Birthday Girl (The Student Union Series Book 1) Read online

  I started laughing. When I saw Brian’s stricken face, I tried to pull myself together. “Sorry,” I said. “The thing is—”

  At that moment, however, the door opened and Jillian walked in. She looked at me. “What’s so funny?”

  I stood up. “Study group is off. You two need to talk.” It was a handy excuse, because I needed to get out of there. If Zach showed, there was no way I was going to be able to play it cool.

  19

  Last year, at room draw, I’d been thrilled to get a single (the privileges of being a senior!) but bummed when I ended up with an east-facing room. Since sun is scarce in the foothills most of the school year, everyone wanted to soak up as much as possible through south- or west-facing windows.

  But Cascade sunrises, it turns, are the greatest. Sure, I usually slept through them, but that morning I woke up at 5:30 from a dream where I was running after Zach and calling his name, but he pretended not to hear me. God, my stupid subconscious. I opened the blinds and caught the first moments of a spectacular sunrise, like an exuberant art student had painted the sky with vivid reds and fluffy clouds. I put on my headphones and listened to Beyoncé while the sun came up.

  Once it was a reasonable hour, I texted Zach and asked him to meet me at breakfast. Sorry about last night, he wrote back. See you soon.

  He showed up looking worn down, stubble etching his cheeks, shirt rumpled. Busy night, I guess. I didn’t hesitate. “What happened last night?”

  “I know I said we were going to get together,” he said. “I had to go see my dad at the nursing home. They said he was yelling at one of the attendants, so I had to rush over there. Sorry I didn’t text you. I was really stressed out.”

  I felt the anger welling up behind my eyes. “Playing the sick parent card,” I said. “That’s just embarrassing.”

  He was doing his best to look puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw you with Professor Radford! You went off in her car.” I let my spoon clatter against the edge of my cereal bowl. “Just tell me. Are you having sex with her?”

  Zach sat back in his chair and sighed. “Jesus Christ.” He rubbed his eyes. “Tara is my aunt.”

  “She...what?”

  “She’s my dad’s half-sister. A lot younger than him, obviously. She’s been living with us since Mom died. Having her in the house is the only way I’ve been able to go to school.”

  “Oh, fuck.” I looked into my cereal bowl. The Cheerios had gotten soggy, and I couldn’t imagine eating another bite. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Zach ignored the question. “Brooke, after what happened to you, I can understand why you jumped to that conclusion. But I have enough stress in my life. I’m not going to waste my time on someone who doesn’t trust me.” He stood up, took his tray and walked away.

  For the first time that semester, I skipped class. I just lay on my bed, my feelings raging all over the place like a pack of feral cats. This was all Zach’s fault. Why didn’t he just tell me? No, this was my fault. I wasn’t able to trust him for one damn day.

  I dozed off for a while, and when I woke up, I looked at the clock and saw that I’d slept through lunch. After eating basically nothing all day, I was hungry, so I got my emergency trail mix stash out of my drawer and ate two big handfuls sitting on my bed. Nobody gives trail mix enough credit. This was my personal favorite, loaded with M&Ms and chocolate chips, and it could cure almost anything.

  Almost.

  Trail mix. What did that remind me of? Oh, the geology field trip. In just three days we were heading up to the research site at North Cascades to hike, look at rock strata, analyze minerals, sleep in cabins, and try to pretend that our gorgeous ex-sort-of-boyfriend wasn’t there. Great.

  I had to give the Sierra the update. I picked up my phone to text her. Oh, come on, Brooke—you’re not that lazy. You live in the same damn building. So I headed over to Sierra’s room. As I walked down the hall, I saw Jillian emerge from the door to Sierra’s room. Oh, good, Sierra was home and presumably already in girl talk mode. (Okay, Sierra was always in girl talk mode.) I called out, “Hey, Jillian!”

  Jillian looked up at me. She seemed a little flushed. “Oh, uh, hey, Brooke.” She hurried past me. “I’ll catch you later.”

