Out on Good Behavior (Radleigh University Book 3) (4 page)

Her words are joke-y enough, but she looks deflated as she says them, which adds a little more fuel to my suspicions that it’s shit from home that’s ruined her night. “Thank you for taking the time to right our wrongs,” I say in mock-seriousness, putting down the glass. “As a show of gratitude, how about I listen to you tell me what happened tonight?”

She’d been lifting a slice to her lips, but she puts it back down as if my question’s made her lose her appetite. “It’s not import—”

“Sam. Don’t you dare.”

She sighs. “My family’s just… Well, I told you how it was a huge fight when I said I needed to get out of South Carolina and transfer to college up north, right? And finally my parents agreed
if
I majored in Poli-Sci, kept my GPA above a 3.5, came home for every break, et cetera, et cetera?”

“Vividly.” We talked about it last semester, the night we met. Cait had ditched us at a basketball game to talk to Mase, and Samara and I went out to dinner alone. Most of the conversation between us that night was just superficial stuff about Radleigh and what people do for fun around campus—Sam was a new transfer then—but after I watched her send a series of calls to voicemail, the stuff about her parents had come tumbling out.

“Well, they’ve been adding more conditions, including demanding I drop my creative writing elective so I can pick up a useless American history class
and
choosing some friend’s son at Cornell they want me to date. But the worst part is—” She cuts herself off and glances toward Cait’s bed, as if she’d somehow materialized there in the last ten minutes.

“Cait’s not here,” I say softly. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Her cheeks flush as she picks at a piece of chicken on her pizza. “They want to pull me out of the dorm, put me in my own apartment.”

“Why?”

“My mom saw Mase earlier today when she and I were Skyping and he came to pick up Cait. After they left, she asked me who he was and said she didn’t feel safe with me living in a room ‘a man like that could walk into whenever he wants.’”

Anger bubbles up in me. “Is she fucking serious? Because he’s black?”

She nods miserably. “I mean, she didn’t
say
that, of course, but it’s not hard to guess. Runs in the family—my mom’s parents hated my dad the second they heard the name Kazarian; couldn’t get over how ethnic it was. It was only when he met them and proved he looked and sounded as WASP-y as they do that they calmed down. You’d have no idea my dad has any Armenian blood if not for that name. Lord knows he never, ever acknowledges it; I
know
he’d have changed it if his parents wouldn’t have disowned him. He’s gotta be a Good Ol’ Boy for Meridian and all the other South Carolinians he’s hoping will vote him into the senate someday. Five generations of Clemson grads. Yet another reason I’m a raging disappointment.”

“Sam—”

“Not to mention my chosen reading material,” she continues as I haven’t spoken, her accent thickening with every rant. “Doesn’t matter that I do all my reading for school, that my parents combined probably read five books a year—they have to make sure to tell me how utterly infantile it is that I read ‘children’s books.’ Y’all’d think YA was written by Dr. Seuss. I told them this is why my dad will never get the youth vote. He did not like that very much.”

I can’t help smiling at that, and after a few moments, so does she. “I recommended a really good political one about a girl whose dad is running for president, but he was not amused. Might’ve been the hot-pink cover.”

Her smile turns impish, and I crack up. “I love your version of being a bad girl,” I tell her, shaking my head. “It’s so damn fitting.”

“So you’re saying I’m a dork.”

“I’m not saying that,” I assure her. “I’m just not…not saying that.”

She puts on an offended face that lasts for all of two seconds before she falls apart laughing. I take a bite of pizza and finally, she does too. We eat in silence for a minute and then I ask, “So, what are you gonna do?”

“I have no idea,” she says, her shoulders slumping. “I can’t afford to be here without my parents paying for everything; I’ve spent the summers making ‘appearances’ with my dad instead of getting an actual job. And I don’t wanna leave the dorm—I like it here, and I like living with Cait. I don’t wanna be by myself, and I don’t wanna leave her with a stranger.”

“Trust me, I remember that guilt well.” I take a sip of the tea, which is growing on me. “When I left her last semester to move into Lizzie’s apartment, I felt so shitty about it. But it was a whole lot cheaper, with much better space for me to do my art.” Plus, I knew Lizzie didn’t exactly have potential roommates lining up at her door, and I couldn’t let her live alone right after her brothers left.

Samara sighs. “Is it…is it actually okay if we don’t talk about it anymore? I mean, I really appreciate you discussing it with me, but I just feel like I’m gonna explode right now.”

“Of course. Do you wanna do something?”

She shrugs so sadly, I just wanna hug her around those smooth shoulders. And maybe bite one.

