Page 9 of Notorious Man on Campus

She’s at the stove taking cinnamon rolls from the oven, judging by the titillating smell seducing me. Without a second thought, I pluck one hot from the pan, bounce it on my fingertips until I reach a spot on the table, and then rip a steaming corner off to stuff in my mouth. She’s watching me, that sickening sunny smile on her face, shaking her head.

“You didn’t give me a chance to frost it.” I continue chewing and staring back at her, waiting for her to say whatever shit she has to say. She shrugs.

“Look, you’re not going to like this, but I’m going to the Jennings wedding with Majik. She wants me to go with her. Said it’d be good for me. I couldn’t get out of it.”

Her unpleasant message contrasts with the deliriously glorious taste of the cinnamon roll in my mouth, a taste I remember well. Her special recipe. Torn between fighting the flood of unwanted nostalgia the taste brings back, all associated with her, and fighting her here and now about going to my best friend’s wedding, I take my time swallowing, savoring the taste, keeping to the here and now, ignoring the past and future.

Majik asked me to give her a ride and of course I said yes. I had no idea she’d invite Nyla.

“I already told Roman I’d give him a ride.” I say. No way I can tell Majik I’m not driving with Nyla. I can’t test her loyalty between us again. Don’t want to take shit for it.

Fuck that.

“What the fuck are you doing going to a wedding where you don’t know the bride and groom for shit? Tell Majik you don’t want to go.” Let Nyla take shit. She wasn’t invited to the wedding.

But I have little hope of Majik changing her mind. I’ll be fucking trapped in a car with Nyla for six hours. Earphones will be my only salvation.

Chapter 4

Nyla

“I’m going to the wedding and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I don’t bother telling him I’ve never been to one before and Majik thought it would be important for me to observe the business of wedding caterers. Her promise to get us a peek behind the scenes in the kitchen will definitely be the highlight, judging by the look on Brick’s face. I pace a small circle in the kitchen while he leans against the refrigerator, arms folded and looking like a college recruiter’s dream ad. Shit, he probably is the recruitment department’s best advertisement.

He wears the same old blank façade except for the tension in his jaw, which is causing a muscle to pulse ever so slightly, and a small smudge of cinnamon at the corner of his mouth. The impulse to lick that cinnamon off his mouth nearly strangles me. It’s my torture and superpower that I notice the little things in people—times a hundred when it comes to Brick. The bastard. The tough, hunky, heart-wrenchingly sad bastard.

“Then I’ll stay home.”

“You can’t do that. You’re the best man.” I speak without thinking, the opposite of cool, calm, and Brick. There’s nothing but calculation about him, emotions buttoned up, soul damaged, so I’m not sure if he has one left. But Majik sees something in him.

“Who told you that? Never mind.” He turns away from me and stares out the window, the energy fanning out from him, pulsing in the room until it feels like the blender might start up spontaneously with his energy. He doesn’t move, but he vibrates with caged-tiger fervor. He was bluffing about staying home.

“I’m going to the wedding, Brick. Deal with it. Are your brother and father going?” I know they’re not, but I need to reach him, rile him up, bring him to life.

“No.” He’s deadpan. He knows it was a stupid question.

“How are they?”

“Ask them yourself. They’ll be at the game next Saturday.” It’s an empty dare. He knows I wouldn’t.

“I won’t be there.”

Brick frowns, then smirks. I know he’s trying to cover his irritation that I won’t be at his game. His irritation buoys me. It shouldn’t, but it shows signs of life in the empty pit that should be his emotional response to people. The only emotions he shows are solidarity with his teammates and housemates and for football. He loves football. Even beyond his ambition to play in the NFL, the game means everything to him, like it’s part of his identity.

If I could, I would turn myself into a football right now so he’d touch me. As it is, he plucks a football from the nearby counter and tosses the misshaped leather bundle from hand-to-hand and back again ceaselessly without even knowing it. A habit more ingrained than eating and sleeping, I think.

I’m jealous of football.

“Too busy cooking?”

I shrug, unwilling to admit that I’m going home because I promised my mother, because she’s worried about me being here among the vile snobs of society, the devil spawn of American greed—her words, not mine. Mom can be very creative when she gets going about the people she hates. And that counts anyone who’s wealthy and elite. Almost everyone at SPU.

“It hardly matters,” I say. “Your dad and Jimmy are off-limits to me.” Brick is supposed to be off-limits too and when his eyes flicker, I know he’s thinking the same thing.

“You going home?” Damn the mind-reading bastard. I don’t say anything, but that doesn’t stop his triumphant smirk. Does he ever just smile? Does he ever just have a moment of joy expressed in a natural lift of his mouth? Or did those bitches who masqueraded as his stepmothers strip that ability from him when they crushed his poor little boy heart?

“What if I am?” I sound like a twelve-year-old, but I don’t care. If I tell him my mother wants me home, I’ll sound like an eight-year-old. Maybe I do need to grow up.

“Your mother still hates those rich-bastard snobs, doesn’t she?” He mocks what my mother used to say to me. I should never have confided in him about my mother, or how I hid my job, and especially that I dated his brother Jimmy, from her. Jimmy Blanick was the original elitist according to Mother, always in the paper just because he played football at that snob school all the way up in New Hampshire, as if we should care just because he came from Fox Chapel.