  Okay, whatever. Without knocking, I opened Sierra’s door and said, “Hey, I so need your adv—” Then my jaw dropped, because Sierra and Trevor were lying her bed, grinning at each other, with a top sheet doing a lousy job of concealing their nakedness. I started laughing so hard.

  Sierra shrugged. “You see, she—”

  “No explanation needed,” I said, fighting through the laughter. “Trevor, you’re smiling like I would be if just got into Harvard.”

  “He just got into something,” said Sierra.

  “Ew. Sierra, come by later. Clothed.”

  Ah, second semester of senior year, when nothing interesting happens and everyone just gets high for a few months in a last gasp of slacker bliss before commencement and adulthood. Right?

  Well, let’s do the math, I was taking (and probably, at this point, failing) one of the hardest classes of my college career, fell for and then chased away the most eligible guy on campus, and wandered into the aftermath of a three-way involving two of my best friends.

  And there was still a month left.

  Sierra came and found me after English class, and we went for coffee. Her cheeks were glowing. “So, are we talking about this or pretending it didn’t happen?” I said.

  “Hey, no shame,” she said. “Are you mad that I went ahead and did it without you?”

  “Not at all.” I stirred a little half-and-half into my Depth Charge. “I never thought you were serious, though.”

  “I didn’t think I was, either,” Sierra admitted. “But Jillian came by and said she broke up with Brian, and I made a joke, and...well, I guess you know the rest. So how are you holding up?”

  That’s never been an easy question for me in the best of times. I had a boyfriend in high school who would always ask me, “What’s on your mind?” Every time he did, so many worries would come flooding in that I wouldn’t know where to start, so I’d say, “Nothing.” And he’d get upset because I wasn’t communicating with him. How could I explain that everything was on my mind? The presidential election, and college applications, and whether my mom and I were ever going to get along again, and whether I needed a haircut. That would have sounded crazy, right?

  “Fine, I think,” I told Sierra. “I need a new study group, and I need to avoid Zach on this camping trip, and I was expecting my letter from Harvard by now, but other than that, everything is awesome.”

  “Good. Then we need to talk about what we’re doing for your birthday this year.”

  Instant flashback. Evan and Ashley, naked and sweaty, in my room.

  “How about nothing?” I suggested.

  “Unacceptable,” said Sierra. “This is an important birthday for you. I’m not going to let you spend it alone.”

  “Sierra, I’m turning twenty-two. Why is that important, exactly?”

  She looked at me like I was a character in The Hunger Games who had forgotten about the upcoming Hunger Games. “Twenty-two is the transitional birthday,” she explained. “When you turn twenty-one, you have one mission: get wasted, legally. By the time you turn twenty-two, that’s boring. It’s your first birthday you get to spend as a real live grownup.”

  “Where are you getting this?”

  “It was on Oprah.”

  “Okay, then what do you have in mind for this major milestone?”

  Sierra stirred her coffee with the wooden stick and thought for a moment. “Let’s go out dancing.”

  “I hate dancing.”

  “It’s a good birthday for trying something new.”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “You find someplace in the Cutlip area where we can go dancing without being molested by mountain men, and I’m in.”

  “You�
�re the best,” said Sierra. “Although you say ‘molested by mountain men’ like that’s a bad thing.”

  We walked back to the dorm together. The cherry trees already bare again. I never really understood why they chose trees for the quad that looked gorgeous for two weeks and then dead for the rest of the year. Maybe I was still thinking about Zach, about our brief, meaningless, delicious spring fling, about his magic tongue and the way he…. And then there he was, briefcase in hand, on the other side of the quad. Sierra had already spotted him and was about to say something when I shushed her. Have I mentioned that Cascade is a tiny college?

  We stopped off at the mailboxes in the lobby, and I pulled out a wad of catalogs bound with a rubber band. Boston Proper, Club Monaco, Restoration Hardware. I’d never bought anything from any of these places, but if you have two X chromosomes and a pulse, they find you somehow. I was about to drop the whole bundle into the recycling when I noticed the envelope in the middle with the return address: Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. I held it up in front of Sierra and squealed like the kind of girl who shops at Restoration Hardware.

