it?”

  I sigh and glance over at him, at his wavy highlighted hair and his concerned honey-­shaded eyes. Even though we met less than a week ago, I feel like I can talk to him. Leti is a good guy. “It was the last thing tying me to him, you know? I have no other reason I’d need to see him now.” Never seeing Brady again—­it’s hard for me to imagine. And painful.

  “Are you thinking about giving him another chance?”

  “I don’t know . . .” Am I? “Dee would kill me.”

  “If she’s a good friend, she’d understand.” I know he’s right, and I know she would.

  “Leti . . . do you think ­people can change?” I’m thinking of Dee’s motto: once a cheater, always a cheater. It can’t be true . . . can it?

  “Hm, that’s a tough one.” He runs his hand over his khaki-­covered thigh. “There are some things about ­people that I think they can change, yes. Cheating? Yeah, I think ­people can learn their lesson. But I think it depends on the person.”
r />   “I guess the thing that’s hanging me up is that I don’t think it was just cheating . . . I think he was having an affair. I can’t even remember how many ‘business trips’ he’s had to go on since he started working for his uncle. I mean, how long was all of this going on before I found out about it?”

  “I guess you’ll never know unless you ask him.”

  Leti is keeping it real with me, which I appreciate more than he could possibly know. He listens and helps me sort through my own thoughts without pushing me one way or another. Talking to him is so much different than talking to Dee. He’s so much more laid-­back, and Dee is just . . . Dee.

  “Alright,” he says after we’ve been driving in silence for a few minutes while I consider everything he said, “enough about that drama. I want to know about some other drama.”

  Huh? When I glance at him, he looks positively devilish.

  “Why didn’t you tell Dee that Adam is in our class?”

  I gulp and make sure to keep my eyes trained on the road, wishing I was a better liar. “I told you. I forgot.”

  Leti lifts his nose in the air and starts sniffing. “Do you smell that?”

  I sniff the air too. What am I supposed to be smelling? Exhaust? City garbage? “No, what?”

  “Bullshit,” he says with a snarky grin, and I can’t help laughing.

  “Whatever.”

  “Come on! I really want to know!”

  I chew on the side of my lip and spare a glance at him. “You can’t tell anyone,” I warn.

  He crosses his heart. “I won’t tell a soul!”

  “Especially not Dee.”

  “Not even Dee!”

  Oh my God, am I really going to do this? Before I can over-­think it, I blurt, “I made out with Adam.”

  Leti stares at me, the tension-­filled silence sucking all the oxygen out of the car . . . and then he busts up laughing. “Oh my God, you almost got me!”