In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead

Chapter 8

March, junior year

No matter what I did, the bills found me. If I avoided my mailbox in the student center, they were delivered to my door. If I buried them under books and papers on my desk, somehow they unearthed themselves, knocked over accidentally by Caro or Heather and scattered across the floor.

The same day I opened the red envelope and discovered, as a college junior, I was ten thousand dollars in debt—bolded words threatening legal action for continued nonpayment—Heather’s parents surprised her with a brand-new BMW. It was the first day of Parents’ Weekend, which always turned campus into a cheery, buttoned-up version of itself. My own parents never came. Surely, they’d received the invitation from the school, gold-foiled and thick-weighted, but they’d never once mentioned it.

When I opened the door to our suite, bill in hand, I found not only Heather and Caro, but Heather’s and Caro’s parents, squealing and popping champagne in our tiny kitchen. Clinking slender, fizzy glasses, they made a beautiful, if confusing, tableau.

I stopped in the doorway. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a precelebration for Heather’s twenty-first birthday,” Dr. Shelby said fondly. Heather’s mother was a carbon copy of her, down to the too-big forehead. She was dressed in loose, roomy clothes and heavy jewelry, like the proprietor of a spa in Sedona. It was a style I’d grown familiar with at Duquette and taken to calling Rich Woman Over Fifty.

“They got me a new car!” Heather tossed me a set of keys. “No more old Audi. I’m taking Jack and his parents for a ride later if you want to come.”

I caught the keys with the hand holding the red envelope, then jerked away quickly, lest they see it. The keys were large and heavy, inset with the blue-and-white BMW logo, that potent talisman of value. I swallowed and set them down. “Ah, regular old keys.” I smiled to show I was joking. “Thought they’d be gold-plated or something.”

I wondered what they’d do with Heather’s Audi, all of five years old.

“Let’s pour you a glass,” Mr. Shelby said. He was short, balding, and never without a smile. “It’s French. The real stuff.”

“Actually,” I said, clutching the bill, “I forgot I have an art lab.”

“Art lab?” Caro’s mom looked puzzled. “I thought you were an econ major.”

“She is,” Heather said, waving a hand. “Jess is a total brain. But she doesn’t actually like econ. She loves painting.”

“Econ is a much more practical choice.” Caro’s dad shot her a warning look, as if he was worried my impracticality was contagious. “Especially in the middle of a recession. Did you hear they’re saying the housing market—”

“I like having an artist friend, personally,” Heather interrupted. “Not everything in the world has to be about money.” She winked at me, raising her champagne glass. “To Jess, our very own Renoir.”

“Don’t worry,” I said to Caro’s dad, ignoring Heather’s theatrics. “It’s just a hobby.” I backed away to the door, catching a flash of Caro’s confused face as I waved over my shoulder. She memorized my schedule every semester, so she knew I was lying about the art lab. But I had to get out.

I raced through campus, not sure where I was going until I stood in front of Blackwell Tower. I slipped inside and climbed the stairs, tears coming as I moved, circle after winding circle, higher and higher.

Of course I wasn’t an art major. I needed a serious degree, one that could lift you up in the world, open doors. At Duquette it was easy to see what power looked like: students with internships at their fathers’ hedge funds that seamlessly transfigured into jobs; deans who came to academia from private equity firms after donating huge chunks of money; endowed professors who took a break from teaching to advise the president on trade deals. Power looked like Maseratis parked in the season-ticket-holder spots at football games and familiar names on the baseball stadium. It looked like Dr. John Garvey, celebrity economist.

I’d finally gotten into one of Dr. Garvey’s classes this semester, and it was hard not to be mesmerized by his lectures. He had a dry, cutting voice, wore three-piece suits, and name-checked Defense secretaries. He berated any student who dared walk in late, expected us to have read all his books on economic theory.

He’d reminded me of somebody I couldn’t quite put my finger on, someone familiar, and it wasn’t until last week’s class that I’d finally realized, with a kick of shame, who it was. Dr. Garvey reminded me of the man I imagined my father was before he’d become my father—a Harvard econ major with dreams of working in DC, dreams of changing the world. The should-have-been, would-have-been dad.

It was strangely fitting, then, that Dr. Garvey was my best shot at realizing my father’s ambitions. If I played my cards right in his class, worked above and beyond to secure his powerful endorsement, I’d have a strong chance of winning the Duquette Post-Graduate Fellowship next year. The fellowship would open doors to Harvard grad school and give me the money to make it a reality.

Not everything in this world has to be about money, Heather had said.

