Page 20 of Break You

Xavier: I never went to bed, so still being an asshole from last night. What’s your excuse?

Me: For being an asshole? I’m not. For being awake? I was involuntarily woken up before my alarm and can’t get back to sleep. Seems like all the guys I know are assholes.

Xavier: I can only speak for myself, not whomever you have in your bed.

Me: Okay.

I wasn’t about to correct his mistake, or any mistaken assumptions he made about me for that matter. I was happy for him to labor under every misconception.

Me: So, you’ll answer the questions, record your answers?

Xavier: Nope.

Me: FFS. Why not? You said yourself the idea had legs.

Xavier: I said it was passable. Not even close to being the same thing.

He was full of shit, and I’d like to see him come up with a better way that we could complete the assignment and only spend minimal, if any, time together. My idea was actually pretty strong. I’d pulled together a bunch of questions. All we had to do was answer them as though we were being interviewed, and record the answers. We could each get a friend or even pay somebody to follow us around for a few days, videoing crucial points in our lives for a while, then all we’d have to do was knit the images and voice together—us telling our stories in our own words—and we were done.

Me: Semantics. But we need to pass this course, so passable is fine. No, passable is good. A damned sight better than failable.

Xavier: “We” don’t need to pass. You need to pass to keep your scholarship. I don’t need to do shit. Pass. Fail. Drop out. Stay. It really makes no difference.

I hated to admit it, but he was absolutely right—about my need to stay, anyway, even if he had the reason twisted. He was so ridiculously stinking rich that it really didn’t matter what he did. If he’d dropped out of high school and not even bothered to get his GED, he could still have walked into any boardroom in the world, thrown down a stack of cash and had the whole room take notice. Nobody was going to check his qualifications before backing him in a business venture, or extending a line of credit—not that he’d ever need it. The fact was, even if he was flunking out of college, he could just offer to build another wing or pour money into a new scholarship fund, and he’d be good to go.

For me it was the opposite. With my family background and personal history, people made up their mind about me before I even walked into the room, and then, when I did, it just made matters worse. A brown girl from so far over the wrong side of the tracks the track had ended and the train derailed. So far that it was no longer a track, but a train boneyard.

Nobody would automatically take what I had to say at face value. Nobody would assume I was talented or intelligent. What Xavier could do with money I would have to do with hard work, grit, determination and a transcript from one of the best schools in the country, and therefore the world. Even then, it would still be a struggle.

Me: Yeah, well we ain’t all entitled blond princes. The rest of us have goals, and mine are bigger than most, so excuse me while I don’t let your inflated ego stand in the way of me achieving them.

Xavier: I don’t put my name to anything passable. IF I choose to do something, it’s to nail it to the wall. Or I don’t fucking bother. There is no in-between. Reylton is going to see right through your flaky-ass plan and flunk us anyway. We do this properly, or I’m out. Your choice, Angry Girl.

I actually hated him. He was baiting me, and just like the bullies I’d had to deal with at school for years, I shouldn’t let him get to me, but he seemed to know exactly how to push my buttons like nobody else.

Xavier

As I watched the little green light fade, telling me that Rocky was no longer on the chat, the desire to kill whomever she had spent the night with was overwhelmingly real. I needed to get a grip of myself. I poured myself another drink, ignoring the fact that it wasn’t even sunrise. Technically I was still “out” from the night before, so it wasn’t early morning drinking, it was ultra-late-night drinking. The reasoning was flimsy, but I had to do what I had to do to get through the day.

I flicked to my email account, scanning the items in the inbox. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep with Rocky on my mind. Again. But, I was too tired to do anything useful like work on assignments. Plus, I really didn’t want to. Cleaning out my inbox was enough to keep my synapses firing, but didn’t require any fully cogent thinking, especially as the majority of it was crap—literally junk mail that had slipped past the spam filter, or just bullshit that I could live without even opening, let alone reading. The amount of crapola I received seemed to have gone up exponentially since I started college. It was staggering.

One message caught my eye, jumping out in the sea of bullshit.

From: Michael Stoppard

To: Xavier Cross

Subject: Update

Mr. Cross,

Please message me at your earliest convenience.

Regards,

Mike

This could only mean one thing. He had news for me. I couldn’t believe my hands were shaking a little as I tapped out a text to him. Between that and my reaction to Rocky, I was beginning to wonder if I’d turned into an actual pussy.

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