  “Well, open it!” said Sierra.

  “Just because it’s a fat envelope doesn’t mean it’s good news,” I said, running my finger along the flap. “Maybe they sent me a brochure about all the cool shit everyone else is going to be doing in Cambridge while I’m chilling at Western.”

  Sierra rolled her eyes. “Just do it.”

  I tore open the envelope, and Sierra read over my shoulder.

  Dear Brooke Shepard, We are pleased to offer you admission to the graduate program in sociology...

  We looked at each other and screamed.

  After I called my mom and texted Jillian and Brian and some of my coworkers at the Shark, I realized there was one other person I was desperate to tell. But he and I weren’t speaking.

  20

  Just like Professor Radford’s class itself, the camping trip was turning out to be a lot more intense than expected.

  Sure, I knew North Cascades National Park was full of mountains. But that was just some lines on a map. Somehow I didn’t put it together that hiking in the mountains meant climbing mountains. My thighs burned, I kept adjusting my bra ineffectively, and I had to stop regularly to reapply sunscreen and insect repellent. But mosquitoes were feasting on my legs anyway, and when a twig scratched an angry red line into my calf, I turned to Jillian and said, “The great outdoors really sucks.”

  “Sorry, Brooke, your goth attitude isn’t going to ruin this for me, no matter how hard you try.”

  “Operation Ivy is punk rock, not goth,” I explained, and pointed to my t-shirt. A bug landed on my upper arm, and I slapped it, leaving a smudge on my shirt. “Why isn’t anything biting you?”

  “Bugs hate me,” said Jillian. “I guess I taste terrible.”

  I thought of and rejected plenty of responses to that. Jillian and I had fallen to the back of the group, and we picked up a little speed as we trudged on toward the campsite, through a series of switchbacks, until then I caught sight of Zach up ahead. It had only been a few days since I’d confronted him about Professor Radford, but it felt like we hadn’t spoken in weeks. I’d been such an asshole to him, I didn’t even know how to begin to apologize, and he probably didn’t want to hear it, anyway.

  “Slow down,” I whispered to Jillian, but she was already pressing ahead. So my choices were either to go it alone and probably get chewed to death by carnivorous insects, or follow Jillian and possibly have to talk to Zach, who I’m sure rightly thought of me as the world’s biggest, craziest, least trusting idiot. I chose the mosquitoes.

  “Oh, give me a break,” said Jillian. She grabbed my arm and nudged me ahead. Now we were walking about a hundred feet behind Zach, who was actually carrying a backpack. Not a red vinyl one with band patches sewn on it, like mine, but a rugged canvas pack that looked like it had been passed down from an Everest-scaling ancestor. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and perfectly-fitting chino shorts, and the way the muscles in his ass and legs flared with each step made me thirsty. Literally. I took a long swig from my water bottle, and was still drinking greedily when Zach turned around. God, even sweat looked good on him. The man looked like he belonged in nature, like he just wandered out of the forest one day on a mission to teach city girls how to have sex like wild animals.

  Or maybe he was one of those rural vampires.

  Zach nodded at me. God, I must have looked like shit—sweaty, scabby, covered with bites and insect guts. Not that he had any remaining interest in me anyway.

  When I thought about it, though, I realized our fling had gone approximately as I’d intended. We had some fun, we had a quick, unequivocal breakup, and now we could move on to our real lives without any boring “how will I ever live without you?” drama.

  So why did I want to tackle him to the ground and jump him right there in the middle of a popular hiking trail?

  Zach paused so I could catch up with him, and asked, “Have you been up here before?”

  I shook my head. “You?”

  “Yeah, my dad used to bring me when I was a kid. Wait till you see the summit.” Then he hiked on, leaving me and Jillian behind. Great. Could that have been any more awkward?

  Desperation Point is really just a hill, not a mountain, but when we got to the summit, I was hot and exhausted, sweat staining my armpits. I drank from my bottle, then poured a little water on my hand and splashed it on my face. A sign mounted on a wooden frame identified the snowy peaks visible on all sides. I looked around, taking in the majesty of nature, and then started laughing when I saw Professor Radford and the clique of boys gathered around her, admiring the majesty of her nature. She was wearing a tight-fitting white tank top and shorts, and her clothes and skin were somehow perfect even after the strenuous hike. The woman was working it.