Heather: my staunchest defender, ever since the day she’d stood up for me to Courtney. But Heather was also the girl who got a BMW just for being born—not for getting high grades, or winning any award, or doing anything remotely special. Heather didn’t need to worry about practical majors. She got everything she wanted, got to fit in effortlessly with the Chi Os and the Phi Delts, all the rich kids who mattered.

Meanwhile, I had to hide where I came from, my family’s lack of money, my father’s…situation. I had to dig myself into a debt-ridden grave just to have one inch of what Heather had, or Courtney, or so many other kids on campus.

Especially Mint. Like Heather, my boyfriend got everything he wanted at the drop of a hat. As much as I loved him, our lives were as different as night and day.

I finally reached the top of Blackwell Tower and burst into the hidden storage room, a secret space known only to upperclassmen. I didn’t bother stifling my sobs.

“Jess? What are you doing here?”

Shit.I whirled, frantically wiping my eyes. Save for the stacks of old furniture and cardboard boxes, the room had looked empty through my tears. But there he was, leaning against the wall in the corner, one hand in his pocket.

“Coop.” I tried to make my voice light. “Figures. Why do you always seem to find me at my lowest?”

“Actually,” Coop said, “you’re the one who finds me.”

“Sorry. I’ll go. I thought I’d be alone.”

He dropped something on the floor and ground it out with his foot. He walked closer, both hands in his pockets, eyeing me cautiously. His hair was so mussed he looked a touch feral.

“Should I get Mint? I think he’s with his parents at a steak house, but I can find him.”

I tried to smile. “No. But thanks.” Mint was the last person in the world I could tell about my debt. And the thought of his parents catching wind made me sick to my stomach.

“Okay. I cede the room, then.” Coop tucked his hair behind his ears and walked to the door.

“Wait.”

He stopped. I swallowed, looking out the large windows at Duquette’s campus, in the process of being swallowed by dusk. “Will you stay, actually?”

Coop turned, and we locked eyes. I tried to read his face, but he kept it carefully blank.

“Sure,” he said finally. He made his way back, standing awkwardly beside me. “Are you going to make me guess why you’re crying?”

I dropped to the floor, drawing my knees to my chin. “It’s nothing.”

“Liar.” He sat, too, keeping a careful distance between us. But it didn’t matter; I could still feel him, a humming energy across the empty space.

I clutched my bill tighter on instinct, and the movement caught his eye. Before I could stop him, he lunged and snatched it.

“Coop—no!”

He unfolded the paper from the envelope and scanned it. My heart plummeted. This was it. The moment my veneer was shattered, when my ugly truth came out. First, Coop, then surely everyone would know.

He whistled, eyeing me. “Damn, Jess. That’s a lot of money. You better pay it fast.”

I stared at him, wide-eyed.

He frowned. The magic-hour sunlight played over his face, dappling it with shadows from the trees. “What, you’re embarrassed?”

I couldn’t move.

“Jess, my dad split when I was five. I was raised by a single mom who worked two jobs my whole life, three for a couple of years. If you think I’m a stranger to the red envelope, you’re wrong.”

I released a breath. “Really?”

He laughed. “Are you kidding? None of the rest of those spoiled assholes would understand, but I do.” He shot me a coy look. “Apologies for slandering your boyfriend. I know how much you adore the golden boy. King of the frat and beloved of professors and all that.”

“You sound jealous.”

“I am. But not of those things.”

I pressed my legs together against the sudden charge in the air.

His eyes dropped to my knees. “So, you’re going to pay it off, right?”

“I can’t.” Saying the words out loud made the tears well again. I dragged my hand over my eyes before he could see. “Neither can my parents. They’d kill me if they knew I opened this credit card. I did it secretly, so I could have the same things as everyone else.” I didn’t know why I was confessing so much, but here it was, out in the open.

Coop ran a hand through his hair, and it went wild again. It stayed upright even after he dropped his hand to the floor and leaned back to brace himself.

“I’m fucked,” I said. “I’m going to get sued.”

He studied his legs, stretched over the floor, then took a deep breath. “I’ll give you the money.”

“That’s absurd. How would you get ten thousand dollars?”

“Come on, like you don’t know.”

“I really don’t.”

Coop’s voice rose a notch. “I sell things. I thought you knew.”

Did he mean drugs? Like an actual drug dealer? Somewhere in the back of my mind, the pieces fit—Coop always had drugs, he went mysterious places at mysterious times—but it didn’t lessen the shock.

“Say something.”

“Does Mint buy his molly from you?”

“Everyone does. Pot. Molly. A few other things.”

“That’s bad, Coop. It’s dangerous. People get killed over drugs.”

