If she thought about it objectively, Abel might actually be better looking than Levi in some ways. Abel was a swimmer. He had broad shoulders and thick arms. And he had hair like Frankie Avalon. (According to Cath’s grandma.)

Levi was thin and weedy, and his hair—well, his hair—but everything about him made Cath feel loose and immoral.

He had this thing where he bit his bottom lip and raised an eyebrow when he was trying to decide whether to laugh at something.… Madness.

Then, if he decided to laugh, his shoulders would start shaking and his eyebrows would pull up in the middle—Levi’s eyebrows were pornographic. If Cath were making this decision just on eyebrows, she would have been “up to his room” a long time ago.

If she were being rational about this, there was a lot on the touching continuum between holding hands and eyebrow-driven sex.… But she wasn’t being rational. And Levi made Cath feel like her whole body was a slippery slope.

She sat at her desk. He sat on her bed and kicked her chair.

“Hey,” he said. “I was thinking that this weekend, we should go on a real date. We could go out to dinner, see a movie.…” He was smiling, so Cath smiled back. And then she stopped.

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You already have a date? Every night this weekend?”

“Sort of. I’m going home. I’ve been going home more this semester, to check on my dad.”

Levi’s smile dimmed, but he nodded, like he understood. “How’re you getting home?”

“This girl down the hall. Erin. She goes home every weekend to see her boyfriend—which is probably a good idea, because she’s boring and awful, and he’s bound to meet somebody better if she doesn’t keep an eye on him.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“On your white horse?”

“In my red truck.”

Cath rolled her eyes. “No. You’d have to make two round trips. It’d take a thousand dollars in gas.”

“I don’t care. I want to meet your dad. And I’ll get to hang out with you for a few hours in the truck—in a nonemergency situation.”

“It’s okay. I can ride with Erin. She’s not that bad.”

“You don’t want me to meet your dad?”

“I haven’t even thought about you meeting my dad.”

“You haven’t?” He sounded wounded. (Mildly wounded. Like, hangnail-wounded—but still.)

“Have you thought about introducing me to your parents?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I figured you’d go with me to my sister’s wedding.”

“When is it?”

“May.”

“We’ve only been dating for three and half weeks, right?”

“That’s six months in freshman time.”

“You’re not a freshman.”

“Cather…” Levi hooked his feet on her chair and pulled it closer to the bed. “I really like you.”

Cath took a deep breath. “I really like you, too.”

He grinned and raised a hand-drawn eyebrow. “Can I drive you to Omaha?”

Cath nodded.

“That does it,” Simon said, charging forward, climbing right over the long dinner table. Penelope grabbed the tail of his cape, and he nearly landed face-first on a bench. He recovered quickly—“Let go, Penny”—and ran hard at Basil, both fists raised and ready.

Basil didn’t move. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he whispered, just barely tipping his wand.

Simon’s fist slammed into a solid barrier just inches from the other boy’s unflinching jaw. He pulled his hand back, yelping, still stumbling against the spell.

This made Dev and Niall and all the rest of Basil’s cronies cackle like drunk hyenas. But Basil himself stayed still. When he spoke, it was so softly, only Simon could hear him. “Is that how you’re going to do it, Snow? Is that how you’re going to best your Humdrum?” He dropped the spell with a twitch of his wand, just as Simon regained his balance. “Pathetic,” Basil said, and walked away.

TWENTY-SIX

Professor Piper held out her arms when Cath walked in. “Cath, you’re back. I wish I could say that I knew you would be, but I wasn’t sure—I was hoping.”

Cath was back.

She’d come to tell Professor Piper that she’d made up her mind. Again. She wasn’t going to write this story. She had enough to write right now and enough to worry about. This project was leftover crappiness from first semester. Just thinking about it made Cath’s mouth taste like failure (like plagiarism and stupid Nick stealing her best lines); Cath wanted to put it behind her.

But once she was standing in Professor Piper’s office, and Professor Piper was Blue Fairy–smiling at her, Cath couldn’t say it out loud.

This is so obviously about me needing a mother figure, she thought, disgusted with herself. I wonder if I’m going to get swoony around middle-aged women until I am one.

“It was really kind of you to offer me a second chance,” Cath said, following the professor’s gesture to sit down. This is when she was supposed to say, But I’m going to have to say no.

Instead she said, “I guess I’d be an idiot not to take it.”

Professor Piper beamed at her. She leaned forward with an elbow on the desktop, resting her cheek against her fist like she was posing for a senior picture. “So,” she said, “do you have an idea in mind for your story?”

“No.” Cath squeezed her fists shut and rubbed them into her thighs. “Every time I’ve tried to come up with something, I just feel … empty.”

Professor Piper nodded. “You said something last time that I’ve been thinking about—you said that you didn’t want to build your own world.”

Cath looked up. “Yes. Exactly. I don’t have brave new worlds inside of me begging to get out. I don’t want to start from nothing like that.”

“But Cath—most writers don’t. Most of us aren’t Gemma T. Leslie.” She waved a hand around the office. “We write about the worlds we already know. I’ve written four books, and they all take place within a hundred and twenty miles of my hometown. Most of them are about things that happened in my real life.”

“But you write historical novels—”

The professor nodded. “I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.”

“So everything in your books is true?”

The professor tilted her head and hummed. “Mmmm … yes. And no. Everything starts with a little truth, then I spin my webs around it—sometimes I spin completely away from it. But the point is, I don’t start with nothing.”

