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Things are mostly the same on the car ride to Queens.
Their family sends them off, everyone a little concerned about whether the two of them could manage the drive without wanting to kill the other. Casey seems surprisingly unemotional about the whole thing, smiling excitedly and hugging everyone, hopping eagerly into the passenger seat and waving until their house is out of view.
It’s only then that she starts getting a little weepy. Derek groans, of course, and she tells him to shut up, but quickly rubs away the tears because she knows that he hates them. He doesn’t give her too much crap, except that old habits die-hard and he thinks she’s being stupid.
“You’re being stupid,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“We’re leaving home!” she shrieks, and he winces. He won’t miss this. He definitely won’t miss her.
“We’re gonna be by ourselves, away from our family, alone!”
“We’re going to college. We’re going to be constantly surrounded by other students. We are literally never going to be alone.”
She rolls her eyes at him, sniffing sadly. But she looks more annoyed than sad anymore, so it got her to stop worrying about it, which was kind of his plan all along, so he considers it a win.
And its just like always between them. They don’t really talk on the drive, except for when they do, and its usually so they can argue.
They argue about where to stop for gas, and Casey tries to convince him that she forgot something and they have to turn around, and then when he won’t she sulks for about five minutes before finding something else to complain about. Same old, same old.
“I’m freezing, Derek, can we turn the air down?”
“I’m hot, and I’m driving, so no.”
“Derek,” she says, but she fishes her coat out of her bag and puts it on. He smirks.
After a while there isn’t anything else to do but talk, so they talk about school.
“I can’t believe we have to wait a whole week before classes even start. I want to meet my professors.”
“I can’t believe we have a whole week before classes. I’m gonna blow all my good points before I crack open a single book.”
She eyes him skeptically.
“What are good points?”
“You know,” he explains, “When you do something nice or good, you get good points to put in the bank and save for when you need to use them to do fun stuff. I’ve been saving up good points for college all summer.”
“I think you’re just talking about karma,” she tells him.
“No,” he says. “Karma comes back to you, right? Good points are just there to keep track of, so you don’t get too wild.”
“So you just use good points to justify making bad decisions?”
He groans.
“As usual, you ruin everything, Case. Even good points. You know, you should think about using some of yours up. You’ve been such a stick-in-the-mud you probably have good points to last a lifetime.”
She slaps his arm and he laughs, glancing over at her. She staring out of the window and biting her lip like she’s deep in thought. It bugs him, but he doesn’t know why, and he keeps driving and forgets about it a moment later.
“I can’t wait to see my room. I’ve already been emailing with my roommate, and she seems really cool. Her name is Katie. She’s a liberal arts major.”
“Katie, huh? I’ll have to remember that.”
“Why?”
“So I can try and date your roommate, to annoy you.”
“Katie is way too cool for you, and anyway, I already know what I’m going to tell all of my friends to keep them away from you.”
“Pray tell.”
“He may seem cute, girls, but I have done his laundry and there is nothing cute about a boy with bad hygiene!”
He can’t even make fun of her for how stupid the insult is because he’s too distracted by the first part. She’s smirking at him from the passenger’s seat like she doesn’t even realize what she said.
“You think I’m cute?” he grins, stretching out the word cute mockingly.
To his surprise her eyes get really big and a blush creeps up her neck and into her cheeks. She doesn’t have a comeback, and Derek feels his stomach do a flip. They’re passing a wide field of cows and there’s a big blue barn in the distance. He’ll think of this exact spot later as the place where everything shifted.
He clears his throat and stares determinedly out of the window.
“Well, I was just planning on telling all my guy friends that you have an STD.”
She says “Derek” like she always does, but it’s different, somehow. They’d passed a point of no return.
It was so easy when they were living at home, with their parents and siblings always around, a constant reminder. Derek could almost forget about it. Sometimes he slipped up—(“step brother”)—but usually he just saw her as Spacey Casey, and it worked okay, the thing that they had.
But home feels very far away, and when he glances at her sitting next to him he can barely recognize the girl he sees.
She has to feel it too.
“It’s going to be… different at college, isn’t it?”
“Well yeah,” he says. “Its supposed to. We’re growing up and… stuff.”
“Yeah.”
He isn’t sure what he can say to break the tension. God, it’s always the tension with her. They can’t just be simple, or easy. Or siblings. There’s always got to be tension.