“Yeah, well, my scholarship only goes so far. And there’s no way I’m adding to my mom’s plate when she can barely make rent. I told myself if I went to college, I’d make sure she never had to worry.”

I eyed him sharply. “You got a scholarship? What were your SAT scores?” I hadn’t made the cut for a scholarship to Duquette, but Coop had?

He leaned closer, dark hair falling over his forehead. “Seriously, that’s your takeaway? You know I’m prelaw, right?”

I laughed, even though a small voice said it was mean. “A drug-dealing lawyer sounds like a pretty big conflict of interest. What if you get caught?”

“The law is nuanced and complicated, and I like nuanced and complicated. Plus, knowing the law helps me break it better. Didn’t you get a scholarship, too? I assumed, you know…”

And just like that, the old wound opened. The ruined remains of my relationship with my mother, dug up from the grave. “No,” I admitted. “I’m paying for it all myself.”

He looked at me with wide eyes. “Why the fuck would you come here, then? No one who isn’t rich as sin could afford this tuition.”

I thought back to the night I’d gotten my acceptance from Duquette. The thick envelope, the slice of scissors across the top, the way I went too far, the sharp metal sliding against my finger, the bright spark of pain, but it didn’t matter. Because the paper, pressed red with my blood, said Congratulations, and then there was the look on my father’s face, the one I’d been waiting for my whole life.

“It was the best school I got into.”

“No school’s worth that…” Coop’s voice trailed off.

No school’s worth saddling yourself with this kind of debt, Jessica. You don’t understand what you’re doing. You’re burying yourself alive.My mother’s words, sharp with anger. But it didn’t matter what she said, or how many times she said it, because none of her warnings compelled me. None of her criticisms compared to what Duquette gave me with my dad.

The day my father crashed our car and nearly shattered the windshield, my mother screamed for hours. I’d never heard her yell so much. Even though I locked myself in my bedroom and stuffed sheets in the crack under my door, I could still hear her intermittently, the words serious problem and kill yourself and has to end. I couldn’t believe she was finally speaking up. For as long as I could remember, my dad’s problem was something she and I had borne silently, addressed only obliquely, even when it was just us.

Although the truth was unspoken, I knew it was the pills my dad swallowed, day and night—such small, innocuous things—that made him the living dead. Gone from the world for hours, or awake but high, so disoriented, walking into walls. Stretches of days where he couldn’t take off his bathrobe. Those days used to be occasional, but they’d grown more frequent. Someone from work had called, left a message on our answering machine. He was in danger of losing his accounting job at the steel company, which he hated, which was beneath him, which we needed.

In the days after the crash, he seemed lucid more often, but that only made me terrified to be in the same room with him. What if he looked up from his cereal bowl and noticed me—really took me in for the first time in years—and hated what he found? I tiptoed through the house, trying to be invisible.

Until it was time for college applications. One day I passed him at the kitchen table, wearing his Harvard University alumni shirt, and paused. Heart hammering, I told him I was filling out an application to Harvard.

A light went on inside him. He looked at me—really looked—and asked what my grades were, my SAT scores, my extracurriculars. He started talking feverishly, tapping his leg against the chair. I brought him the application and he pored over it. Getting into the best school in the world was imperative, he said. It would mean I was the best, the cream of the crop. When he got into Harvard, his parents told him it was the proudest moment of their lives. I knew he was telling the truth, because my grandparents brought up Harvard at every holiday. In their eyes my father was perfect. Smart, flawless, always one step away from getting his life back on track and becoming something big.

They didn’t know about the pills.

My dad became obsessed with college applications. The moment I got home from school each day, I rushed to get them, fourteen in all, safeties and reaches, and we spread them over the kitchen table. Talked about answers to questions, reworked essays. We revised the Harvard application seven times until it was perfect, and then he took off a day from work so we could mail it together, ceremoniously. He kissed the stamp and closed the mailbox and I felt, with every fiber of my being, that my father loved me.

For months we waited, speculating about which dorm I’d get assigned to, where my classes would be. He was so normal, a version of himself I barely remembered but was thrilled to have back. Even my mother couldn’t complain. When she wasn’t in the room, he talked in a low voice about moving with me to Cambridge. Four whole years of father-daughter time.

Then the letter came in a thin envelope. We regret to inform you, it said, and the thing I wanted was gone, closed, ripped away. I wasn’t good enough.

I waited for my father to say something—anything—but he locked himself in his bedroom and didn’t come out for two days. When he did, he wouldn’t look at me.

Two weeks later, the envelope came from Duquette. Not Harvard, but the next-best school on my list, number sixteen in the country. When I showed it to him, the light came back, and he broke his silence.

