“Done and done. I’m telling you, there is no lovey-dovey stuff.”
“Three, shut up, nobody talks to me about their relationship.”
Cath nodded. “Fine.”
“Four…”
“You’ve really been thinking about this, haven’t you?”
“I came up with the ground rules the first time you guys kissed. Four, Levi is my friend, and you can’t be jealous of that.”
Cath looked at Reagan. At her red hair and her full lips and her totally out-sticking br**sts. “I feel like it’s too soon to agree to that,” she said.
“No,” Reagan said, “we’ve got to get this out of the way. You can’t be jealous. And in return, I won’t flex my best-friend muscles just to remind myself, and Levi, that he loved me first.”
“Oh my God”—Cath clutched her comforter in disbelief—“would you actually do that?”
“I might,” Reagan said, leaning forward, her face as shocked as Cath’s. “In a moment of weakness. You’ve got to understand, I’ve been Levi’s favorite girl practically my whole life. He hasn’t dated anyone else, not seriously, since we broke up.”
“God,” Cath said, “I really hate this.”
Reagan nodded, and it was like a dozen I-told-you-sos.
“Why did you let this happen?” Cath asked. “Why’d you let him hang out here so much?”
“Because I could tell that he liked you.” Reagan sounded almost angry about it. “And I really do want him to be happy.”
“You guys haven’t … relapsed, have you? Since you broke up?”
“No…” Reagan looked away. “When we broke up freshman year, it was pretty awful. We only started hanging out again at the end of last year. I knew he was having trouble in his classes, and I wanted to help.…”
“Okay,” Cath said, deciding to take this seriously. “What are the rules again? No talking about sex, no PDA, no talking about relationship stuff—”
“No being jealous.”
“No being unnecessarily jealous, is that fair?”
Reagan pursed her lips. “All right, but be rational if this comes up. No being unnecessarily jealous.”
“And no being a horrible, narcissistic bitch who gets off on her ex-boyfriend’s affection.”
“Agreed,” Reagan said, holding out her hand.
“Do we really have to shake on this?”
“Yes.”
“Levi and I might not even be anything, you know. We haven’t even gone on a date. “
Reagan smiled tightly. “I don’t think so. I’ve got a good/bad feeling about this. Shake.”
Cath reached out and shook her hand.
“Now, get up,” Reagan said. “I’m hungry.”
* * *
As soon as Reagan left for work that afternoon, Cath jumped up from her desk and started going through her closet to figure out what to wear. Probably a T-shirt with a cardigan and jeans. There was nothing in Cath’s closet that wasn’t a T-shirt, a cardigan, or jeans. She laid her options out on the bed. Then she went looking for something she’d bought at a flea market last year—a little green knit collar that fastened with an antique pink button.
She wondered where Levi would take her.
Her first date with Abel had been to a movie. Wren and some of their other friends had come, too. After that, going out with Abel usually just meant hanging out at the bakery or studying up in Cath’s room. Swim meets during swim season. Math contests. Those probably weren’t dates, come to think of it. She wasn’t going to tell Levi that her last date had been at a math contest.
Cath looked at the clothes she’d laid out and wished that Wren were here to help. She wished that she’d talked to Wren about Levi before they’d started fighting.… Which would have been last year, before Cath had even met him.
What would Wren say if she were here? Pretend that he likes you more than you like him. It’s like buying a car—you have to be willing to walk away.
No … that was the kind of advice Wren gave herself. What would she say to Cath? Stop frowning. We’re prettier when we smile. Are you sure you don’t want to do a shot?
God, thinking about Wren was just making Cath feel worse. Now she felt nervous and sad. And lonely.
It was a relief when Reagan kicked in the door and started talking about dinner.
* * *
“Wear your hair down,” Reagan said, tearing a piece of pizza in half. “You have good hair.”
“That comment is definitely against the ground rules,” Cath said, taking a bite of cottage cheese. “Number three, I think.”
“I know.” Reagan shook her head. “But you’re so helpless sometimes. It’s like watching a kitten with its head trapped in a Kleenex box.”
Cath rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to feel like I have to look different for him all of a sudden. It’ll seem lame.”
“It’s lame to want to look nice on a date? Levi is shaving right now, I promise you.”
Cath winced. “Stop. No insider Levi information.”
“That’s insider guy information. That’s how dates work.”
“He already knows what I look like,” Cath said. “There’s no point in being tricky about it now.”
“How is doing your hair—and maybe putting on some lip gloss—being tricky?”
“It’s like I’m trying to distract him with something shiny.” Cath circled her spoon hand in front of her face, accidentally flicking cottage cheese on her sweater. “He already knows about all this. This is what I look like.” She tried to scrape the cottage cheese off without rubbing it in.
Reagan leaned across the table and grabbed the clip out of Cath’s hair. It slumped over her ears and into her eyes.
“There,” Reagan said. “Now that’s what you look like. Presto chango.”
“Oh my God,” Cath said, grabbing her clip out of Reagan’s hand and immediately twisting her hair back up. “Was that a Simon Snow reference?”
Now Reagan rolled her eyes. “Like you’re the only one who’s read Simon Snow. Like it isn’t a global phenomenon.”
Cath started giggling.
Reagan scowled at her. “What are you eating anyway? Are those peaches in your cottage cheese?”
“Isn’t it disgusting?” Cath said. “You kinda get used to it.”
* * *
When they turned down the hallway, they could see Levi sitting against their door. In no circumstances would Cath ever run squealing down the hall into his arms. But she did her version of that—she smiled tensely and looked away.
“Hey,” Levi said, sliding up the door to his feet.
“Hey,” Reagan said.
