Fangirl

Well … maybe.

To really be a nerd, she’d decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one. Cath would move into the World of Mages in a heartbeat. She’d felt almost despondent last year when she realized that, even if she discovered a magical wormhole into Simon’s world, she was too old now to go to the Watford School of Magicks.

Wren had been bummed, too, when Cath pointed it out. They were lying in bed on the morning of their eighteenth birthday.

“Cath, wake up, let’s go buy some cigarettes.”

“Can’t,” Cath said. “I’m going to watch an R-rated movie—in the theater. And then I’m go

“Oh! Let’s skip class and go see Five Hundred Days of Summer.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Cath looked up at the giant map of Watford they’d taped to the ceiling. Their dad had paid one of the designers at work to draw it for them one year for Christmas. “It means we’re too old for Watford.”

Wren sat back against her headboard and looked up. “Oh. You’re right.”

“It’s not that I ever thought it was real,” Cath said after a minute, “even when we were kids, but still—”

“But still…” Wren sighed. “Now I’m too sad to start smoking.”

Wren was an actual nerd. Despite her fancy hair and her handsome boyfriends. If Cath had found that wormhole, that rabbit hole, that doorway in the back of the closet, Wren would have gone through with her.

Wren might still go through with her, even in their current state of estrangement. (That would be another good thing about finding a magic portal. She’d have an excuse to call Wren.)

But Levi wasn’t a nerd; he liked real life too much. For Levi, Simon Snow was just a story. And he loved stories.

Cath had fallen behind on Carry On, Simon since this thing with Levi started—which on the one hand, was perfectly okay; she wasn’t such a nerd that she’d rather make up love scenes with boys than be in one.

On the other hand … Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance was coming out in less than three months, and Cath had to finish Carry On by then. She had to. The Eighth Dance was the very end of the Simon Snow saga—it was going to settle everything—and Cath had to settle it her way first. Before Gemma T. Leslie closed the curtains.

Cath could study when Levi was in the room (he needed to study, too—he sat on her bed and listened to his lectures; sometimes he played solitaire at the same time), but she couldn’t write with him there. She couldn’t get lost in the World of Mages. She was too lost in Levi.

Levi was five-foot-eleven. She’d thought he was taller.

He was born on a ranch. Literally. His mom’s labor came on so fast that she sat down on the stairs and caught him herself. His dad cut the cord. (“I’m telling you,” Levi said, “it’s not that different from calving.”)

He lived with five other guys. He drove a truck because he thought everybody should drive a truck—that driving around in a car was like living with your hands tied behind your back. “What if you need to haul something?”

“I can’t think of a single time my family has needed a truck,” Cath said.

“That’s because you’ve got car blinders on. You don’t even allow yourself to see outsized opportunities.”

“Like what?”

“Free firewood.”

“We don’t have a fireplace.”

“Antlers,” he said.

Cath snorted.

“Antique couches.”

“Antique couches?”

“Cather, someday, when I get you up to my room, I will entertain you on my beautiful antique couch.”

When he talked about the ranch or his family or his truck, Levi’s voice slowed down, almost like he had an accent. A drawl. A drag on his vowel sounds. She couldn’t tell if it was for show or not.

“When I get you up to my room” had become a joke between them.

They didn’t have to meet at the Union or wait for Reagan to leave them alone in Cath’s room. They could hang out at Levi’s house anytime.

But, so far, Cath hadn’t let that happen. Levi lived in a house, like an adult. Cath lived in a dorm, like a young adult—like someone who was still on adulthood probation.

She could handle Levi here, in this room, where nothing was grown-up yet. Where there was a twin bed and posters of Simon Snow on the wall. Where Reagan could walk in at any minute.

Levi must feel like somebody’d pulled a bait-and-switch on him. Back when they were nothing to each other—back when she thought he belonged to somebody else—Cath had crawled into bed with him and fallen asleep mouth to mouth. Now that they were seeing each other (not really dating, but everyday seeing each other), they only sometimes held hands. And when they did, Cath sort of pretended that they weren’t—she just didn’t acknowledge it. And she never touched him first.

She wanted to.

God, she wanted to tackle him and roll around in him like a cat in a field of daisies.

Which is exactly why she didn’t. Because she was Little Red Riding Hood. She was a virgin and an idiot. And Levi could make her breathless in the elevator, just resting his hand—through her coat—on the small of her back.

This was something she might talk to Wren about, if she still had a Wren.

Wren would tell her not to be stupid—that boys wanted to touch you so badly, they didn’t care if you were good at it.

But Levi wasn’t a boy. He wasn’t panting to get up somebody’s shirt for the first time. Levi had been up shirts; he probably just took them off.

The thought made Cath shiver. And then she thought of Reagan, and it turned into more of a shudder.

Cath wasn’t pla

If she thought about it objectively, Abel might actually be better looking than Levi in some ways. Abel was a swimmer. He had broad shoulders and thick arms. And he had hair like Frankie Avalon. (According to Cath’s grandma.)

Levi was thin and weedy, and his hair—well, his hair—but everything about him made Cath feel loose and immoral.

He had this thing where he bit his bottom lip and raised an eyebrow when he was trying to decide whether to laugh at something.… Madness.

Then, if he decided to laugh, his shoulders would start shaking and his eyebrows would pull up in the middle—Levi’s eyebrows were pornographic. If Cath were making this decision just on eyebrows, she would have been “up to his room” a long time ago.

If she were being rational about this, there was a lot on the touching continuum between holding hands and eyebrow-driven sex.… But she wasn’t being rational. And Levi made Cath feel like her whole body was a slippery slope.

She sat at her desk. He sat on her bed and kicked her chair.

“Hey,” he said. “I was thinking that this weekend, we should go on a real date. We could go out to di

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You already have a date? Every night this weekend?”

“Sort of. I’m going home. I’ve been going home more this semester, to check on my dad.”

Levi’s smile dimmed, but he nodded, like he understood. “How’re you getting home?”

“This girl down the hall. Erin. She goes home every weekend to see her boyfriend—which is probably a good idea, because she’s boring and awful, and he’s bound to meet somebody better if she doesn’t keep an eye on him.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“On your white horse?”

“In my red truck.”

Cath rolled her eyes. “No. You’d have to make two round trips. It’d take a thousand dollars in gas.”

“I don’t care. I want to meet your dad. And I’ll get to hang out with you for a few hours in the truck—in a nonemergency situation.”

“It’s okay. I can ride with Erin. She’s not that bad.”