Good job, Jessica.

After that, it didn’t matter that I didn’t win a scholarship, that Duquette offered me no financial aid. There wasn’t a universe in which I would have made a different choice.

I couldn’t find the words to describe this to Coop, even if I wanted to. So instead I said, “You wouldn’t understand.”

He was quiet for a beat, then repeated in a low voice, “I wouldn’t understand…”

I looked out the window. Below us was the central thoroughfare, a promenade that ran the entire length of campus—Frankie liked to run it every morning before football practice. Beyond that, a rolling expanse of treetops, broken by the elegant spires of teaching halls and dormitories.

“Jess.”

When I turned, I found Coop leaning so close our knees almost touched. I inched back. My heartbeat notched higher. And I realized: It was just the two of us. In a private room.

“I understand everything about you. I know you’re obsessed with making Kappa the top sorority because the Chi Os rejected you. I know you’re obsessed with Mint and the Phi Delts because everyone else is, and it’s a status symbol. I know you sneak Adderall to study all night even though econ makes you want to kill yourself. And now I know you charge thousands of dollars to a credit card you can’t afford just to fit in.”

I jumped to my feet. “Stop it, Coop. Shut up.”

He got to his feet, too, taking a step toward me. When I pulled back, he grinned, a glint in his eyes.

“I understand,” he said slowly, drawing the words out, “that you’d do anything to win. You’re kind of a sociopath.”

I froze. “That is the single worst thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Slowly, his grin faded. But his eyes held mine, waiting.

What was happening to me? Where was the outpouring of anger, the indignation? Why did I feel not a blaze of rage but a sparking warmth, blooming somewhere deep, somewhere intimate and dangerous?

“I don’t understand”—my voice was rising, almost yelling—“why I’m not furious right now. Why don’t I want to hit you?”

“Because,” Coop said, “you know I’m right. And you know it means I see you.”

As soon as he said it, I knew it was true—not the sociopath part, but him seeing me. He always had. Ever since the first day.

Something wild unleashed inside me. Without pausing to think, I closed the distance between us and dragged Coop’s mouth to mine. I kissed him hard, desperate to pull him under with me, wherever I was going. His full lips parted instantly, his fingers pushing through my hair, gripping me tighter. I kissed him hungrily, and he kissed back like a starved man, fisting his hands in my shirt, lifting the hem to press his palms against my stomach, running them over my ribs, his touch rough, as if desperate for each next square inch.

Abruptly he broke away, chest heaving.

“Are you sure?” His voice was husky, taut with worry. Like I held something precious in my hands, something he’d waited for, and there was a chance I’d take it away.

“Yes,” I said, barely finishing the word before he was kissing me again, pushing me against the full-length window, my back flush against the cold glass; then the wall, his body a pressure I craved. He pressed his thumbs to the hollows of my cheekbones, fitting his hands against the seams of my face, and tilted my head back. He dragged his lips up my neck to my jaw to my mouth.

I groaned against his lips. I’d never messed up this hard on purpose. I’d never wanted anyone so badly in my life.

“You’re my best friend’s girlfriend.” Coop lowered his head to kiss behind my ear. Delicious heat twisted between my legs. “Mint. The golden boy.”

“Stop,” I said, tipping my head further, urging him higher.

“I’m not like him.”

I shivered, and he captured my mouth. His was warm and tasted faintly herbal. “I’m not an Eagle Scout. I’ll do things you hate.”

Coop. The boy who always said things that were too close to the truth, the one who made me uncomfortable, who looked at me too long, too closely. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m giving you an out.” Coop ran his hands down my body, until he reached the place between my legs. He cupped me there, and I arched into the wall.

“I’ve wanted you since the first day I saw you, walking to class in your pleated skirt. I’ve spent three years thinking about this. Three years, not allowed to touch you, or breathe a word.”

He unzipped my jeans and pushed his hand inside, stroking me through my panties, the heat of his hand too good, too much. I gasped.

“I’m telling you upfront. I need more. I need you over and over. So this is your out. Take it. Otherwise you’re mine, the way it should have been.”

He dropped to his knees on the wooden floor and slid my panties down. A rush of cool air, goose bumps, and then his mouth was on me, hot and stoking, so good it was damning.

It’s just my body, I thought. Just my body, not me; just a moment, not forever. He can have it. Coop plunged his tongue. I cried softly and rose on my tiptoes, tangling my fingers in his thick, dark hair.

I didn’t take the out.

The next day when I came back from class, I found ten thousand dollars stuffed into two envelopes, resting on my desk.