It’s there the rest of the car ride, in every terse conversation they have. Maybe on the surface it’s the same, but underneath they’re already at college and it’s already different and he’s got no idea what to do about it.
They arrive at school, and they go to her dorm first and he helps her with her stuff, a little, and he tells her she brought too many books and he’s not gonna carry all of them up all those stairs, because she’s on the third floor, but then he carries them anyway.
And then its time for him to head to his dorm, and she offers to help him carry his stuff, too, and it’s already different. He shrugs with his hands in his pockets.
“Nah, it’s fine. I don’t have as much as you.”
And then they’re quiet, but they’re staring at each other, and he almost wants to say it. God, they haven’t been away from home for 24 hours and he already wants to break all the rules.
But then she holds her hand out to him, looking determined.
“Well,” she says, “this is it.” And he can’t bring himself to do it so he just takes her hand in his and shakes.
“See you around, I guess?” she says, still holding onto his hand. “Not that I really want to, obviously.”
The comment lacks it’s usually venom and he knows why, and her hand is soft and warm in his. He pulls away first, shoving his fists back into his pocket so she can’t see the way they’re clenched. But he can’t stop himself.
“Listen,” he says, trying to think of something a brother would say. He clears his throat.
“If you get in any trouble… you can call me.”
She blinks at him, face unreadable, and then smiles cautiously, like shes expecting a joke still to come. But she replies in the same way.
“If you need any help, I guess you know where to find me.”
And he gets back into the car and drives off. He can see in the rearview mirror that she watches him until hes out of sight.
For all his talk about blowing his good points he stays pretty tame the first few days. His roommate had moved in earlier that day and already set up their room. The guy had some kind of inheritance, so he brought a huge TV and every video game Derek could dream of. They spend two days zoned out on games, ordering pizza for every meal, and Derek tries pot for the first time, but it’s pretty chill.
He doesn’t hear from her, and he tries not to think about her, but fails. He keeps picturing her wandering around campus with the map they’d gotten or holed up in the library for no reason except that she’s a nerd.
On the third day he has a hockey meet-up with other incoming freshman, so he finally goes out and experiences some of college. He meets a few cool people, and they go to a party afterwards, and its different from what he imagined it would be, because it just feels normal. He doesn’t feel any older or more free or cool. The party is fun and the girls are cute, but he goes back to his dorm sort of early and eats cold pizza and plays more games. He’ll have plenty of time once school really starts to let loose, he tells himself.
On the fourth night, at around midnight, he gets a call from her.
He picks up on the second ring, but it’s not her on the other end. It’s some other girl who he doesn’t know, and she sounds kind of drunk, but like she’s trying to be serious, and he gets a little nervous.
“Are you Derek?”
“Yeah? Where’s Casey?”
“This is her roommate… She said really specifically not to call you, so we thought you were the best one to call. I think you should come get her.”
He’s jumping to his feet and grabbing his hoodie before he even asks where to go. He doesn’t even have time to explain it to his roommate.
The girl with Casey’s phone tells him that they’re at some party about five minutes from campus, and he jogs and gets there in three. He doesn’t register anything about the house or the people when he goes inside and looks around for her. There’s music blasting and lights flashing, and people are crushing into him. He told her to call if she needed help, but he hadn’t actually thought she would. How could she have gotten into trouble so quickly? How could Casey get into any trouble at all?
“Damn,” a voice yells close to his ear. He’s standing next to a couple of douchey-looking frat guys with their hats on backwards and theyre staring into the other room.
“Look at the fresh meat this year!”
His stomach sinks and he moves through the doorway into the other room and she’s on a table, and she’s in her bra, and that image would haunt him if he weren’t completely freaking out. There’s two girls standing near her table, eyeing her with mild concern and he goes over to them.
“Do you have Casey’s phone?”
“Oh! You must be Derek,” the girl yells over the music. Casey’s still on the table.
“Yeah. Phone.” He holds out his hand and she shrugs and gives him the phone.
“Are you Casey’s boyfriend or something?” She asks.
“Yeah,” he answers without really thinking, and then he’s pulling Casey by the arm, and she looks down to see him, and her face gets really red when she realizes who he is.
“What’re you doing here?” she asks, a little too drunk to notice as he carefully pulls her down from the table, but not too drunk to realize that she isn’t wearing a shirt.
“I came to get you,” he says, and it comes out gruff and deep, like he’s angry. But he isn’t really angry. He’s something else, something that he shouldn’t be for his sister.
