Chapter 2: Carter and Clara II

Chapter 2

"You look like actual death," Allie said, slapping a gray, sour-smelling rag against the laminate counter, and I did not bother to lift my head from my hands, because I was busy watching a fruit fly drown in a puddle of spilled creamer on the stainless steel shelf and feeling a deep and uncomfortable kinship with it.

"I got two hours of sleep," I mumbled, in a voice that sounded as though I had swallowed a handful of gravel, "and if one more person orders poached eggs today, I am locking myself in the walk-in freezer and screaming until my lungs give out."

"Is this still about the bursar's office?" She tilted her head and tossed the rag into the plastic bucket under the sink.

"I checked my bank app in the bathroom five minutes ago, and I have four dollars and twelve cents to my name." I took a sip of black coffee from my styrofoam cup and winced when it scorched the tip of my tongue. "That is my entire life savings, and it does not even include the near heart attack I had last night when I lost the master key in the locker room, nearly got caught by Coach Miller, and then walked in on Carter Graham in the team showers wearing nothing at all."

My skin burned at the memory of his arrogant smirk, a visual I fully intended to carry to my grave as the worst trauma of my young life, and Allie nudged my shoulder with hers in the gentle way she always did when she was about to say something kind. "You will pull through, Clara, because you always do, and you are literally the smartest girl on this campus."

"Smart does not pay my four-hundred-dollar share of the electric and internet, Al."

The bell above the heavy glass door rang out, loud and obnoxious, and I did not even glance up as I unclipped the pen from my green apron, clicked the top twice with my thumb, and prepared to fake a cheerful personality for whoever wanted a stack of chocolate chip pancakes, but nobody spoke, and the entire diner went so quiet that I could hear the rusted exhaust fan above the griddle laboring against the silence. Old Man Haskins stopped chewing his rye toast in the corner booth, the two sorority girls beside the jukebox broke off mid-whisper, and I wiped a stray strand of dark hair out of my eyes and looked up, and my stomach did far more than drop, because it dissolved entirely.

Carter Graham was standing just inside the doorway, so out of place in our grease-stained diner that the sight was almost funny, in a black leather jacket over a tight white T-shirt, dark fitted jeans, and boots that probably cost more than my semester's tuition, with his dark hair tousled in the kind of effortless way that takes twenty minutes in front of a mirror to achieve. His ice-blue eyes swept the room with bored indifference toward every woman within three miles who was openly gawking at him, and then they landed on me, and the same slow, dangerous smirk from the night before spread across his face.

I spun around so quickly that my knees struck the trash can under the counter, and I began scrubbing the side of the espresso machine with a dry napkin while I hissed through my teeth, "Allie, please tell me that he is not walking over here."

Allie leaned around my shoulder, her eyes as wide as saucers. "The guy who looks like he belongs on a billboard in Times Square? He is walking straight toward your section, and I need to know how you know him."

"I do not know him," I muttered, gripping the counter until my knuckles turned white, "and he is a rich, entitled hockey nightmare."

Heavy boot heels stopped on the other side of the counter, and the smell of burnt coffee and fried bacon was wiped out by expensive cologne and fresh leather, which made my chest feel unreasonably tight, so I took a slow breath, pasted on the sugary smile that I reserved for bad tippers, and turned around to find him leaning on his elbows with his face level with mine, looking like a man who was having the best morning of his life.

"Hey, Sarah," he said softly.

Allie blinked from him to me and back again. "Sarah?"

"Isn't that your roommate's name?" Carter asked, without so much as glancing in her direction.

"Not even close, bro," Allie said, folding her arms, and I silently thanked God for her.

"It is Clara," I said, slamming my order pad onto the counter between his elbows, "and you know exactly who I am, Graham."

"Clara Hayes," he agreed, letting his smirk widen enough to show a flash of white teeth. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, drew out a folded sheet of blue paper, and slid it across the sticky Formica until it touched the edge of my apron. "I need you to fix my life."