“How about a movie?” I suggest. “Something that’ll take your mind off everything. What do you like?”

She thinks about it for a minute. “
Pitch Perfect
usually works when I’m in a bad mood.”

“
Pitch Perfect
it is.” I finish my slice while she sets it up on her laptop, and try to figure out where I should sit to watch. Cait’s bed is definitely the safer move, but not terribly practical for watching on a small screen. Besides, safe isn’t a whole lot of fun. “Okay if I join you?”

“Of course.” She pulls the laptop into her bed and I stretch out at her side, inhaling her clean, fresh scent. She’s got all these frilly pillows, and her sheets are so girly, it’s cute as hell. But I’m here to be a friend, and if I had any ideas of forgetting that tonight, well, that’s what Cait’s half of the room is there to remind me.

We watch in pleasant silence, but when the tryout scene comes on, Sam starts humming along to “Since U Been Gone,” and I can tell she wants to sing along so badly, she’s busting at the seams. “You can sing, you know,” I whisper.

She laughs. “Trust me, I can’t. Not that high, anyway. And I’m not embarrassing myself in front of you.”

I love that she adds “in front of you,” as if I’m someone she has to impress. “Oh, come on. Now you have to.”

“No way!”

“Your loss.” Anna Kendrick’s character comes onscreen and starts singing “Cups,” and I joyfully sing along with her. I have a terrible voice, but thankfully, I was born without the shame gene. Samara cracks up, burying her face in my shoulder.

Totally worth it.

“See? If I can, you can.”

She just snorts and says nothing, but…she also doesn’t move her head. It’s now half resting on my shoulder, and I very happily leave it there. It takes supreme restraint not to touch her any further—to trail my fingertips down her arm or play with the ends of her shiny hair—but I have to admit it: this is nice.

Especially when she shocks me by singing along to “S&M” at the riff-off, and then it’s my turn to laugh in shock. But I join in, and little by little, her head ends up all the way in the nook of my arm, and the red in her eyes fades, and I think this might be the best night without an orgasm I’ve had in a good, long while.

I don’t have work the next morning, but I wake up bright and early anyway, memories of barbecue chicken pizza and orange-blossom hair sharp in my brain. I pull out my sketchpad, start a pot of coffee going, and curl up on the couch. I get so lost in etching thin but full arches above long-lashed almond-shaped eyes that I don’t even notice Lizzie’s gotten up too until she’s standing over me with a cup of fragrant coffee, asking, “Who’s that?”

I drop the pad, then quickly pick it back up and turn it over on the coffee table. “No one. Just doodling.” I nod at the “Half Filipino is Better than None” mug in her hand. “Couldn’t even bring me some of the coffee I made, huh?”

“Looks like you’ve been up for a while, so maybe if you weren’t so lost in ‘no one,’ you’d already have your own.” She grabs for the sketchpad, turns it over, and laughs. “Oh God. Cait is going to kill you.”

“There’s nothing to kill me over.” I stride past her into the kitchen and pour my own cup. “I draw my friends all the time.”

“First thing in the morning. Before coffee. Okay. Let’s see all the loving sketches you have of me in this thing, Frankie B.”

“Oh, shut up.”

A smile spreads across Lizzie’s face. “You have a little crush! Oh, Frank, that is so cute.”

“I do not have a crush.”

She bursts out laughing. “You
so
do. You should see your face right now. You
never
get this red, except when someone’s complimenting your art. Did something happen?”

“No, nothing happened.” Oh, what the hell. “We just hung out last night. Watched a movie. It was no big deal.”

“I thought last night was your Rainbow night.”

“It was—I went to the house, and then I went to keep Sam company. She was having a tough night.”

“And she called you?”

I groan. “Don’t make it more than it is.”

She settles into the corner of the couch across from where I’d been sitting. “Are you sure that I am?”

I just roll my eyes and sip my coffee. “What are you doing up so early, anyway?”

“I have therapy at ten. I had to rearrange my week because Max and Ty are apparently having a really tough time with the anniversary coming up, and Nancy thinks me going home for a bit would help, so…shit.” Her face falls. “Your art show. Frank, I’m so sorry.”

My stomach flips a little at the thought of not having half of my biggest support system at Radleigh there, but I can’t exactly be upset about my best friend needing to be with her little brothers during a milestone in the mourning of their parents’ death. “Oh, please,” I say, waving my free hand. “I’ll be fine. Your brothers need you.”

“Make sure Cait takes a billion pictures for me,” she says warmly, then glances at her watch. “Shit, I have to get dressed.” She drains the rest of her mug and hops off the couch. “Samara’s going, right? On Friday?”

