Page 28 of Keep Me Still
Good thing I brought my fake I.D. The girls might be a little harder to obtain, but I’m sure Skylar will be on top of that. Literally, I bet.
I turn to tell him he’s on chick duty when that feeling of being watched pummels me again. It’s so intense that I can tell which direction it’s coming from. Up and to my right. The marching band is filing out, but in between the tubas and drums I see her. The girl staring at me like she’s seen a ghost. And not one she’s particularly fond of.
She looks slightly different than the girl in my memory. Her skin is a darker shade of golden and her hair is a little lighter, like she’s been at the beach. But it’s her. I can feel it with everything I am. I want to call out, ask her to wait for me while I climb the bleachers like a maniac to get to her. But the horrified expression she wears keeps me still and silent for a full minute. She’s done waiting for me. She said everything she had to say with her last text message nearly nine months ago.Goodbye Landen.
“Canwe go?” I say to Corin, standing abruptly, because I’m getting out of here whether she comes or not. I can barely hear my own voice over the drums, or maybe that’s the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. I know in my head I’m here, in college, not in Hope Springs. But the memory is so vivid I might as well be right back in Georgia, watching my world fall apart at a Christmas parade.
“Landen!” the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl squeals as she throws herself into his arms.
“Huh?” Corin asks, having just started to get up to sing the alma mater with the rest of the stadium.
“I need to go,now.” The stadium spins around me and staying upright is a struggle.Focus, Layla. Don’t do this here. Let it go.But my mind isn’t cooperating.
The dark-haired girl kisses him, right on the mouth, right in front of me.But that didn’t hurt as much as the words that came after.
“Your mom said you guys were moving back to Colorado. So we came to help you pack.”
All through the parade, I’d been tingling with anticipation. It was the night I was going to tell Landen I was ready—ready to be more than friends. I was going to kiss him, let him be my very first kiss, my first boyfriend, my first everything. And he was hiding a secret girlfriend back in Colorado the whole time. One he was about to move back to in a matter of days, a fact he hadn’t even bothered to mention to me.
“Danni,”he informed me with a panicked smile.“Friend of mine from Colorado.”Apparently, in Colorado,friendskiss each other on the mouth.
Corin lifts her designer knock-off bag and the bright purpleWelcome to SoCalbags we’ve been given from the floor and slings them over her shoulder.
“Sure, let’s go. You all right?”
“I’m fine. Just not feeling so well.” Because my past has just caught up with me. He’s here. It’s really him. I saw him when we first sat down but only from the side and I was sure I was imagining things.Maybe that guy just looks like him, sits like him, runs his hands through his hair like him.There wasn’t a roster in the programs we were given so I had to wait until they called his name. Number thirteen, striker, Landen O’Brien from Colorado Springs, Colorado.He’s notfromanywhere, I thought to myself before my brain had time to catch up with my heart.
This was supposed to be the beginning of a new life. My new life. The one where I start over, where no one knows that broken girl from Hope Springs, Georgia, or what she’s been through. And he’s here. At my dream school. Sending all my painful high school memories flooding back, threatening to drown me. He wouldn’t have even applied to SoCal if it weren’t for me. I knew he probably wouldn’t go to UGA after everything that happened. But whyhere? I’ve seen him with my own two eyes and it’s still not real.
“Um, Layla, was that fine piece of soccer hotness just calling your name?” Corin asks as we exit the stadium.Was he?Oh God. He saw me too then.
“Huh? No, I doubt it.” But I pick up the pace and she side-eyes me so hard I’m breaking down under the intensity. “Maybe.”
“And you’re running like your panties just caught fire because…?”
“Because,” I say, trying my darnedest to swallow even though my mouth is the Sahara. “Because I do not want to see him.”
Or do I? Dang it! I do not want towant tosee him.
“Listen, speedy, you’re gonna have to slow down a little. These boots ain’t made for sprintin’,” my roommate informs me.
I sigh in frustration and slow the slightest bit. “I kind of know him, or I used to, a long time ago.”
“Uh huh. Looked like he was pretty interested in a reunion.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not,” I snap. My teeth clench, and immediately I regret pulling this bitch-move on Corin because she seems nice enough. And let’s face it, I’m not exactly in a position to turn down a friend. And we have to live together for at least a year. But every thought associated with him hurts. What we were, what we never got the chance to be. How much I missed him.Still miss him.The image of that girl,Danni,he called her, leaping into his arms and kissing him when I was supposed to be the one doing that. Just before he told me he was leaving, finishing out his senior year back in Colorado because his mom was leaving his dad and needed him to go with her. He forced his way into my life just to leave when I already had more than enough abandonment issues to send a therapist’s triplets to college. Ivy league.
Fricking Landen O’Brien and his uncanny ability to interrupt my regularly scheduled life.
Corin doesn’t say anything else when we get back to the dorm, but when I collapse on my bed, she sits across from me on hers. She’s completely still and her probing hazel eyes are wide as she waits for me to carve out my heart and show it to her. I fidget with my plum-colored comforter, tracing the random pattern with a finger. I figure I’ll just wait her out. But moments later, when I look up, she’s still there. Still waiting. And it’s not like she has anywhere to be or like I can get away from her. This roommate thing is going to take some getting used to. At least Aunt Kate had a demanding job to deal with.
“He was just a friend,” I breathe out, relenting and making a mental note to suggest she major in criminal justice so she can make good use of her impressive interrogation skills. Just the look on her face has me wanting to spill my guts.
“But…”
“But it had the potential to be more. A lot more. And then he moved away.” I shrug. There. Easy peasy. Doesn’t sound so bad. “And now he’s here.”
She leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “Layla, I have eyes. You were trembling with…rage or fear or something. Did hehurtyou?”
