Melinda Di Lorenzo - Bad Reputation

Would this girl be like that?

Impossible to tell in five seconds. In the smoky, party-dark room, I couldn’t even be sure if she was attractive. I decided quickly that I would take my chances. After all, my thirty-six hours of freedom would go by very quickly. It always did.

* * *

“You have to be super quiet,” she whispered. “The girls in here are ridiculous about men.”

A warning bell went off in my head.

“Ridiculous how?” My voice echoed in the stairwell, and the girl shushed me immediately.

“I said super quiet.”

“Sorry.”

“And my roommate might be home, so when we get up there, let me check before we go in.”

“And if she is home?”

“Then we have to be super- duper quiet.”

“Uh-uh,” I muttered

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t do group living situations.”

She turned to give me a coy smile. “Do what with them?”

“Anything.” We’d reached the top of the stairs and I gave her a bleary-eyed grin.

“Very funny.”

She dragged me into the hall, and I gave the line of doors a horrified look.

“So, I’m gonna go home.”

“You’re what?”

“Listen…” I blanked on what her name was, and struggled to find an endearment that wouldn’t lead her on. Not any more than I had already. “Kiddo.”

“Kiddo?”

Whoops .

Quickly, I switched tactics, launching in my favorite rejection speech. “Do you really want to be that girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl who has a one-night stand while her roommate sleeps in the other bed.”

That was enough. Even in the dim light, through my tequila haze, I saw her face cloud over.

“Go,” she ordered. “And don’t you dare tell anyone you were here with me.”

She shoved past me and let herself into one of the rooms without looking back. I felt momentarily triumphant. Until I remembered that the girl— shit, what was her name? —had driven my truck from the party to the dorm, and my keys were still in her purse.

Damn. I’d screwed myself over.

“The Joey Fox MO,” I muttered to the empty hall as I settled down for the night. “Through and through.”

I debated on whether or not I should try to find a couch somewhere in a common area, then swiftly rejected it. I might be a bit of dumb ass sometimes, but I’m not so much of an idiot that I want to risk incurring the wrath of an entire dorm full of women. It was bad enough that the one who’d stormed off would complain to her roommate about me. They always did. Then the roommate would probably tell two or three of her friends what a jerk I was. Maybe one day I’d find the campus completely plastered with least-wanted posters featuring my lovely face.

I grinned at the mental picture.

Until that point, though, I needed to pull up a piece of floor and wait for the girl to simmer down and bring me my keys.

I slid to the ground, closed my eyes and did my version of passing out.

I woke up in a panic, then lay there in the dark, trying to calm my racing heart and isolate the source of my worry. It took a few moments, but as my pulse normalized and my sleep fog lessened, I was able to grasp it.

I’d been dreaming of my mother, and a promise she’d had me make when I was twelve years old.

I’d been holed up in the coat closet at our apartment while my parents argued about money, about unmet dreams and about God knows what else. I drifted in and out of doziness as the screaming went on, jerking awake when it finally reached its crescendo. My father stormed out, drunk and angry, with our grocery money in his hands, ready to hand it over to his preferred dealer. It had been very quiet for a few a moments after that, then my tearful mother had dragged me out of the closet and sat me down on the couch.

“Promise me,” she said.

“Promise you what?” I replied resentfully, not wanting to meet her mascara-smeared eyes.

“Swear that you will never settle for less than you deserve.”

“I will never settle for less than I deserve,” I repeated automatically.

“Tucker. Look at me.”

And I forced my gaze to her face. She looked feverish, and very nearly frightening.

“Okay, Mom,” I agreed.

And then she laid out a list. Her list of more. She made me repeat it until there was no way I could forget it.

Ten years from now, I will have gone to Europe at least once.

Ten years from now, I will have met the love of my life—a kind, smart, generous man. He will value me.

Ten years from now, I will have a successful career. It will be one that matters.

We never talked about it again, but the memory struck me sometimes, and when it did, it would fill me with the panic I was feeling at that exact moment. Because I was right on the cusp of my twenty-second birthday, and I had not accomplished a single thing on that list.

“Liandra!” I hissed.

She muttered an incomprehensible response.

“Liandra!”

“Tucker,” she groaned from across the room. “What do you want?”

“What if I never amount to anything?”

“You’re not even going to make it until morning if you don’t leave me alone,” she grumbled.

I waited, knowing that any second she would remember how many times she’d woken me up over the past year for things far less significant than a crisis of self-faith. She sighed resignedly.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

“I just thought I would have it all together by now,” I replied.

“Does this have anything to do with the fact that you’re turning twenty-two in three months?”

I nodded, even though she probably couldn’t see me in the darkness of our shared bedroom.

“And because you got that letter this past week, asking you to declare your major?”

“More like demanded it,” I told her.

She ignored my comment. “And because of what happened with Mark…an awfully long year and a half ago?”

“Are you trying to make me feel worse?” I asked.

“No,” Liandra said. “I’m just gathering all your points so I can accurately refute them.”

“And now you’re resorting to lawyer speak?”

“I’m not a lawyer.”

“Not anymore.”

“Tucker.” My friend sighed. “How old am I?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“I’m thirty-four!”

“I know,” I told her. “I was trying to soften you up so you’d be nicer to me.”

“Well, stop it.”

“Sorry.”

“How many boyfriends do I have?” Liandra asked.

“None.”

“None,” she repeated.

“But at least you’ve been married,” I reminded her.

“None,” she said a second time, this time heavily.

“But—”

She cut me off. “So. I’m a thirty-four-year-old woman with one failed marriage, one failed career, living off a student loan that I will probably never pay back, in some run-down, all-girls dorm with a self-pitying twenty-one-year-old who is sad because she has never been to Italy.”

“You are trying to make me feel worse,” I accused.

“I’m giving you perspective,” she corrected.

And truthfully, what she was saying did make me feel better about my situation. When I had come to Liandra, I’d been in the lowest state of my life, and she had helped me rebuild. She’d had her share of hard times, and she understood loss. In fact, it was often what she had been through herself that inspired me. She’d left those details out of her little rant, but my mind went to them immediately. I thought of the fact that she’d battled breast cancer for eight years, and that the radiation treatment had resulted in infertility. And how her boss at the law firm where she’d worked had also been her husband. And that he’d fired and divorced Liandra after impregnating his office assistant.