Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(9)

Krishna I can talk to. But West … no. The way he walks—that swagger that isn’t a swagger—it’s like he knows his way around, even if he’s somewhere he’s never been before. His confidence makes him seem older than me, and Bridget is always telling me stuff about him that cements the impression. Apparently he loaned money to this guy in Bridget’s psych class so the guy could buy a plane ticket to see his girlfriend. West charged him interest. It makes me wonder whether he breaks kneecaps if someone doesn’t pay him back.

He’s just more than I could handle, even if I were allowed to talk to him.

I confined my relationship with West to staring from afar—and I wouldn’t have done even that, except I can’t help it. When he’s around, I have to look at him.

He knows it, too. He smirks at me sometimes. One time, when he was coming down the hall in a towel? God. I think I was red for an hour afterward.

I never found out what he said to my dad. I have a feeling that, whatever it was, he wasn’t defending my honor. It’s hard for me to see why he would start now.

Maybe I should be grateful, but I can’t. I don’t need guys like West Leavitt defending me. He’s infamous. Between the drug dealing and that face, that smile … pretty much everyone on campus knows who he is.

He’ll draw attention to me. My primary purpose in life at the moment is to disappear.

When I mentally come back to the table, Bridget is peeling a hard-boiled egg and watching me. She’s gotten used to my long silences. She’s fiercely loyal, endlessly supportive. The best person I could possibly have on my side.

“If people want to know what I think about what West did?” I began.

“Yeah?”

“Tell them it was all a misunderstanding. It had nothing to do with me.”

Her forehead wrinkles. “But I figured it was good. Somebody else on our side, right?”

“I don’t want to be on a side, Bridge,” I say gently. “I want people to get amnesia on this whole issue. Fighting tends to be a thing people remember.”

She bites her lip.

“I don’t need people linking me up with him, okay? I need to keep a low profile.”

“If that’s what you want me to say, that’s what I’ll say,” she assures me. “That’ll be the end of it.”

I try on a smile and push my chicken across the tray, then pull my mint brownie closer and sink my fork through the thick layer of frosting. Dark fudgy black over a green so bright it’s almost neon.

That’ll be the end of it.

I wish I could believe her, but I can’t make assumptions like that anymore. I’ve learned that when evil crawls out of a snake pit, you have to track it down and squash it. Then you have to assume it had babies and go looking for them.

I have a past to erase if I’m going to claim the future I’ve always wanted—a future that requires me to get into a good law school so I can clerk with a great judge and start making the connections my dad says I need if I want to be a judge myself someday. Which I do. I want to go even further. State office. Washington, D.C.

My dad always says the first step to getting what you want is to know what you want and what it takes to get it. There’s no shame in aiming high. For my sixth-grade History Day project, I wrote a book of presidential limericks, one for each president. By ninth grade, I was volunteering to canvass door to door, and I got on the mailing lists for the Putnam College Democrats and the Putnam Republicans before I even received my acceptance letter.

I know what I want, and I know what it takes to get it. It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice—but it also takes a clean record. No arrests, no scandals, no sex pictures on the Internet.

I don’t need anyone going around beating people up on my behalf. I can’t chance it happening again.

I need to talk to West.



I find him on the fourth floor of the library.

It’s all journals up here, the shelves shoved together in the middle and study desks lining the outside walls, plus a Xerox machine where I spent way too much time copying literary criticism of T. S. Eliot last year.

West is standing by a cart full of books with his back to me, shelving a fat red volume of something. It takes me a minute to realize he’s him. I’d already looked all over the first three floors, and I was starting to panic that he might not be here. I’ve noticed that I often see him with his cart on Thursday afternoons, but that doesn’t mean much.

He’s got earbuds in, and I don’t think he’s seen me, so I take a second to think about what I want to say to him. I feel kind of sweaty and unkempt, even though I took time after lunch to change my shirt and slick on lip gloss.

I’ve never done this before.

I’ve never initiated a conversation with West.

It feels more intimidating than it should, not only because of who he is—the forbiddenness of him—but also because this is the fourth floor. It’s an unwritten rule of Putnam that the fourth floor of the library is a space of sacred silence.

West grabs another book. He has to reach above his head to shelve it, which means his shirt lifts and I see he’s got a thick brown leather belt holding his jeans up. It doesn’t match. His boots are black, and so is his T-shirt. It’s got this big jagged orange seam sewn across the back, as though a shark came along and bit a giant rip in it and then he handed it over to a seven-year-old to fix.