  Zach was sitting on a rock in another corner of the viewpoint. I thought about trying to talk to him again, but just as I’d started to work up the courage, Professor Radford called everyone over. “The lodge is another kilometer down the trail.” Groans. “Don’t worry, everything is downhill from here. We’ll load in our gear, eat lunch, and meet up in front of the lodge at three to get some field work in before dinner.”

  When she said “lodge,” I imagined an Abe Lincoln–style log cabin with a fireplace. The building was actually concrete, with ten no-frills bunks to a room. There was a fire pit outside. Jillian and I rolled out our sleeping bags on adjacent bunks in the women’s bedroom, then sat at one of the picnic tables outside and ate our sandwiches. At some point, she set down her sandwich and said, “Brooke, seriously, just go talk to him.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve ignored the last six things I’ve said to you, because you’re staring at Zach.”

  I started to deny it, but she just held up a hand at me. I shrugged and pulled out my phone to text Sierra. No signal up here, of course. I slipped the phone back into my pocket and walked over to where Zach was eating with a couple of classmates. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, do you have a minute?” The woman sitting across from him, this cute sophomore named Beth, smiled at me with barely concealed annoyance. I rolled my eyes at her.

  Zach balled up his lunch bag, nodded at me, and excused himself. He threw on his backpack and said, “Follow me?” He led me back toward the trail we’d arrived on, and for a few minutes we hiked back uphill, but then he said, “I think it’s...yeah, this way,” and we turned off onto a minor side trail.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” I asked. “Are we going to end up eaten by bears or mountain men or—”

  “Don’t worry,” said Zach. “Like I said, my dad used to bring me up here. Besides, some of my best friends are mountain men, and as for bears, they never attack guys with beards. We’re considered part of the family.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” We hiked in silence for a few more minutes through pine and cedar forest, until the
trail ended at a meadow. Wildflowers had popped up everywhere, like an impressionist painting. It was so pretty I almost forgot how much my legs itched. The far end of the clearing ended in a cliff, beyond which we could see the swells of the Cascades. Zach waved his arm at it. “Well, what do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful.” I set down my backpack and stepped closer to him. “Zach, I’m so sorry for how I treated you. You trusted me, and I didn’t trust you. I’ll understand if you can’t forgive me, but I’d really like it if we could at least be friends again.”

  “Brooke, you really hurt me,” he said. I turned away from him, but he went on. “I’ve hardly ever told anyone about what happened with my parents. And whenever I did, I felt like they were saying, ‘It’s not your fault,’ but the way they said it, I knew they did think it was my fault, at least a little bit. And that was actually kind of reassuring. It’s comforting to have someone confirm your beliefs, even if what you believe is that you’re a terrible person.”

  “Zach, no—”

  “I’m not done.” He set his backpack down on the grass and sat down next to it, motioning for me to join him. I sat, but not too close. “When I told you, though…I could tell you actually believed I wasn’t so bad. Which was scary. But then being close to you, touching you…it’s the first time since my mom died that I’ve felt like there could still be good things in life.”

  I hugged my knees to my chest. “And then when I accused you…”

  “Yeah, that sucked. And I forgive you, but I think it would be really hard to be your friend again.”

  My heart sank. “I get it. I think I can find my way back.”

  Zach laughed. “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, it would be hard to be just your friend, because you turn me on too much.”

  “Oh.” I started to laugh, too. “I’m not laughing at you, sorry.” I pulled out my tube of sunscreen and started to reapply, then held the tube out toward him. “Could you help me with this?”

  “Sure.” He rubbed the lotion over my arms and the back of my neck. My breathing grew shallow. “How about here?” he asked, running his fingers down the neckline of my t-shirt. I nodded, and he rubbed the tops of my breasts and just a bit of the exposed hollow between them. “Or we could just move into the shade.”