“I’ve never written anything that isn’t magical,” Cath said.

“You still can, if that’s what you want. But you don’t have to start at the molecular level, with some sort of Big Bang in your head.”

Cath pressed her nails into her palms.

“Maybe for this story,” Professor Piper said delicately, “you could start with something real. With one day from your life. Something that confused or intrigued you, something you want to explore. Start there and see what happens. You can keep it true, or you can let it turn into something else—you can add magic—but give yourself a starting point.”

Cath nodded, more because she was ready to leave than because she’d processed everything the professor was saying.

“I want to meet again,” Professor Piper said. “In a few weeks. Let’s get back together and talk about where you are.”

Cath agreed and hurried toward the door, hoping she wouldn’t seem rude. A few weeks. Sure. Like a few weeks will fix the hole in my head. She pushed her way through a mob of gaudy English majors, then escaped out into the snow.

* * *

Levi wouldn’t put her laundry hamper down.

“I can carry it,” Cath said. Her head was still in Professor Piper’s office, and she wasn’t in the mood for … well, for Levi. For the constant good-natured game of him. If Levi were a dog, he’d be a golden retriever. If he were a game, he’d be Ping-Pong, incessant and bouncing and light. Cath didn’t feel like playing.

“I’ve got this,” he said. “You get the door.”

“No, seriously,” she said. “I can carry it.”

Levi was all smiles and fond glances. “Sweetheart, get the door. I’ve got this.”

Cath pressed her fingertips into her temples. “Did you just call me ‘sweetheart’?”

He grinned. “It just came out. It felt good.”

“Sweetheart?”

“Would you prefer ‘honey’? That reminds me of my mom.… What about ‘baby’? No. ‘Loveboat’? ‘Kitten’? ‘Rubber duck’?” He paused. “You know what? I’m sticking with ‘sweetheart.’”

“I don’t even know where to start,” Cath said.

“Start with the door.”

“Levi. I can carry my own gross, dirty laundry.”

“Cath. I’m not going to let you.”

“There’s no letting. It’s my laundry.”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

“I don’t need you to carry things for me. I have two functioning arms.”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “What kind of creep would I be if I let my girl carry something heavy while I walked along, swinging my arms?”

Your girl? “The kind that respects my wishes,” she said. “And my strength, and my … arms.”

Levi grinned some more. Because he wasn’t taking her seriously. “I have a lot of respect for your arms. I like how they’re attached to the rest of you.”

“You’re making me feel fragile and limp. Give me the laundry.” She reached for it.

He stepped back. “Cather. I know you’re capable of carrying this. But I’m not capable of letting you. I literally couldn’t walk next to you empty-handed. It’s nothing personal; I’d do this for anyone with two X chromosomes.”

“Even worse.”

“Why? Why is that worse? That I’m respectful to women.”

“It’s not respectful, it’s undermining. Respect our strength.”

“I do.” His hair fell in his eyes, and he tried to blow it away. “Being chivalrous is respectful. Women have been oppressed and persecuted since the beginning of time. If I can make their lives easier with my superior upper-body strength, I’m going to. At every opportunity.”

“Superior.”

“Yes. Superior. Do you want to arm wrestle?”

“I don’t need superior upper-body strength to carry my own dirty laundry.” She put her fingers on the handles, trying to push his aside.

“You’re deliberately missing the point,” he said.

“No, that’s you.”

“Your face is flushed, did you know that?”

“Well,” she said. “I’m frustrated.”

“Don’t make me angry-kiss you.”

“Give me the laundry.”

“Tempers rising, faces flushed … This is how it happens.”

That made Cath laugh. And that was irritating, too. She used most of her inferior upper-body strength to shove the hamper into his chest.

Levi pushed it back gently, but didn’t let go. “Let’s fight about this the next time I try to do something nice for you, okay?”

She looked up at his eyes. The way he looked back at her made her feel wide open, like every thought must be closed-captioned on her face. She let go of the hamper and picked up her laptop bag, opening the door.

“Finally,” he said. “My triceps are killing me.”

* * *

This was the coldest, snowiest winter Cath could remember. It was the middle of March already, technically spring, but it still felt like January. Cath put on her snow boots every morning without thinking about it.

She’d had gotten so used to the snow, to being a pedestrian in the snow, that she hadn’t even thought to check the weather today—she hadn’t thought about road conditions and visibility or the fact that maybe this wasn’t the best afternoon for Levi to drive her home.

She was thinking about it now.

It felt like they were the only car on the interstate. They couldn’t see the sun; they couldn’t see the road. Every ten minutes or so, red taillights would emerge out of the static ahead of them, and Levi would ease onto the brakes.

He’d stopped talking almost an hour ago. His mouth was straight, and he was squinting at the windshield like he needed glasses.

“We should go back,” Cath whispered.

“Yeah…,” he said, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand, then clenching a fist around the gearshift. “But I think it might be easier now to keep going. It’s worse behind us. I thought we’d beat it to Omaha.”

There was a metallic ringing as a car passed them on the left.

“What’s that noise?” she asked.

“Tire chains.” Levi didn’t sound scared. But he was being so awfully quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about the weather.”

“My fault,” he said, sparing a second to smile at her. “I didn’t want to let you down. Think I’ll feel worse if I actually kill you.…”

“That would not be chivalrous.”

Levi smiled again. She reached out to the gearshift and touched his hand, running her fingers along his, then pulling them away.

They were quiet again for a few minutes—maybe not that long. It was hard to judge time with everything so tense and gray.