“So, what? Was Reagan going to read it to you?”
“Usually we just go over the highlights. It helps her, too, to review it.”
Cath looked down at the paperback. “Well, I’ve got nothing for you. All I know about The Outsiders is ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy.’”
Levi sighed and pushed back his hair. Cath shuffled the pages with her thumb.… It really was a short book. With tons of dialogue.
She looked up at Levi. The sun was setting behind her, and he was sitting in a wash of orange light.
Cath turned her chair toward the bed, knocking his feet without warning to the ground. Then she rested her own feet on the bed frame and took off her glasses, tucking them in her hair. “‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house—’”
“Cath,” Levi whispered. She felt her chair wobble and knew he was kicking it. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Obviously,” she said. “‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight—’”
“Cather.”
She cleared her throat, still focused on the book. “Shut up, I owe you one. At least one. And also, I’m trying to read here.… When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had just two things on my mind.…”
When Cath glanced up between paragraphs, Levi was grinning. He bent forward to slide out of his coat, then found a new way to rest his legs on her chair and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes.
* * *
Cath had never read out loud this much before. Fortunately it was a good book, so she sort of forgot after a while that she was reading out loud and that Levi was listening—and the circumstances that got them here. An hour or so passed, maybe even two, before Cath dropped her hands and the book into her lap. The sun had finished setting, and the only light in her room was from her desk lamp.
“You can stop whenever you want,” Levi said.
“I don’t want to stop,” She looked up at him. “I’m just really”—she was blushing, she wasn’t sure why—“thirsty.”
Levi laughed and sat up. “Oh … Yeah. Let me get you something. You want soda? Water? I could be back here in ten with a gingerbread latte.”
She was about to tell him not to bother, but then she remembered how good that gingerbread latte was. “Really?”
“Back in ten,” he said, already standing and putting on his jacket. He stopped in the doorway, and Cath felt tense, remembering how sad he’d looked the last time he stood there.
Levi smiled.
Cath didn’t know what to do, so she sort of nodded and gave him the world’s lamest thumbs-up.
When he was gone, she stood up and stretched. Her back and her shoulders popped. She went to the bathroom. Came back. Stretched again. Checked her phone. Then lay down on her bed.
It smelled like Levi. Like coffee grounds. And some sort of warm, spicy thing that might be cologne. Or soap. Or deodorant. Levi sat on her bed so often, it was all familiar. Sometimes he smelled like cigarette smoke, but not tonight. Sometimes like beer.
She’d left the door unlocked, so when he knocked again, Cath just sat up and told him to come in. She’d meant to get up and sit back down at her desk, but Levi was already handing her the drinks and taking off his coat. His face was flushed from the cold, and when his coat touched her, it was so cold, she jumped.
“Five below,” he said, taking off his hat and riffling his hair until it stuck up again. “Scoot over.”
Cath did, scooting up toward her pillow and leaning against the wall. Levi took his drink and smiled at her. She set the drink carrier on her desk; he’d brought her a big glass of water, too.
“Can I ask you something?” She looked down at her Starbucks cup.
“Of course.”
“Why did you take a literature class if you can’t finish a book?”
He turned to her—they were sitting shoulder to shoulder. “I need six hours of literature to graduate. That’s two classes. I tried to get one out of the way freshman year, but I failed it. I failed … a lot that year.”
“How do you get through any of your classes?” Cath had hours of assigned reading, almost every single night.
“Coping strategies.”
“Such as?”
“I record my lectures and listen to them later. Professors usually cover most of what’s on the test in class. And I find study groups.”
“And you lean on Reagan—”
“Not just Reagan.” He grinned. “I’m really good at quickly identifying the smartest girl in every class.”
Cath frowned at him. “God, Levi, that’s so exploitive.”
“How is it exploitive? I don’t make them wear miniskirts. I don’t call them ‘baby.’ I just say, ‘Hello, smart girl, would you like to talk to me about Great Expectations?’”
“They probably think you like them.”
“I do like them.”
“If it wasn’t exploitive, you’d harass smart boys, too—”
“I do, in a pinch. Do you feel exploited, Cather?” He was still grinning at her over his coffee cup.
“No,” she said, “I know that you don’t like me.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“So, this is old hat for you? Finding a girl to read a whole book to you?”
He shook his head. “No, this is a first.”
“Well, now I feel exploited,” she said, setting her drink down and reaching for the book.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Chapter twelve—”
“I’m serious.” Levi pulled the book down and looked at her. “Thank you.”
Cath held his eyes for a few seconds. Then she nodded and pulled back the book.
* * *
After another fifty pages, Cath was getting sleepy. At some point, Levi had leaned against her, and then she’d leaned back, and it was hard to think about what was happening on that side of her body because she was busy reading.… Though there was almost an entire chapter there where her lips and her eyes were moving, but her brain wasn’t keeping track of anything but how warm he was. How warm her roommate’s boyfriend was.
One of her roommate’s boyfriends. Did that matter? If Reagan had three boyfriends, did that mean this was only one-third wrong?
Just leaning against Levi probably wasn’t wrong. But leaning against him because he was warm and not-exactly-soft … Wrong.
Cath’s voice rasped, and he sat up away from her a little bit. “Want to take a break?” he asked.
She nodded, only partly grateful.
Levi stood up and stretched. The tails of his flannel shirt didn’t quite lift up over the waist of his jeans. Cath stood up, too, and rubbed her eyes.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Let’s stop.”
“We’re not stopping now,” she said. “We’re almost done.”
“We’ve still got a hundred pages—”
“Are you getting bored?”
“No. I just feel like it’s too much, what you’re doing for me. Bordering on exploitive.”
“Pfft,” Cath said. “I’ll be right back. And then we’ll finish. We’re half done, and I want to know what happens. Nobody’s said, ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’ yet.”
When she came back, Levi was in the hallway, leaning against the door. He must have gone up to the boys’ floor to use the bathroom. “This is weird now that I know you have a key,” she said.
She let him in, and he dropped down onto the bed again and smiled at her. Cath glanced at her desk chair, then felt his hand on her sleeve. He pulled her down next to him on the bed, and their eyes met for a second. Cath looked away as if they hadn’t.
“Look what we sell at Starbucks,” he said, holding an energy bar out to her.
Cath took it. “Blueberry Bliss. Wow. This takes me back two whole months.”
“Months are different in college,” Levi said, “especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they’re like dog months.”
She unwrapped the protein bar and offered him half. He took it and tapped it against hers. “Cheers.”
* * *
It was really late. And too dark in the room to be reading this much. Cath’s voice was rough now, like someone had run a dull knife across it. Like she was recovering from a cold or a crying jag.