Marianna Baer - Frost

“Exempt,” I said immediately.

“No one’s exempt,” she said. “You know the rules.”

“Come on, Celeste.”

“Don’t be so uptight.” She stopped walking. “I’ll even go first. It’s an easy one. Kill Simone, marry Mr. Bart, screw David.”

I looked at her with a grimace.

“What?” she said. “I’m not going to kill or marry my own brother.”

She was trying to shock me. I should have been used to it by now. “Okay,” I said, “Kill Mr. Bart, sleep with Simone, marry David.”

“If that’s your plan, you better hurry up.” Celeste gestured with her chin toward the steps. “You’ll be out of luck on both counts.”

Simone had a hand on David’s shoulder and was laughing, her long legs—with striped knee socks and bare thighs—stretched out in front of her. David stared, apparently mesmerized. A lump settled in my stomach.

“So, what’s up with you and Whip?” I asked, turning away. Because of the distraction of her burn and the photo, I’d never asked her last night.

“He looks surprisingly good in body paint,” she said, “if that’s what you mean.”

“So, you had fun?”

“Jesus, Leena.” Celeste glared at me. “David’s obviously already using you to do his dirty work.”

My face flushed. “He worries about you.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s the goddamn problem.” She turned toward the steps and called, “Hey! David!” He looked in our direction and she beckoned him over. Crap. What was she planning?

David said something to Simone then grabbed his bag and walked over.

“What’s up?” he said.

“You guys are annoying me,” Celeste said, gesturing at the two of us. “That’s what’s up. All this delay. illy-dally, twiddle-twoddle. It’s annoying.”

The flush in my cheeks flared hotter. “Celeste—”

“No. Wait a minute.” She reached into her bag I was holding, brought out a bunch of papers, and began shuffling through them. “I don’t know what the holdup is, but … here. A catalyst.” She separated out a sheet of white paper. David reached for it but she hid it behind her back and turned to me. “The other day, David brought me papers he’d picked up for me at the office,” she said. “But a couple of his own things were mixed in the pile.” Now she held out the sheet for us to see.

The syllabus for David’s English class.

“So?” I said.

Celeste turned the paper over.

On the back, David had done a bunch of doodles: a remarkably realistic eye, a glass of water, a cartoon cat … My immediate thought was, Wow. David can draw . A split second later, though, my brain made sense of the largest doodle on the page. An elaborate graphic version of a name—in black ballpoint pen, a name turned into an almost Celtic twisty-turny hedge of intertwined, swooping strokes.

Leena.

My breath stopped.

David grabbed the paper from Celeste. “What the hell?” he said, shoving it in his bag. “Who cares?”

“Yeah,” I said, recovering enough to jump to his defense. “So he doodles. Big deal.”

Celeste snorted. “Anyone who has ever been in love knows the primal urge to doodle the loved one’s name.”

“You’re unbelievable,” David said, shaking his head. “I’m outta here.”

“It’s just a name on a piece of paper,” I added, to assure him I wasn’t making a big deal out of it.

David walked away without looking again at either one of us.

“I’m doing this for your own good,” she called after him. “Don’t you want to actually live life, instead of just thinking about it? Instead of focusing on everyone else?”

David didn’t turn around, just held up a hand giving Celeste the finger. People on the path had stopped and were staring.

“Thanks for ruining a nice friendship,” I said as his figure receded.

“He’ll get over it.”

We started walking again. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t making her carry her own bag after that little episode. And I couldn’t believe that instead of just being angry, some of what I felt coursing through my body was actually excitement. I didn’t want to let her know that, though.

“Has it occurred to you that if something were going to happen between me and your brother, it should happen at its own pace?” I said.

“No,” she said plainly.

I shifted her bag on my shoulder. “Well, has it occurred to you that if something were going to happen, the fact that you are so suspiciously, overly gung-ho about it would give someone like me second thoughts?”

“Huh.” She seemed to consider this. “No.”

“It is a little weird,” I said. “Your insistence. Just tell me—why do you want us to get together so bad? Do you have some ulterior motive?”

She stopped walking and looked at me. “Okay. Yes, actually, I do.”

Of course. I raised my eyebrows.

“I want you to get him off my back,” she said.

“What?”

“I want him to have someone he can take care of so he’ll stop spending every free minute wondering who I’m hooking up with or whether I’m losing my mind or whether I took a crap yesterday. Is that so weird? I have enough to worry about without worrying about him worrying about me.”

Her voice and face made it clear she was telling the truth. I didn’t quite know how to respond.

“I just know,” she added, “that if he had the right girlfriend, not just some fling, he’d be the best boyfriend ever. It’s not like I randomly picked you. I really, honestly think you’d be great for him. Don’t you think he’d be great for you?”

I stared at her some more, at the almost pleading look in her eyes. “You sound like you’re trying to sell your used car,” I said finally, laughing a little.

“Leena,” she said, smiling now, too. “I promise, he runs really, really well.”

As I walked away, after leaving Celeste at the religion building, I found myself unable to contain a huge smile. Celeste’s reason for wanting us to get together wasn’t that weird. And despite feeling bad about David’s embarrassment, I couldn’t help feeling a giddy jolt of excitement when I thought about what had happened on the quad. I actually broke out into a skip.

For once, I wasn’t the one doing the elaborate name doodles. They were being done about me.

David called me that evening. “So, that was awkward,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, hugging a pillow to me, “you could say that.”

“Sorry she’s such an ass,” he said. “I wasn’t mad at you when I walked off like that. I just couldn’t believe her. Of course, I should have acted like I didn’t care. That would have been much better. She’s like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum. She really is.”

“I know.”

“And, you know, that wasn’t—”

“Don’t even worry,” I said. “I doodle all the time. Totally random stuff.”

“Because I respect the moratorium,” he said. “So I wouldn’t ever, you know, ask you to compromise that. Even in my fantasies.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, smiling, because the way he said it was insinuating just the opposite.

“The seriousness of the moratorium must be respected,” he went on. “Celeste wasn’t aware of it, I guess.”

“I guess not,” I said. And I closed my eyes and hugged the pillow tighter, and dared to think that something good—something very good—might have come from rooming with Celeste Lazar.

My favorite part of books and movies is almost always the “before.” The beginning, before whatever upends the characters’ lives has happened— before she knows he’s a vampire, before the spaceship arrives … And for me, the next week or so had that same sort of feeling. I knew, almost for sure, that something was going to happen with me and David. I wasn’t sure when—maybe not immediately; I hadn’t shed my stress about how much work lay ahead of me this semester. But still, the air was filled with the thrill of possibility.