And They Were Roommates(43)
“I’m not approving these letters.”
“Why?”
“I don’t feel any love in them. Eli didn’t either.” Jasper flips to the next page. He crosses out my second love letter. My third. My fourth.
I’m too stunned to stop him. “What about your third EROS? Love doesn’t have to make sense, and neither do your words?”
Jasper lifts his pen so suddenly that I flinch. His hand plummets back down, stabbing the notebook with the same destruction as a knife, leaving behind a hole and splatters of red ink. All my hard work, destroyed. “Even if I lack understanding, I should still feel your feelings. I feel nothing.”
Nothing. After weeks. If this were a class, I’d have an F. My first F.
Defeat rattles through me as I stare at the destroyed notebook. The chances of Jasper thinking I’m special now are, without a doubt, zero. Just when I started to think maybe he—anyone—thought different.
“What does this mean, then?” I ask, my chest sinking. But I already know. No more deal. No more single room to myself.
“You’ll still practice with me.”
He’s not calling it off? “But the mixer is already a month away,” I say, confused. “I needed to start writing real letters with you, like, yesterday.”
“We have time.”
“What time? Aren’t you wasting more time trying to teach me than if you’d tackle the letters yourself?”
Jasper twirls his pen along his knuckles instead of answering. Not believing in me. Like Mom. Like Ms. Nallos. Like everyone at Valentine.
“Is my effort that invisible?” My voice rises enough to be heard beyond the bookcase door, but I don’t care, my chest tightening too painfully over what Jasper must think of me. Or rather, what he doesn’t think of me at all.
At least Jasper finally looks at me. His eyes are wide. With surprise or fear, I can’t tell.
“Don’t you care how much STRIP stops me from studying? How much my grades are tanking?” I slap my palms against the table as I rise to my feet. The coffee he bought me—what I foolishly thought proved Jasper cared about more than just himself—rattles and tips, leaking onto the floor. I can barely perceive it. Too many afternoons we spent together flash through my mind. Every moment Jasper willingly sat so close, looking me in the eye like I so undoubtedly existed. Too many times he chased after me around campus, inviting me to eat lunch with him in Dix or study after classes. “Do you realize how thoughtless you are toward everyone around you?”
“Charlie—?”
“You don’t. Because even after I got accepted into Valentine, became an Excellence Scholar out of thousands, and studied every waking second, you’re Rank One.”
“Charlie.”
“You never try. Yet you’re loved. You have no clue”—I squeeze my fist to stay in control, to stop my anger from turning into what the pressure behind my eyes threatens to—“no clue what it’s like to be alone.”
Jasper stands, too, but I storm out before he can use his own words as a weapon and get my hopes up, like years ago, just to leave me crushed.
Chapter 22
THE INVISIBLE MAN
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11
At least no one pounces at me from the bushes when I do homework in the Dixon Writing Gazebo this time. Probably because it’s only an hour until lights-out. Or Blaze is on delivery duty tonight, tiptoeing around the equestrian center for all the couples whose sole survival relies on STRIP.
Staying out late isn’t enticing to me, especially when the temperature in Au Sable Forks is so low that I need my winter coat and the academy hasn’t turned on the heat lamps in this gazebo yet. But I want nothing to do with Jasper.
Unfortunately, he lives in my bedroom.
Instead, I flip through Mr. Stern’s blackout poetry assignment. The subject material fails to distract from thoughts of Jasper, but it is due tomorrow. The packet is scanned pages taken from “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” a Sherlock Holmes short story.
I pick a marker out of my case and pop open the top. At least the words are already here, waiting for me to find the right answer. Unlike Jasper’s poetry, there should be a correct one, just like a multiple-choice test.
Maybe I can handle this.
I squint at the page. My date. There’s no my.
Wait. Am I treating this like one of Jasper’s love letters?
I smack my forehead with my notebook at the same time as laughter swells closer toward the cockblockade. An instructor leads four sister academy students through the gate, back toward their side. Each carries a cardboard box, and plastic cups stick out of one labeled MIXER. One of the students is familiar. Someone I’ve nearly forgotten to think about lately, being so entrenched in the never-ending unwanted surprises on this side of campus.
I jump up from the bench. “Delilah!”
The moment she flicks her head my way, a sense of relief I haven’t felt in weeks washes over me. In the dark, I barely make out her reshuffling the box to wave back, and it’s only then that I realize how much I don’t expect her to. How much I wonder deep down, with her never responding to my letters, if I’ve done something wrong. All I can recall are memories of orientation when she briefly got annoyed, and how unresolved that feels now.