Fangirl

“Take it,” Cath said, tossing a chunk of strawberry-soy bar to the fat red squirrel at her feet. She took a photo of it with her phone and sent it to Abel. “bully squirrel,” she typed.

Abel had sent her photos of his room—his suite—at MoTech, and of him standing with all five of his nerdy Big Bang Theory roommates. Cath tried to imagine asking Reagan to pose for a photo and laughed a little out loud. The squirrel froze but didn’t run away.

On Wednesdays and Fridays, Cath had forty-five minutes between Biology and Fiction-Writing, and lately she’d been killing it right here, sitting in a shadowy patch of grass on the slow side of the English building. Nobody to deal with here. Nobody but the squirrels.

She checked her text messages, even though her phone hadn’t chimed.

She and Abel hadn’t actually talked since Cath left for school three weeks ago, but he did text her. And he e-mailed every once in a while. He said he was fine and that the competition at Missouri was already intense. “Everybody here was the smartest kid in their graduating class.”

Cath had resisted the urge to reply, “Except for you, right?”

Just because Abel got a perfect score on the math section of the SATs didn’t mean he was the smartest kid in their class. He was crap in American History, and he’d limped through Spanish. Through Spanish, for Christ’s sake.

He’d already told Cath that he wasn’t coming back to Omaha until Thanksgiving, and she hadn’t tried to convince him to come home any sooner.

She didn’t really miss him yet.

Wren would say that was because Abel wasn’t really Cath’s boyfriend. It was one of their recurring conversations:

“He’s a perfectly good boyfriend,” Cath would say.

“He’s an end table,” Wren would answer.

“He’s always there for me.”

“… to set magazines on.”

“Would you rather I dated someone like Jesse? So we can both stay up crying every weekend?”

“I would rather you dated someone you’d actually like to kiss.”

“I’ve kissed Abel.”

“Oh, Cath, stop. You’re making my brain throw up.”

“We’ve been dating for three years. He’s my boyfriend.”

“You have stronger feelings for Baz and Simon.”

“Duh, they’re Baz and Simon, like that’s even fair—I like Abel. He’s steady.”

“You just keep describing an end table.…”

Wren had started going out with boys in the eighth grade (two years before Cath was even thinking about it). And until Jesse Sandoz, Wren hadn’t stayed with the same guy for more than a few months. She kept Jesse around so long because she was never really sure that he liked her—at least that was Cath’s theory.

Wren usually lost interest in a guy as soon as she’d won him over. The conversion was her favorite part. “That moment,” she told Cath, “when you realize that a guy’s looking at you differently—that you’re taking up more space in his field of vision. That moment when you know he can’t see past you anymore.”

Cath had liked that last line so much, she gave it to Baz a few weeks later. Wren was a

Anyway, Jesse never really converted. He never had eyes only for Wren, not even after they had sex last fall. It threw off Wren’s game.

Cath was relieved when Jesse got a football scholarship to Iowa State. He didn’t have the attention span for a long-distance relationship, and there were at least ten thousand fresh guys at the University of Nebraska for Wren to convert.

Cath tossed another hunk of protein bar to the squirrel, but someone in a pair of periwinkle wingtips took a step too close to them, and the squirrel startled and lumbered away. Fat campus squirrels, Cath thought. They lumber.

The wingtips took another step toward her, then stopped. Cath looked up. There was a guy standing in front of her. From where she was sitting—and where he was standing, with the sun behind his head—he seemed eight feet tall. She squinted up but didn’t recognize him.

“Cath,” he said, “right?”

She recognized his voice; it was the boy with the dark hair who sat in front of her in Fiction-Writing—Nick.

“Right,” she said.

“Did you finish your writing exercise?”

Professor Piper had asked them to write a hundred words from the perspective of an inanimate object. Cath nodded, still squinting up at him.

“Oh, sorry,” Nick said, stepping out of the sun and sitting on the grass next to her. He dropped his bag between his knees. “So what’d you write about?”

“A lock,” she said. “You?”

“Ballpoint pen.” He grimaced. “I’m worried that everyone is going to do a pen.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “A pen is a terrible idea.”

Nick laughed, and Cath looked down at the grass.

“So,” he asked, “do you think she’ll make us read them out loud?”

Cath’s head snapped up. “No. Why would she do that?”

“They always do that,” he said, like it was something Cath should already know. She wasn’t used to seeing Nick from the front; he had a boyish face with hooded blue eyes and blocky, black eyebrows that almost met in the middle. He looked like someone with a steerage ticket on the Titanic. Somebody who’d be standing in line at Ellis Island. Undiluted and old-blooded. Also, cute.

“But there wouldn’t be time in class for all of us to read,” she said.

“We’ll probably break up into groups first,” he said, again like she should know this.

“Oh … I’m kind of new around here.”

“Are you a freshman?”

She nodded and rolled her eyes.

“How did a freshman get into Professor Piper’s three-hundred-level class?”

“I asked.”

Nick raised his furry eyebrows and pushed out his bottom lip, impressed. “Do you really think a pen is a terrible idea?”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say now,” Cath answered.

*   *   *

“Do you have an eating disorder?” Reagan asked.

Cath was sitting on her bed, studying.

Reagan was holding on to her closet door, hopping, trying to pull on a black heeled boot. She was probably on her way to work—Reagan was always on her way somewhere. She treated their room like a way station, a place she stopped between class and the library, between her job at the Student Union and her job at the Olive Garden. A place to change clothes, dump books, and pick up Levi.

Sometimes there were other guys, too. Already in the last month, there’d been a Nathan and a Kyle. But none of them seemed to be a permanent part of Reagan’s solar system like Levi was.

Which made Levi part of Cath’s solar system, too. He’d seen her on campus today and walked with her all the way to Oldfather Hall, talking about some mittens he’d bought outside the Student Union. “Hand-knit. In Ecuador. Have you ever seen an alpaca, Cather? They’re like the world’s most adorable llamas. Like, imagine the cutest llama that you can, and then just keep going. And their wool—it’s not really wool, it’s fiber, and it’s hypoallergenic.…”

Reagan was staring at Cath now, frowning. She was wearing tight black jeans and a black top. Maybe she was going out, not to work.

“Your trash can is full of energy bar wrappers,” Reagan said.

“You were looking through my trash?” Cath felt a rush of anger.

“Levi was looking for a place to spit out his gum.… So? Do you have an eating disorder?”

“No,” Cath said, pretty sure it was exactly what she’d say if she did have an eating disorder.

“Then why don’t you eat real food?”

“I do.” Cath clenched her fists. Her skin felt drawn and tight. “Just. Not here.”

“Are you one of those freaky eaters?”

“No. I—” Cath looked up at the ceiling, deciding that this was one of those times when the truth would be simpler than a lie. “—I don’t know where the dining hall is.”

“You’ve been living here more than a month.”

“I know.”