Usually she ended up working on Carry On, Simon. Cath was on a streak, posting long chapters almost every night. Switching from her Fiction-Writing homework to Simon and Baz was like realizing she’d been driving in the wrong gear. She could actually feel the muscles in her forearms loosen. Her typing got faster; her breathing got easier. She’d catch herself nodding her head as she wrote, almost like she was keeping time with the words as they rushed out of her.
When the library closed, Cath would dial 911 on her phone, then run back to the dorm as fast as she could with her finger on Call.
It was more than a week before she saw Levi again. She came home from class late one afternoon, and he was sitting on Reagan’s bed while Reagan typed.
“Cather,” he said, grinning, pulling his earphones out of his head. He was listening to a lecture; she knew that now. Reagan said he listened to them all the time, and that he even saved the ones he really liked.
“Hey,” he said. “I owe you a beverage. Your choice, hot or fermented. I rocked that Outsiders quiz. Did Reagan tell you? I got an A.”
“That’s great,” Cath said, trying not to let her face show how much she wanted to kiss and kill him.
She’d thought Reagan had to work tonight. That was the only reason Cath had come home. But she didn’t have to stay here. She was going to meet Nick at the library later anyway.…
Cath pretended to get something she needed out of her desk. A pack of gum.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m taking off.”
“But you just got here,” Levi said. “Don’t you want to stay and talk about the symbolism of Johnny’s relationship with Ponyboy? And the struggle between Sodapop and Darry? Hey, do you think there’s such a thing as Outsiders fanfiction?”
“I’ve gotta go,” Cath said, trying to say it to Reagan. “Meeting somebody.”
“Who are you meeting?” Levi asked.
“Nick. My writing partner.”
“Oh. Right. Do you want me to walk you home later?”
“Nick’ll probably walk me home,” she said.
“Oh.” Levi brought his eyebrows together, but still smiled. “Cool. Later.”
She couldn’t get away from him fast enough. She got to the library and wrote a thousand words of Carry On before Nick showed up.
* * *
“Shut that thing down,” Nick said. “You’re corrupting my creative centers with static.”
“That’s what she said,” Cath said, closing her laptop.
Nick looked dubious.
“It was sort of a metaphysical ‘that’s what she said.’”
“Ah.” He set down his backpack and pulled out their notebook. “You working on your final project?”
“Indirectly,” Cath said.
“What does that mean?”
“Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?”
“No.” He sat down.
“Well, I’m writing everything that isn’t my final project, so that when I actually sit down to write it, that’s all that will be left in my mind.”
“Clever girl,” he said, pushing the open notebook toward her. She flipped through it. Nick had filled five pages, front and back, since they’d last met.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I might turn in a story I worked on this summer.”
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“I don’t think so. It’s more like being really ahead of schedule.… All I can think about right now is this story.” He nudged the notebook toward Cath again. “I want you to read what I did.”
This story. Their story. Nick kept trying to call it an anti-love story. “But it’s not anti-love,” she’d argued.
“It’s anti- everything you usually find in a love story. Gooey eyes and ‘you complete me.’”
“‘You complete me’ is a great line,” Cath said. “You wish you came up with ‘you complete me.’”
Cath didn’t tell him that she’d been writing love stories—rewriting the same love story—every day for the last five years. That she’d written love stories with and without the goo, love-at-first-sight stories, love-before-first-sight stories, love-to-hate-you stories.…
She didn’t tell Nick that writing love stories was her thing. Her one true thing. And that his anti-love story read like somebody’s very first fanfic—Mary Sue to the tenth power. That the main character was obviously Nick and that the girl was obviously Winona Ryder plus Natalie Portman plus Selena Gomez.
Instead Cath fixed it. She rewrote his dialogue. She reined in the quirk.
“Why’d you cross that out?” Nick said tonight, leaning over her left shoulder. He smelled good. (Breaking news: Boys smell good.) “I liked that part,” he said.
“Our character just stopped her car in a parking lot to wish on a dandelion.”
“It’s refreshing,” Nick said. “It’s romantic.”
Cath shook her head. Her ponytail brushed Nick’s neck. “It makes her seem like a douche.”
“You have something against dandelions?”
“I have something against twenty-two-year-old women wishing on dandelions. Stopping the car to wish on dandelions. Also, the car? No. No to vintage Volvos.”
“It’s a character detail.”
“It’s a cliché. I swear to God, every surviving Volvo produced between 1970 and 1985 is being driven by quirky fictional girls.”
Nick pouted down at the paper. “You’re crossing out everything.”
“I’m not crossing out everything.”
“What are you leaving?” He leaned over more and watched her write.
“The rhythm,” Cath said. “The rhythm is good.”
“Yeah?” He smiled.
“Yeah. It reads like a waltz.”
“Make you jealous?” He smiled some more. His eyeteeth were crooked, but not bad enough to get braces.
“Definitely,” Cath said. “I could never write a waltz.”
Sometimes, when they talked like this, she was sure they were flirting. But when the notebook closed, the light always went off in Nick’s eyes. At midnight, he’d rush off to wherever he always rushed off to, probably to wrap a beer around a blond girl’s waist. To kiss her with his twisted eyeteeth showing.
Cath kept working on the scene; a whole new conversation took shape in the margin. When she looked up, Nick was still smiling at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, laughing.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just … It’s crazy that this works. Between you and me. That we can actually write together. It’s like … thinking together.”
“It’s nice,” Cath said, meaning it. “Writing is lonely.”
“You wouldn’t think we’d be on the same wavelength, you know? We’re so different.”
“We’re not that different.”
“Totally different,” he said. “Look at us.”
“We’re both English majors,” Cath said. “We’re both white. We live in Nebraska. We listen to the same music, we watch the same TV shows, we even have the same pair of Chuck Taylors—”
“Yeah. But it’s like John Lennon writing with … Taylor Swift instead of Paul McCartney.”
“Get over yourself,” Cath said. “You’re not half as pretty as Taylor Swift.”
“You know what I mean.” Nick poked her in the arm with the end of his pen.
“It’s nice,” she said, looking up at him, still not sure if they were flirting—pretty sure she didn’t want them to be. “Writing is lonely.”
There wasn’t time for Cath to write a page of her own in the notebook. She and Nick spent the rest of their night in the stacks, revamping his section. The Volvo became a rusty Neon, and the dandelion detail blew away completely.
At eleven forty-five, they packed up. When they got to the library’s front steps, Nick was already checking his phone. “Hey,” Cath said, “do you feel like walking past Pound Hall on your way to your car? We could walk together.”
He didn’t look up from his phone. “Better not. I need to get home. See you in class, though.”