“Your roommate called me. Come on, we’re going.”
“Nooo! I told her not to call you! I don’t wanna go, Derek!”
Her roommate reappears at their side and she’s holding a shirt that Derek can only assume is Casey’s. The two of them work to get it over her head and Derek does not see the irony in putting Casey’s clothes on her body for her.
“Can you take her back to our dorm?” the roommate asks. For all his talk of trying to date Casey’s roommate Derek can’t remember her name.
He nods and she gives him a key and starts to pull Casey towards the door.
“Nooo!” she resists, pulling and slapping at him weakly, trying to get back to the table. If he wasn’t in serious-mode the whole thing would be hilarious.
“Casey, you’re drunk. We’re leaving.” He tries to reason with her, but she doesn’t even seem to hear him. Frustrated, he lifts her and throws her over his shoulder. He’s glad that even if he isn’t the strongest guy in the world, he’s strong enough for this. She kind of gives up as soon as he picks her up and goes limp, so it isn’t all that hard to carry her out of the party. He puts her back down when theyre a little ways from the house and helps her walk, clumsier than usual, back to her dorm. It takes them a while to find her room, because she’s really out of it, and she’s only lived in the room for four days, but they finally make it, and he lets her fall onto her mattress and immediately pass out.
He sinks, exhausted, onto the floor beside her bed, but he can only relax for a moment before she shoots back up and runs to the trashcan to puke. He holds her hair, because of course he does. He should have known all his college experiences would revolve around Casey. Everything in his life always does.
She passes out again and he gets another trashcan to leave beside her head and waits for her to wake up and puke again. It takes a few more repeats of that before she can roll over and blink those big blue eyes at him, currently red and bloodshot from all the puking. She groans.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” she replies, muffled by the pillow she has her face pressed against. Another few minutes and she speaks again.
“Am I a bad girl now?”
Derek almost laughs. In fact he does, a little, but covers it with a cough.
“You? Casey Mcdonald? A bad girl? Never.” I wish.
Her face is still pressed into the pillow, her hair messy and stuck up on the back of her head and he has to resist running a hand over it to try and press it flat for her.
“I used up all my good points.”
He does laugh this time, aloud. She finally looks at him and glares.
“I already told you, Spacey, you have good points to spare. Do you want to talk about it?”
“Oh my god, who are you? Derek Venturi would never willingly talk about feeeelings.”
“Casey Macdonald would never dance on a table without a shirt on. There’s crazy stuff going around.”
She groans again and hides her face, but not for long. Her eyes find his and they stare for a while and then she sighs.
“Everything was just so different here. It was…freeing. No one knows who I am. I felt like I didn’t have to... be me.”
He felt it too. It was why he was letting himself look at her so long. When they were here she didn’t have to be her, and he didn’t have to be him, and they could mean nothing to each other. Or…
“I’m not gonna lie,” he says, “that was a good look for you.”
“Derek,” she replies, but it comes out all pitiful and weak. Still, it makes him smile and his chest fill up with a warmth he hadn’t known he was missing since they’d gotten to school.
He wants to tell her, then. They’re here, alone, together, and its just like she said, it’s different here, they’re different. He thinks about how those guys had called her fresh meat, and he hates it. He thinks about her dancing on the table and he knows that it’s not really her, not really. He thinks about how he told her roommate that he was her boyfriend, and why he did that, and how it felt to be that guy in that moment.
She rolls over and he doesn’t tell her anything.
He stays until early in the morning when her roommate finally stumbles in. She makes a lot of noise and Casey wakes up and frowns when she sees him.
“You didn’t have to stay.”
“I just had to be sure you didn’t choke on your own vomit. Nora would be so disappointed.”
“I’m okay now,” she tells him, but from the look on her face he can tell she’s got a massive headache. He searches through her stuff until he finds her medicine kit (he’d spotted it when he was carrying her boxes) and pulls out two advil, handing them to her with a bottle of water she’d had sitting on her desk.
He watches her take it and stands there awkwardly. He knows he should go, but he doesn’t want to break it, whatever it was that grew between them last night. But she’s exhausted and he’s exhausted and sore from half-sleeping on the floor, so he moves towards the door.
“Wait,” she says, and his heart jumps. He freezes.
“Thanks, Derek,” she says, and it comes out a little puny, but genuine. Their eyes meet and it feels like a thousand things pass between them, every last one left unsaid.
