“It’s fine. You have to do this, and I understand,” she was gone again.

“Nolan, I mean it. Tell me what you want,” I asked urgently as she opened her door and slid from her seat. She pulled her purse strap and backpack over her shoulder and looked at me one more time.

“That’s just it. I don’t know. I…I need to figure some things out, Reed,” she said, turning away and then stopping again. “Please don’t feel bad. You didn’t do anything. Really. I’ll…I’ll just call you when I get back to school, okay?”

She was already inside when I sent her a text that read: I love you. I drove back to Tucson, and when I got into my room, I checked my phone—and she hadn’t texted back. For the first time in months, I wanted to drink. No, f**k that. I wanted to get ripped and forget f**king everything.

I picked up my phone and called Trig. “Hey, where you at?” I asked, putting a hat on my head and shoving my wallet and keys back in my pocket.

“We’re at Cooler’s, just shooting pool. You wanna come?” he asked, half surprised.

“Yeah, I’ll be there in ten. Then we’re drinking. A lot,” I said and just hung up.

Nolan

I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess that was part of the problem. I didn’t know what to think, about anything. I actually wanted just to not think, which was impossible!

By the time Sarah picked me up from my parents to drive back to campus Sunday morning, I was a mess. Thankfully, the yin to the yang that was Sarah’s spitfire temper was that she was also quick to forgive. I filled her in on everything, and she agreed that I was right to freak out over the close and personal touching by Dylan. She also defended Reed, telling me it wasn’t fair that I was mad at him for trying to include me in his decision about the draft when I was hiding such an enormous secret from him.

Sarah was right. And when we went out to dinner with Sienna that night back at campus, and I filled her in on everything—after breaking down to cry every 30 seconds—she agreed, too.

I hadn’t talked to Reed since I walked away from him Saturday afternoon. It had been almost 24 hours since I’d heard from him. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking after the way I’d left him. With the girls’ help, I drafted a text to send to him from our table.

I’m sorry I walked away from you. You’re only trying to include me, and I love you because of it. Maybe we can get together and really talk about everything sooner? I promise to have an open mind.

I didn’t think a text was a good place to elude about having to talk about other things, so I just left it at that. It took three of us to perfect the pathetic four sentences I did send.

We finished eating, and I walked back to my dorm from the café where we met. It had been an hour since I sent my text, and I still hadn’t heard from Reed. I was getting a little anxious on top of the heavy worry that had already permanently moved into my conscience.

To distract myself, I pulled out the latest spreadsheets from the testing trials for the IQ project. I loaded a few of them up on my computer and then went through my emails to see the others that my group members had sent, which only made my stress shoot through the roof. Nothing was right!

Exasperated, I flopped back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. It was going to take me hours to sort through the results and put things in the right order just so I could merge everything together. “I HATE GROUP PROJECTS!” I thought.

I rolled sideways to glance at my phone once again and there still was no message from Reed. Happy to have something new to worry about—something I at least had some power over—I pulled my laptop cord from the wall, gathered up my pages of notes, stuffed a pencil in my hair and grabbed my keys to go upstairs.

When I knocked on Gavin’s door, one floor up, it slowly slid open since it wasn’t really latched. Gavin was sitting on his floor in front of his laptop with notes spread all around and his hands on top of his head. I started to giggle, realizing he was probably coming to the same conclusion I just had.

I could tell he had headphones in and I didn’t want to scare him, so I reached over and knocked a little louder on his now-open door. He turned around quickly and pulled an ear bud from one of his ears.

“Nolan! Thank God!” he sprang to his feet, carefully stepping through his maze of papers and Monster Drink cans. He was trying to clean up a little as I walked all the way into his room.

“Hey,” I just smiled, sitting at his desk chair and putting my computer down. “So, I take it you saw the data from the dingle twins?”