Page 7
“Keller?” Nicole quirks her head, and then her eyes stretch wide. “Oh wait . . . him? God, no! Why the hell would you think I meant him?”
I shrug, biting my tongue so I don’t admit I think he’s kind of sexy in an unconventional way. Rather, he would be if he ditched the weird patch of fur sprouting between his lower lip and chin . . . and if he didn’t style his jet-black hair into a green-streaked faux-hawk.
Her nose wrinkles. “Didn’t he drop out to join a Sex Pistols cover band?”
I shake my head, but I can’t deny, he does sort of look like a punk rock icon. The guy wears more black eyeliner than my mom. And he must own every bit of eighties punk rock paraphernalia in a fifty-mile radius. I can’t imagine what he’d look like if he weren’t channeling Sid Vicious.
“Maybe he really likes the Sex Pistols,” I offer but don’t dare tell her I hear the Sex Pistols play inside my head every time he walks by.
“Whatever.” Nicole curls her upper lip into a sneer worthy of vintage Billy Idol. “The guy’s a freak. Have you seen all his piercings? And the green hair dye is bad enough—that’s just weird on a guy—but how much glue is he putting in there to achieve the height on that ridiculous fishtail? And what’s with the soul patch? It looks like a damn vagina on his face. Hello? The nineties called. They want their facial hair back.”
Nicole stares at me with raised eyebrows, so I nod, even though I don’t entirely agree. The landing strip he passes off as a beard isn’t doing him any favors. And while I don’t mind the green streaks, I’m not a fan of the faux-hawk fishtail. Still, none of that makes him a freak. Just a little intimidating.
“Someone needs to tell him the whole punk thing is so last century. You can do way better than him.” With one last roll of her eyes, Nicole turns the phone around, showing me the shaggy blond on the screen. “Now this is more like it.”
“Jordan Bates?” My top lip curls until it almost touches my nose.
She groans. “Another no?”
“Uh . . .” I shake my head vigorously. “The California surfer thing doesn’t do it for me.”
Her penetrating gaze calls me a liar. “Since when?”
I press my lips together and meet her stare as I project the image of the other blond invading my thoughts.
“Oh.” Her face falls. “Lucas.”
Bingo.
Despite coming from somewhere in western Illinois—about as far from the ocean as one can get—Lucas acts the part of a California surfer. His stellar looks and cocky attitude landed him at the top of the Kappa popularity pyramid, and like a lot of naive freshmen, I believed the act and fell hard and fast. We were a couple for almost a year—from the winter formal freshman year until he eviscerated my heart in a blender this past Halloween, when I found him with his pirate pants literally around his ankles, and Selina Davis’s shiny black cat tail in the air as she sucked him off in the Kappa common room. The same room where he begged me to have sex more times than I can count.
“Not going there again.” I shudder. Looking back, it’s clear I dodged a bullet with him.
“Fine.” Nicole mumbles under her breath and scratches another name from the list. “No blonds. What about gingers?”
My nose scrunches. “Are we talking Prince Harry or Ron Weasley?”
She studies me as if solving a complicated math equation. “You were always more of a Harry Potter kind of girl.”
“Actually, I was more of a Cedric Diggory kind of girl.”
“Weren’t we all?” Nicole sighs. “Let’s stick with tall, dark, and handsome then, shall we? That should be . . . next to impossible if you want the truth. No wonder you’re still a virgin. You’ve raised the bar awfully high for a bunch of Springer University frat boys.”
I shrug, refusing to debate how high the bar should be. I’m seeking quality over quantity. According to the old Betty Crocker version of my mother, sex is a big deal. If there’s ever a time to be picky, this would be it.
“Okay, let’s look at this logically.” Nicole is all business as she scrolls through the directory. “There are easily over ten thousand undergrads at Springer. I’ll take a stab in the dark and say just under half of those are men—maybe forty percent. And statistically speaking, ninety percent of those are straight men. Another twenty to thirty percent are already taken. Then if we eliminate the roughly ten percent, give or take, who just happen to be blond, that leaves you just over two thousand potential partners.”
“Jesus.”
She laughs. “Oh, I haven’t even taken appearance, hygiene, or availability into consideration yet.”
This should be interesting.
Nicole taps her pen against the page, leaving little dots of ink behind. “Let’s start with the ones we actually know first.”
She’s a woman on a mission as she divides her attention between staring at the screen and scribbling in her notebook. For every new name she adds, she scratches through one, until half the list is filled with blue scribbles. My coffee’s gone cold by the time she lays down her pen and tucks her hair behind her ears.
“It’s a good thing this exercise is hypothetical, because you burned through half the prospects before we even started.” She rips the sheet from the notebook and slides it in front of me.
