I settle back beside him and drop my head on his shoulder. “I need to go talk to Liv,” I sigh. “But?—”
“But?” He presses his warm cheek against my hair.
“Can I just stay here with you?”
“As long as you want.”
How about forever? “Maybe if we hide, they’ll lock us in here, likeFrom The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”
“From the what?”
I lift my chin to find him smiling downat me. “From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It’s a book, a kid’s book. You never read it?”
“I don’t think so. What happens in it?”
“The main character and her little brother run away from home and stow away in the Met.”
“The art museum?”
“Yep. And they solve some sort of mystery, but I don’t remember much about it. I just remember reading it as a kid and thinking that living in a museum would be the coolest thing ever.”
Leo lets out a soft laugh. “Probably not a dream most kids have.”
No, probably not. Living on a beach, or in a football stadium or a toy store maybe, but not an art museum. “You’d like it though, wouldn’t you? Living in a museum?”
He smooths the hair on the top of my head and rests his cheek back down upon it. “I’d love it.”
I give myself thirty seconds to daydream. Leo and me, hiding away for, let’s say, a week, here in this huge, beautiful, old library. We could dine from the vending machines in the basement cafe, sleep on the cushioned benches in one of the reading rooms, and spend all day sitting on the floor among the stacks, just like we are now, simply reading.
I like this fantasy. A little too much.
With a stretch and a sigh, I force myself back to reality. “Okay. I’m going now.” Leo lends me a shoulder as I struggle in my pencil skirt to get gracefully to my feet. “Time to pay the piper.”
He smiles up at me. “Good luck.”
“Just be honest, right?”
“Just be honest, rebel violet.”
For a spilt second, I have to grip the shelf beside me as warmth runs down from the top of my head and settles low in my belly.
I turn to go, but Leo stops me with a “hold on.” He hands me his phone, opened to a browser. “Will you find me that kids’ book?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I get backto the dorm to find Liv waiting up for me, eyes swollen and face splotchy. It had to be hard for her to sit here in this lonely room while Rush carried on without her. Because she’s being so brave for me, I tell her I went to GKA and DRB. A lie, I know, but it seems ungrateful of me to not have gone. And I’m honest about what’s most important: that I’ve decided to drop out of Rush.
She’s shocked. “Why?”
I let out a breath and sink to my bed. “It’s just...neither of them are a great fit. None of them are.”
“You’d be a perfect GKA.”
I shake my head. I don’t want to be a perfect GKA, or even a perfect DRB. I want to be a perfect Betts, whoever she is today or next week or next year. “For some reason, being in a sorority makes me feel boxed in. I mean, what if I want to do something that’s really un-GKA-like?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, like…like…”Skipping parties to practice witchcraft? Spending weekends in the library? Taking eighteen credit hours a semester so I can minor in women’s studies?But I can’t bring myself to say thosewords out loud. Instead, I blurt out the most outlandish things I can think of, just to make my point, “Like going to a Buddhist retreat or…or getting a purple mohawk!”