“Yes, Lizzie. Samara is going.” Which makes a whole new group of butterflies take place in my stomach, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary; I always get anxious about people seeing my art, seeing as it’s the most personal I get with anyone outside my inner circle. Intellectually I know a person isn’t their work, but emotionally…it can definitely be a challenge to separate the two.

She grins. “Good.” Then she closes herself in her room, smug in having gotten in the last word. I would throw my pencil at her door, but the sketching bug is still making my hands twitch. I put down my coffee, pick up my pad and pencil, and get back to work.

• • •

By the time I drag my butt into work on Friday morning, “I’m sorry” has quickly become my least favorite phrase on the planet.

“I’m sorry,” my dad said about not being able to come because a friend of his from seminary days had to bail on officiating a wedding thanks to the flu and begged him to step in.

“I’m sorry,” my mom said about not being able to come because she has phobias of both driving long distances alone and public transportation.

“I’m sorry,” Cait said about having to bail on the art show because of some mandatory athletes’ dinner.

“I’m sorry,” Sid said about having to spend the night with her parents at the special dinner being thrown by the campus’s Muslim community center in honor of Parents’ Weekend.

“I’m sorry,” Abe said about having to spend the night with
his
parents, who made reservations at a nice restaurant to surprise him.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter to my enormous cup of coffee. “I am about to pound the shit out of you while wishing you were full of rum.”

“Did you just…?” I look up to see Samara eyeing me quizzically. “Are you talking to your coffee?”

“Not anymore,” I say sheepishly, putting it down on the front desk I have to start manning in two minutes. “It’s been a rough week.”

“Armchair Psychology lunch didn’t help?” she teases, referring to Wednesday, when we ate together in the quad when I got off work and she taught me different random diagnoses so we could assign them to total strangers who walked by, complete with imaginary backstories.

I laugh at the memory. “Armchair Psychology lunch
definitely
helped,” I assure her. “Just things with the show tonight not going super smoothly.”

“Oh no! It’s still happening, right?”

“Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s nothing with the actual event—just a lot of people bailing.” I pick the coffee back up, wrapping my fingers around its soothing warmth. I don’t want to unload about my parents not showing up this weekend to someone whose are a nightmare 24/7, so I keep it vague. “These kinds of things make me nervous, so it’s hard not having my usual hand-holders.”

She smiles softly, and it is not making me melt. It is not it is not it is not. “Well, I’m obviously not Cait or Lizzie, but I’ll happily hold your hand.” Her face flushes, and oh my fuck yes okay I am definitely melting a little. “I mean…you know what I mean. Not—just—”

“I get it,” I say with a wink, though I’d love to see where she would’ve gone with that if left to her own devices. “And thank you. I appreciate that.”

“Least I could do after you turned my night around earlier this week,” she says. “I gotta run to class, but I’ll see you tonight. Looking forward to it.”

“Enjoy class.”

“I’ll try.” She flutterwaves as she disappears into the crowd, and I take my seat at my desk and finally take my first sip of coffee. It’s gone lukewarm, but somehow, I don’t really give a damn.

• • •

My show doesn’t start until eight, but I’m at the gallery at seven thirty, my palms sweating and half my lip gloss on my teeth because I can’t stop chewing at it. Otherwise, I look good, I think—Lizzie helped freshen up the streaks in my hair and lent me her mother’s gorgeous jade earrings for luck, and I’m wearing my hundred-percent success-rate dress. I just keep thinking about how badly I wish I had a friend’s hand to squeeze right now, and I’m not sure the one arriving in half an hour counts, considering where I imagined that hand as part of my pre-show relaxation ritual.

Everyone’s been texting encouragement all night, but it isn’t the same—not even when my mom sends an adorable picture of my Border Collie, Lump. All I can think about is nerves nerves nerves.

Which I guess I’m not hiding as well as I thought. “Frankie? Are you okay? You ready for them to open the doors in a minute?”

I look up into the warm smile and mismatched attire of Suzanne Kirsch, my Studio professor for the past two years and the one who submitted my stuff for this show in the first place. “Just a little anxious,” I admit. I glance at her clutch, which is covered in glittery appliques. “There’s no Xanax in there by any chance, is there?”

“Actually, there is,” she says with a wink, “but you’ll have to choose between that and champagne, so think long and hard about this.”

“Fair point.” I wipe my palms on my dress and lick my gloss off my teeth. “Everything looks okay, right?”

“It looks fantastic, my dear. As do you.” She cocks her head. “Do you have someone special coming tonight?”