Levi ruffled the top of his hair sheepishly, like he wasn’t sure which one of them to smile at. “You ready?” he asked Cath while Reagan opened the door.
Cath nodded. “Just … my coat.” She found her coat and slipped it on.
“Scarf,” Levi said. So she grabbed it.
“See you later,” she said to Reagan.
“Probably not,” Reagan said, shaking her hair out in front of her mirror.
Cath felt herself blushing. She didn’t look over at Levi again until they were standing together in front of the elevator. (Condition: smiling, stable.) When it opened, he put his hand on her back and she practically jumped in.
“What’s the plan?” she asked.
He grinned. “My plan is to do things that make you want to hang out with me again tomorrow. What’s your plan?”
“I’m going to try not to make an ass of myself.”
He grinned. “So we’re all set.”
She smiled back at him. In his general direction.
“I thought I’d show you East Campus,” Levi said.
“At night? In February?”
The elevator doors opened, and he waited for her to step out. “I got a great deal on an off-season tour. Besides, it’s not that cold out tonight.”
Levi led the way outside and started walking away from the parking lot.
“Don’t we have to drive?” Cath asked.
“I thought we’d take the shuttle.”
“There’s a shuttle?”
He shook his head. “City folk.”
The shuttle was a bus, and it rolled up almost immediately. “After you,” Levi said.
Inside, the bus was lit up brighter than daylight and nearly empty. Cath chose a seat and sat down sideways with one knee up, so that there wasn’t room to sit down right next to her. Levi didn’t seem to mind. He swung sideways into the seat in front of her and rested his arm on the back.
“You have very nice manners,” she said.
“My mother would be thrilled to hear that.” He smiled.
“So you have a mother.”
He laughed. “Yes.”
“And a father?”
“And four sisters.”
“Older or younger?”
“Older. Younger.”
“You’re in the middle?”
“Smack-dab. What about you? Are you the older or younger twin?”
She shrugged. “It was a C-section. But Wren was bigger. She was stealing my juice or something. I had to stay in the hospital for three weeks after she went home.”
Cath didn’t tell him that sometimes she felt like Wren was still taking more than her fair share of life, like she was siphoning vitality off Cath—or like she was born with a bigger supply.
Cath didn’t tell him that, because it was dark and depressing. And because, for the moment, she wouldn’t trade places with Wren, even if it meant getting the better umbilical cord.
“Does that mean she’s more dominant?” Levi asked.
“Not necessarily. I mean, I guess she is. About most things. My dad says we used to share the bossiness when we were kids. Like I’d decide what we were gonna wear, and she’d decide what we were playing.”
“Did you dress alike?”
“When we were little. We liked to.”
“I’ve helped deliver twins before,” he said. “Calves. It almost killed the cow.”
Cath’s eyes got big. “How did that happen?”
“Sometimes when a bull meets a cow, they decide to spend more time together—”
“How did you end up being there for the delivery?”
“It happens a lot on a ranch. Not twins, but births.”
“You worked on a ranch?”
He raised an eyebrow, like he wasn’t sure whether she was serious. “I live on a ranch.”
“Oh,” Cath said. “I didn’t know people lived on ranches. I thought it was like a factory or a business, someplace where you go to work.”
“You’re sure you’re from Nebraska?”
“I’m starting to feel like Omaha doesn’t count.…”
“Well”—he smiled—“I live on a ranch.”
“Like on a farm?”
“Sort of. Farms are for crops. Ranches are for grazing livestock.”
“Oh. That sounds … are there just cows wandering around?”
“Yeah.” He laughed, then shook his head. “No. There are cattle in designated areas. They need a lot of space.”
“Is that what you want to do when you’re done with school? Work on a ranch?”
Something passed over Levi’s face. His smile faded a bit, and he scrunched his eyebrows together. “It’s … not that simple. My mom shares the ranch with my uncles, and nobody really knows what’s going to happen to it when they all retire. There are twelve cousins, so we can’t just split it. Unless we sell it. Which … nobody really wants. Um…” He shook his head again quickly and smiled back up at her. “I’d like to work on a ranch or with ranchers—helping them be better at what they do.”
“Range management.”
“And you try to pretend like you’re not paying attention—hey, this is our stop.”
“Already?”
“East Campus is only two miles from your dorm; it’s shameful that you’ve never been here.”
Cath followed him off the bus. He stopped to thank the driver by name.
“Did you know that guy?” she asked when the bus pulled away.
Levi shrugged. “He was wearing a name tag. Okay—” He stepped directly in front of her and spread a long arm out toward a parking lot. He was smiling like a game show host. “—Cather Avery, as a student of the Agricultural College, a member of the agricultural community, and a citizen of Lincoln, Nebraska, I would like to welcome you to East Campus.”
“I like it,” Cath said, looking around. “It’s dark. There are trees.”
“You can park your snark at the gate, Omaha.”
“Who would have thought that being from Omaha would make me citified?”
“On your right is the East Campus Union. That’s where we keep our bowling alley.”
“Another bowling alley—”
“Don’t get excited, there’s no bowling on the agenda tonight.”
Cath followed Levi along a winding sidewalk path and smiled politely at all the buildings when he pointed to them. He kept touching her back to get her attention or to make sure she was facing the right direction. She didn’t tell him that East Campus (in February, at night) looked a lot like City Campus.
“If we were here during the day,” he said, “we’d stop at the Dairy Store and have some ice cream.”
“Too bad,” she said. “It’s the perfect freezing night for it.”
“Are you cold?” He stopped in front of her and frowned. “Is that how your mother taught you to put on a scarf?”
Her scarf was hanging around her collar. He pulled it snugly against her neck and wrapped it, tucking in the ends. Cath hoped her coat hid the embarrassingly shaky breath she’d taken.