“First off,” she said, holding up a finger.
“Jesus, here we go.”
“You waited twenty-four hours, so you weren’t that concerned.Two.” She stabbed her fingers toward his face when he started to retort. “How did you know which building I’d be in? And three, phones exist, you know.”
His mouth dropped open and his eyes widened in feigned shock. Slowly, he pulled his phone out of his back pocket, and turned it over, examining it as though it was an ancient artifact. “Wait. Do you mean this thing is a telephone? I can call people with it?” He put it up to his ear, still doing that slack-jawed face, and Cass bit her lip hard against a losing battle to hold back a smile.
“I hate you,” she said on a giggle. “You’re a horrible person.”
He grinned, quick and pleased, then pocketed his phone, folded his arms, and grew serious, head kicked back at an assessing angle. “So what happened?” He shot a glance toward Jamie, who was sipping at the Coke and watching them. “The basket case got raped and you took her to Dixon?”
A gasp pulled Cass’s attention; it wasn’t Jamie, but another girl, a stranger feeding coins into the candy machine.
“Oh my God, you can’t say that sort of thing out loud.” She swatted his arm. “Jesus…okay, come on, we can’t do this out in the open.”
They went back to her dorm, Jamie trailing with the hesitance of someone walking behind a wild tiger, and when they arrived, she grabbed a stack of books off the desk and slipped back into the hall with a hasty excuse about studying in the common room.
“She seems like a barrel of laughs,” Shep quipped, thumb hooked over his shoulder toward the door.
Cass rolled her eyes as she shut the door. “She’s normal, okay? And she’s been through a rough time.” She went to plop down on the edge of her bed. “Why didn’t you call if you wanted to know the story?”
He ignored her for the moment, and instead prowled around the small dorm room, peering at the artwork on the wall, at the clutter on the desk. He picked up a foam stress ball printed with tiny blue and red cats and squished it down into nothing in his palm. He had big hands, strong, square-knuckled. She could see the flex of tendons in his wrist where his sleeve had ridden up.
“Shep.”
He put the ball down, and brushed aside a piece of clean paper to get a better look at what lay beneath, which, she remembered with a wave of self-consciousness, was a piece for her Comics class.
“Who the fuck is this?” Shep demanded, and she would have been gratified by the unguarded jealousy in his voice if her pulse hadn’t kicked up with nerves.
She popped off the bed and went to his side.
He glanced over at her, lips slowly spreading in a smile, gaze hectic in a way she couldn’t decipher. He looked startled, even a little alarmed, and she recalled the way he’d sounded yesterday on the phone, his voice touched with a fear she didn’t understand.
“Is thisme?”
“No.” She felt her face heat, and stared resolutely down at her painting, clipped to the board she was using to work on it, protective clear cover folded over it. “That’s Frank Castle.”
His attention snapped from her face, to the paper, and back, something she was keenly aware of in her periphery but which she refused to meet head-on. “My last name’sShepherd,” he said, like she was slow.
“You—” Her face was hot. She backhanded him in the chest (damn, all that gym time was paying off) and said, “It’s FrankCastle. The Punisher.” When she dared a look, his smirky smile was fading, his brows drawing together. “The comic book character? Marvel? Jamie’s right: youareold.”
He frowned, defensive now, and that was safer, that allowed her cheeks to cool and her pulse to slow. “I know who the Punisher is.”
“Then why did you think he was you?”
He shrugged, and nodded back down at the page. “You drew him to look like me.”
“Oh, please. Do you have a vest with a skull on it? Do you walk around dripping guns? He looks nothing like you.”
But the thing was…hedidlook like Shep. A little. In the face. And Cass hadn’t even done it consciously.
The assignment was to reconceptualize an existing comic character, any comic character, from any imprint, and create five original pages featuring characters of her own making alongside the borrowed character. They were still early in the semester, and the final, her prof had already said, would be to complete a wholly originally comic, stem to stern. She’d surprised herself by swerving into the Marvel lane; she’d been a dedicated manga fan for years now. But when her prof went around the room and asked them to name their chosen character, she’d said, “Frank Castle,” straight off.
A sudden, unshakeable bolt of inspiration, one she’d attributed to her family, her gun-dripping, punishing brothers.
But maybe she’d had adifferentFrank on the brain.
God.