“You know I don’t have anyone ‘special,’” I say, air quotes and all, wondering why it feels like I’m not telling the whole truth. “I—” I break off as the bell over the door tinkles and in (cautiously) steps Samara, looking so heartachingly beautiful a lump actually forms in my throat. Whatever “dressed to the nines” means, she’s it, from the tips of her fuck-me heels to her perfectly messy updo. Even if she didn’t look infuckingcredible, the fact that she clearly spent time on her appearance for my show is bringing back every weird, stomach-flipping, skin-tingling feeling I have ever had in this girl’s presence…times a billion.

She smiles and waves when she sees me, and Suzanne laughs in my ear. “Oh, I don’t know—she looks pretty special to me.”

I can’t even argue. I can barely manage words. And the only thought that fits in my brain is, “Please, please do not turn out to be straight.” I barely even notice Suzanne drifting away or the tiny crowd slowly filtering in or the waiters coming out of the back room with their trays; I could not stop staring at Samara’s mile-long legs peeking out from the mid-thigh hem of her crocheted emerald-green dress if you paid me.

“Hey, you.” She smiles brightly and pecks my cheek. “This is amazing!” She steps away as I’m still recovering from the brush of her lips on my skin and glances around the space. “Is the whole gallery your stuff tonight?”

I unstick my tongue from my palate and force myself to speak human words. “Mine and two other art students from Radleigh. Every year, the department picks three students’ work to get displayed in a show here on Parents’ Weekend, and my teacher—the woman who was just with me—submitted mine.”

She nods, then walks over to the first series, a knot forming in my stomach as I watch the neon light installation play over her glossy golden hair in washes of azure and fuchsia. “I can’t believe I finally get to see the work of the famous Francesca Bellisaro.” She leans in to examine the panels more closely. “It looks like…scenes from a club?”

“Got it in one,” I say with a smile.

She moves to the plaque to read the inscription, and I love watching her face change slowly as she processes the meaning, then glances back at the art itself. “So it’s the same party through the eyes and veil of people in different mental and focal states?” she says, stepping back to take in the different scenes. “I imagine the blue light over the gray cast is…depression?”

“Subtlety is a lost art with me,” I concede with a grin, and she laughs.

“It’s so cool, though.” She reaches out to touch it, then thinks better of it. “The blander colors, the way everyone looks just a little more undesirable but daunting than in the colorful but blurry version with the pink light…” The awe in her voice as she keeps examining and interpreting is starting to make me want to curl into myself and hide. Suddenly I wish she’d never come, that I’d just braved this night solo. Because the feelings she’s inspiring in me are new and weird and I don’t understand why the fuck I’m suddenly sweating under the gallery lights, but I know I wasn’t until she started talking. “These are really great, Frankie,” she says with a kind of quiet reverence I feel traveling slowly down my spine. “Every time I look at one again, I notice something I didn’t before. The liquor bottles reshaped to look like land mines in this one. The women’s bodies and outfits in this male gaze-y one. This…it’s just so damn cool that you can do this. That you
did
this.”

She means it, I think. Lizzie and Cait try to, and they’re always proud of me, but I know when they come to see this, they’ll talk about how cool the lights are, and which elements of which clubs they recognize. And then they’ll stand to the side like proud parents while other people admire my work, maybe staring at it long enough to pick out some details, maybe not.

But I’ve never had a friend like Samara, who throws herself into things like this, who wants to understand every nuance of what I’m doing, who wants to appreciate art to its fullest—not because it’s her life like it is mine and Abe’s and Sid’s, but just because. And the fact that she does get it, that she picked up the little piece of my mother in my art that my mom wasn’t able to come see for herself…

In a flash, I’m struck with the crazy urge to hold her hand.

I sweep my hair up instead, twisting it into a bun just to keep my hands occupied for a moment.

“You look nice like that,” she says with a soft smile. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your hair up before.”

Well, fuck.

I mumble a thanks, then spot a waiter—definitely a grad student trying to earn a few bucks—carrying champagne flutes on a cork-bottom tray. I practically lunge for him, grabbing one in each hand.

“Thanks,” says Samara when I offer her one, “but, um, I don’t drink.”

“Shit. Right. I knew that.” What the hell is wrong with me? The waiter’s already gone, and I don’t know anyone in our immediate vicinity. Nothing to do but stand there, awkwardly holding both.

I take a long sip from the one in my left hand. Then another.

Samara shows no sign of sharing my discomfort or of annoyance that I forgot she doesn’t drink; she just goes back to looking at the installation. “So do you have a whole series of these?” she asks. “Do you show a different setting each semester?”