Fangirl

could pull in at the waist.
    “You look the same,” Cath said. “You look like me, and look what I’m eating.” Cath was eating beef fajitas with sour cream and three kinds of cheese.
    “Yeah, but you’re not drinking.”
    “Is that part of the Skinny Bitch diet?”
    “We’re skinny bitches on weekdays,” Courtney said, “and drunk bitches on the weekend.”
    Cath tried to catch Wren’s eye. “I don’t think I’d want to aspire to be any kind of bitch.”
    “Too late,” Wren said blandly, then changed the subject. “Did you hang out with Nick last night?”
    “Yeah,” Cath said, then smiled. She tried to turn it into a smirk, but that just made her nose twitch like a rabbit’s.
    “Oh! Cath!” Courtney said. “We were thinking we could just happen to come to the library some night, so we can see him. Tuesdays and Thursdays, right?”
    “No. No way. No, no, no.” Cath looked at Wren. “No, okay? Say okay. ”
    “O kay .” Wren stabbed her fork full of onions. “What’s the big deal?”
    “It’s not a big deal,” Cath said. “But if you came, it would seem like a big deal. You would destroy my ‘Hey, whatever, you want to hang out? That’s cool’ strategy.”
    “You have a strategy?” Wren asked. “Does it involve kissing him?”
    Wren wouldn’t leave the kissing thing alone. Ever since Abel had dumped Cath, Wren was on her about chasing her passions and letting loose the beast within.
    “What about him ?” she’d say, finding an attractive guy to point out while they were standing in the lunch line. “Do you want to kiss him?”
    “I don’t want to kiss a stranger,” Cath would answer. “I’m not interested in lips out of context.”
    It was only partly true.
    Ever since Abel had broken up with her … Ever since Nick had started sitting next to her … Cath kept noticing things.
    Boys.
    Guys.
    Everywhere.
    Seriously, everywhere. In her classes. In the Union. In the dormitory, on the floors above and below her. And she’d swear they didn’t look anything like the boys in high school. How can that one year make such a difference? Cath found herself watching their necks and their hands. She noticed the heaviness in their jaws, the way their chests buttressed out from their shoulders, their hair.…
    Nick’s eyebrows trailed into his hairline, and his sideburns feinted onto his cheeks. When she sat behind him in class, she could see the muscles in his left shoulder sliding under his shirt.
    Even Levi was a distraction. A near-constant distraction. With his long, tan neck. And his throat bobbing and cording when he laughed.
    Cath felt different. Tuned in. Boy—even though none of these guys seemed like boys —crazy. And for once, Wren was the last person she wanted to talk to about it. Everyone was the last person Cath wanted to talk to about it.
    “My strategy,” she said to Wren now, “is to make sure he doesn’t meet my prettier, skinnier twin.”
    “I don’t think it would matter,” Wren said. Cath noticed she wasn’t arguing the “prettier, skinnier” point. “It sounds like he’s into your brain. I don’t have your brain.”
    She didn’t. And Cath didn’t understand that at all. They had the same DNA. The same nature, the same nurture. All the differences between them didn’t make sense.
    “Come home with me this weekend,” Cath said abruptly. She’d found a ride back to Omaha that night. Wren had already said she didn’t want to go.
    “You know Dad misses us,” Cath said. “Come on.”
    Wren looked down at her tray. “I told you. I’ve got to study.”
    “There’s a home game this weekend,” Courtney said. “We don’t have to be sober until Monday at eleven.”
    “Have you even called Dad?” Cath asked.
    “We’ve been e-mailing,” Wren said. “He seems fine.”
    “He misses us.”
    “He’s supposed to miss us—he’s our father.”
    “Yeah,” Cath said softly, “but he’s different.”
    Wren’s face lifted, and she glared at Cath, shaking her head just slightly.
    Cath pushed away from the table. “I better go. I need to run back to my room before class.”
    *   *   *
    When Professor Piper asked for their unreliable-narrator papers that afternoon, Nick grabbed Cath’s out of her hand. She grabbed it back. He raised an eyebrow.
    Cath tilted her chin and smiled at him. It was only later that she realized she was giving him one of Wren’s smiles. One of her evangelical smiles.
    Nick pushed his tongue into his