“Don’t mention it, Spacey. Seriously, I have a reputation to uphold.”
She smiles and shakes her head, and he’s almost out of the room completely when he stops again and turns back.
“If you’re feeling better later and you want to hang out, ill text you my room number.”
He leaves before she can reply, but he follows through and texts her, and then goes back to his dorm to sleep for 10 hours.
She’s there when he wakes up, showered and rested, and looking much better than the last time he saw her. More like the Casey he knowsm but not. His roommate is trying to explain Mario Kart to her. When she sees that he’s awake she smiles at him, and then seems to catch herself, looking away quickly.
“Finally,” she says, “Jeez, I thought you were going to sleep until classes started.”
“No, I’m going to sleep when classes start,” he replies groggily. He’s acutely aware that he’s only wearing boxers and shuffles to find a shirt and pants as she pointedly stares at the TV screen. It’s not like he should care. They’d lived in the same house for years. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t seen before. But that was home and this is college and he can’t separate the two when it comes to her.
“Man,” his roommate says, oblivious to anything and everything happening between them, “your sister is really bad at Mario kart.”
He flinches, and it all comes hurtling back. It doesn’t matter where they are or what people they try to be, theyre still Derek and Casey, and nothing can change that.
“She’s bad at everything,” he says, sitting on the beanbag beside the small loveseat they crammed into the room. “It’s her charm.”
She pretends to get offended, and then he fights her for the controller so he can show her how its really done. They play games for a while as she watches and then eventually ask her if she’s hungry and they order a pizza.
“Um, Derek, how many pizzas have you bought already? You shouldn’t be spending your money like this, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, what do you want on your half?”
“Vegetables.”
Then the three of them watch a few movies, and its strange and easy. They only bicker every couple minutes, and none of it gets violent or intense. And then it starts to get late and Derek’s roommate says he’s meeting up with some video game club, and he leaves, and they finish the movie in an awkward, tense (always tense) silence. She doesn’t say a word until the credits roll.
“So, I’m not going out partying anymore, I think. I don’t know, maybe I will if I’m not too swamped once classes start, but I’m not gonna do… that, again.”
“Wow. Fun Casey was nice while it lasted. Back to regular old boring, uptight Casey.”
She punches his shoulder, but she’s smiling. Why do his insults make her smile now? Why do her insults make him smile, too?
“I know I said thanks before but,” she pauses. “Thanks again. For coming to get me. My roommate said she called you because she was worried something bad might have happened to me if I stayed at that party.”
He can’t think of anything to say to that, because the thought had certainly occurred to him, too, and it made him too angry to think about for too long.
“I think it’s going to take a while to get used to,” she says.
“What is?”
“Being here, you know. It’s not what I expected. I feel like I’m just… floating in space with nothing to hold on to. Just drifting.”
“Yeah,” he says, because he gets it. They got to school and everything changed without anything changing at all. Maybe its just in his head. Maybe he just wants it to be different, and it doesn’t have anything to do with her or them at all. Maybe it’s just a part of growing up and he should stop overthinking it so much.
“Well, I guess I need to get going,” she says. “Classes start tomorrow and I haven’t done nearly enough. I’ve only read through three of my textbooks so far.”
He scoffs and rolls his eyes at the easy joke and she smiles, knowing she said it just to rile him up. She stands and walks to the door.
“See you around, Derek.”
“Yeah. See ya, Case.”
And she leaves, and there’s nothing but silence, and he counts the seconds, staring hopelessly up at the ceiling. He wishes everything wasn’t so complicated. He wishes he just knew the answer, the solution, the right thing to do.
But he’s just a kid, and it doesn’t matter how many good points he’s saved up. When he’s around her, he always seems to come up even. So he stands and moves to go after her, because its just too much, but he doesn’t have to go far, because he opens the door and she’s still there, right on the other side. And she looks like she’s hurting, or confused, or scared, and he’s about to just open his mouth and say it, out loud, when she holds up her hand and shuts him up.
“Why did you say it like that?” she asks, and she looks so lost and determined all at once.
“Say what?” he breathes, heart like a jackhammer in his chest.
“Step brother,” she says. “Step.”
He shrugs, hopes it looks practiced and casual.
“Same difference, right?”
“Derek.”
“Casey.”
And it all collapses in at once, and he’s pulling her into him and into his room, and she’s kissing him more fiercely than any fantasy he’s ever had, and it’s everything. Everything.
She is everything.