It was the syllabus for Advanced Psychology 400 with Professor Helen, and I did not even open it, but flicked the corner with one finger and pushed it back toward his chest. "You have the wrong girl, because I sell burnt coffee and reheated pie, and I especially do not fix the lives of men who hit people with wooden sticks for a living."

He let out a short, rough laugh. "Coach says you are the only person in the department who got an A on the midterm, and I am sitting at a thirty-four, so congratulations, you are hired."

"Hired by whom?" I asked, and I could not stop the bitter laugh from dragging itself out of my throat. "You?"

"Yes, me." He leaned in until his shadow blotted out the fluorescent light overhead. "I know that we got off on a strange foot last night in the locker room."

"What locker room?" Allie choked on her own spit and began to cough.

"Stay out of this, Allie," I snapped, keeping my glare fixed on Carter, "because we did not get off on a strange foot, we established that you are an arrogant jerk who thinks he owns this campus, and the answer is no."

For half a second he looked genuinely thrown, as though the word were a foreign language that he had never heard spoken aloud, and then the smooth, easy posture stiffened. "You also left something behind in my locker room, and I am happy to return it tonight at the library at eight o'clock, once you have agreed to help me, so I would think carefully before you say no again."

"That is extortion," I said, lowering my voice so that Old Man Haskins would not hear, "and it is also the stupidest way to ask a girl for a favor that I have ever heard."

The diner was still silent, with every pair of eyes fixed on us, and I knew that Carter Graham, campus god, was being cut down by a waitress with grease stains on her shoes, a story that would be all over T****k within five minutes. His jaw flexed, and for one unguarded moment the cocky mask slipped and showed the raw panic underneath, because Coach Miller's threat from last night was clearly still ringing in his ears: fail the class, get benched, lose his father's trust fund.

"I am not asking for a favor, Clara," he muttered, dropping his voice to a harsh whisper that only I could hear. "I know that you are broke, because everyone knows that you work two jobs and walk around campus as though you have not slept since freshman year, so I will pay you double whatever the tutoring center offers, or triple, and you can simply name a number."

He shoved a hand into his back pocket, drew out a thin leather wallet, and snapped a crisp, fresh hundred-dollar bill onto the counter, flicking it toward me like a piece of junk mail, and my stomach twisted into a tight knot as I stared at it, because that single piece of green paper could cover my groceries for a month and keep my phone company from shutting off my data in the morning. I looked up at Carter, who stood there with his chin raised, waiting for me to take it, because in his world everybody had a price and a hundred dollars was all that it took to make a broke girl jump through hoops, and the disgust that swept through me was so hot and sharp that it burned away every last trace of my exhaustion.

"I do not want your money," I said, and my voice did not shake even a little, and I snatched the bill from the counter, stepped around the register, and shoved it hard against his chest, so that his hand shot up instinctively to catch it before it hit the floor. "My price is that you walk back out those glass doors and never speak to me again, because I hate hockey players, I hate the brainless culture and the fake entitlement, and I especially hate rich boys who think that they can throw cash at a problem instead of doing the work."

Carter stood there frozen, staring down at me as though I had slapped him across the face with a wet fish, and I pointed one finger toward the entrance and held it there with a steadiness that I did not feel.

"Now get out," I told him quietly, "before I call my manager and have you removed for disturbing the customers."

For a long moment he did not move, and then he exhaled through his nose, tucked the hundred back into his wallet, and left the folded syllabus on my counter as though he had never expected me to take it on the first try. "Library, eight o'clock," he said, from the doorway, glancing back at me with something unreadable in his blue eyes, "and you will bring a pen, because I think that you are going to want to be there."

The bell rang above the door as he left, and the whole diner exhaled at once, and Allie turned to me with her mouth hanging open.

"Clara Hayes," she said, "you have exactly sixty seconds to tell me what happened in that locker room."