If she thought about it objectively, Abel might actually be better looking than Levi in some ways. Abel was a swimmer. He had broad shoulders and thick arms. And he had hair like Frankie Avalon. (According to Cath’s grandma.)
Levi was thin and weedy, and his hair—well, his hair—but everything about him made Cath feel loose and immoral.
He had this thing where he bit his bottom lip and raised an eyebrow when he was trying to decide whether to laugh at something.… Madness.
Then, if he decided to laugh, his shoulders would start shaking and his eyebrows would pull up in the middle—Levi’s eyebrows were pornographic. If Cath were making this decision just on eyebrows, she would have been “up to his room” a long time ago.
If she were being rational about this, there was a lot on the touching continuum between holding hands and eyebrow-driven sex.… But she wasn’t being rational. And Levi made Cath feel like her whole body was a slippery slope.
She sat at her desk. He sat on her bed and kicked her chair.
“Hey,” he said. “I was thinking that this weekend, we should go on a real date. We could go out to dinner, see a movie.…” He was smiling, so Cath smiled back. And then she stopped.
“I can’t.”
“Why not? You already have a date? Every night this weekend?”
“Sort of. I’m going home. I’ve been going home more this semester, to check on my dad.”
Levi’s smile dimmed, but he nodded, like he understood. “How’re you getting home?”
“This girl down the hall. Erin. She goes home every weekend to see her boyfriend—which is probably a good idea, because she’s boring and awful, and he’s bound to meet somebody better if she doesn’t keep an eye on him.”
“I’ll drive you home.”
“On your white horse?”
“In my red truck.”
Cath rolled her eyes. “No. You’d have to make two round trips. It’d take a thousand dollars in gas.”
“I don’t care. I want to meet your dad. And I’ll get to hang out with you for a few hours in the truck—in a nonemergency situation.”
“It’s okay. I can ride with Erin. She’s not that bad.”
“You don’t want me to meet your dad?”
“I haven’t even thought about you meeting my dad.”
“You haven’t?” He sounded wounded. (Mildly wounded. Like, hangnail-wounded—but still.)
“Have you thought about introducing me to your parents?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I figured you’d go with me to my sister’s wedding.”
“When is it?”
“May.”
“We’ve only been dating for three and half weeks, right?”
“That’s six months in freshman time.”
“You’re not a freshman.”
“Cather…” Levi hooked his feet on her chair and pulled it closer to the bed. “I really like you.”
Cath took a deep breath. “I really like you, too.”
He grinned and raised a hand-drawn eyebrow. “Can I drive you to Omaha?”
Cath nodded.
“That does it,” Simon said, charging forward, climbing right over the long dinner table. Penelope grabbed the tail of his cape, and he nearly landed face-first on a bench. He recovered quickly—“Let go, Penny”—and ran hard at Basil, both fists raised and ready.
Basil didn’t move. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he whispered, just barely tipping his wand.
Simon’s fist slammed into a solid barrier just inches from the other boy’s unflinching jaw. He pulled his hand back, yelping, still stumbling against the spell.
This made Dev and Niall and all the rest of Basil’s cronies cackle like drunk hyenas. But Basil himself stayed still. When he spoke, it was so softly, only Simon could hear him. “Is that how you’re going to do it, Snow? Is that how you’re going to best your Humdrum?” He dropped the spell with a twitch of his wand, just as Simon regained his balance. “Pathetic,” Basil said, and walked away.
—from chapter 4, Simon Snow and the Five Blades, copyright © 2008 by Gemma T. Leslie
TWENTY-SIX
Professor Piper held out her arms when Cath walked in. “Cath, you’re back. I wish I could say that I knew you would be, but I wasn’t sure—I was hoping.”
Cath was back.
She’d come to tell Professor Piper that she’d made up her mind. Again. She wasn’t going to write this story. She had enough to write right now and enough to worry about. This project was leftover crappiness from first semester. Just thinking about it made Cath’s mouth taste like failure (like plagiarism and stupid Nick stealing her best lines); Cath wanted to put it behind her.
But once she was standing in Professor Piper’s office, and Professor Piper was Blue Fairy–smiling at her, Cath couldn’t say it out loud.
This is so obviously about me needing a mother figure, she thought, disgusted with herself. I wonder if I’m going to get swoony around middle-aged women until I am one.
“It was really kind of you to offer me a second chance,” Cath said, following the professor’s gesture to sit down. This is when she was supposed to say, But I’m going to have to say no.
Instead she said, “I guess I’d be an idiot not to take it.”
Professor Piper beamed at her. She leaned forward with an elbow on the desktop, resting her cheek against her fist like she was posing for a senior picture. “So,” she said, “do you have an idea in mind for your story?”
“No.” Cath squeezed her fists shut and rubbed them into her thighs. “Every time I’ve tried to come up with something, I just feel … empty.”
Professor Piper nodded. “You said something last time that I’ve been thinking about—you said that you didn’t want to build your own world.”
Cath looked up. “Yes. Exactly. I don’t have brave new worlds inside of me begging to get out. I don’t want to start from nothing like that.”
“But Cath—most writers don’t. Most of us aren’t Gemma T. Leslie.” She waved a hand around the office. “We write about the worlds we already know. I’ve written four books, and they all take place within a hundred and twenty miles of my hometown. Most of them are about things that happened in my real life.”
“But you write historical novels—”
The professor nodded. “I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.”
“So everything in your books is true?”
The professor tilted her head and hummed. “Mmmm … yes. And no. Everything starts with a little truth, then I spin my webs around it—sometimes I spin completely away from it. But the point is, I don’t start with nothing.”
“I’ve never written anything that isn’t magical,” Cath said.
“You still can, if that’s what you want. But you don’t have to start at the molecular level, with some sort of Big Bang in your head.”
Cath pressed her nails into her palms.
“Maybe for this story,” Professor Piper said delicately, “you could start with something real. With one day from your life. Something that confused or intrigued you, something you want to explore. Start there and see what happens. You can keep it true, or you can let it turn into something else—you can add magic—but give yourself a starting point.”
Cath nodded, more because she was ready to leave than because she’d processed everything the professor was saying.
“I want to meet again,” Professor Piper said. “In a few weeks. Let’s get back together and talk about where you are.”
Cath agreed and hurried toward the door, hoping she wouldn’t seem rude. A few weeks. Sure. Like a few weeks will fix the hole in my head. She pushed her way through a mob of gaudy English majors, then escaped out into the snow.
* * *
Levi wouldn’t put her laundry hamper down.
“I can carry it,” Cath said. Her head was still in Professor Piper’s office, and she wasn’t in the mood for … well, for Levi. For the constant good-natured game of him. If Levi were a dog, he’d be a golden retriever. If he were a game, he’d be Ping-Pong, incessant and bouncing and light. Cath didn’t feel like playing.