his practices with the team, and his
study sessions to catch up with his classes, Devon and I spent hours—almost any
time we were between classes—on the basketball court together. Devon ran drills and taught me everything he knew about
playing. Even though I was a very big basketball fan, I had never tried to play
the game myself. Devon used the excuse of teaching me how to throw a foolproof
three-point shot to improve his own techniques, and we chased each other back
and forth across the court, keeping the basketball away from each other. Devon
was just as good as he had ever been, and I was so happy that he was teaching
me; I couldn’t imagine learning how to play from anyone else.
The team joked that the next year, I’d be on the
girl’s team, Devon was doing such a good job teaching
me. “I’ll leave the sports stuff to him,” I told them, grinning at Devon. “I
mean, if I’m not careful he’ll steal my superiority in academics; we should
probably just stick with what we’re
already good at.”
“You are in no danger of ever not being smarter than
me,” Devon told me in front of his friends, kissing me quickly on the lips.
“But if you do get into sports, I’m doomed.”
I was surprised and not surprised to realize that even
though we spent most of our time together, Devon and I became closer and closer
every day. I had been afraid—in spite of the fact that we’d done so well while
we were cramming for Devon’s ACT retake—that once the drama was out of our
lives, there would be very little keeping us together. There was still the
drama of Devon needing to get ready for the game, of course, but other than
that everything had relaxed so much I almost couldn’t believe it. There was
nothing hanging over Devon’s head that he’d never dealt with before, and
although my friends occasionally whined and bitched about how little time I
spent with them, I had separated from Kelly for good—and I didn’t even miss
her.
I started to make deeper friendships with Devon’s frat
brothers, learning their stories, getting to know their girlfriends—at least
the girlfriends of those brothers that had them. I had become completely and
totally one of the accepted additions to the household at the Phi Kappa frat;
and while I was not someone who liked to party all the time, the day-to-day
life was not as wild as I would have thought weeks before. I even managed to
make friends with some of the girlfriends of Devon’s teammates—something I
would have given long odds against if I had thought about it.
Envy raged as it became more and more obvious that Devon
and I was a settled, serious couple. I heard that Kelly was enraged at the fact
that Devon hadn’t just dropped me after he’d passed the ACT; I hadn’t been
there to see her meltdown, but it was apparently epic even by campus standards.
It seemed like people’s opinion of Devon was slowly shifting. Girls who had
considered him absolutely the scum of the Earth had now started to say that if
only he wasn’t in a relationship already, he’d be a great catch. And of course
with that, I had to deal with basketball bunnies throwing themselves at Devon
more than ever. But I didn’t care; I knew that no matter what a girl did to try
and draw his eye, Devon was interested in me and serious about his feelings for me. He wasn’t going to wander off and
abandon me just because some cute girl flirted with him.
I put in my paperwork to change roommates, explaining
to the Resident Advisor that things just weren’t working out between Kelly and
me. I didn’t want to get into specifics, but she told me she had heard
everything about what was going on between us; it was an open secret on campus
that Devon had been the cause of my falling out with Kelly. When the semester ended, I would be able to move my things into a
new dorm, with someone I barely knew. I didn’t mind it too much; I knew that I
would barely ever be in my dorm anyway.
The more Devon and I
Olivia Dade
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Lucy Kelly
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