Free Eager to Learn (Complicity Cycle) by Sadie Romero Page B

lunch plans. On a given day, you pretty much just had to show up and you’d meet someone to eat with.
    The second heart was the Union, which housed the LSU bookstore and a slew of restaurants. Campus organizations set up booths and sold knickknacks or posters or asked for donations or recruited new members in a kind of shady free-zone between the Union and the parade grounds. Sometimes, fire-and-brimstone street preachers showed up to decry the evils of college life and tell us we were all going to hell.
    I lingered in the quad, hoping to bump into someone I could eat with. I set my backpack against a stone bench and rested under the leafy shade of an overarching live oak.
    In the middle of one of the triangular patches of grass, white-masked theater students acted out some avant-garde performance piece. They stood like statues for a moment before snapping silently to a new position at the indication of a silver-masked puppet-master, who walked smoothly through them. He wore a black sweater that must have been intolerably hot.
    I noted that there were so many reasons not to be a theater major.
    I saw Jeffery step out of Stubbs , and I waved at him.
    “ Jeffery,” I called, cupping my hands to my mouth.
    He grinned and started toward me.
    Jeffery was the late-blooming all-star. He had absolutely none of the athleticism that made for high school golden boys, but he had charm and ambition, and unlike all the football players who peaked senior year of high school, Jeffery was just getting started. And he knew it, the cocky bastard.
    He was a double-major in Business and English. Business because he planned on being filthy rich. English because he loved reading poetry. He played the piano with (exclaimed his music professor) a large and heavy soul. He had a stand-up comedy routine that he performed on Open-Mic Night at Northgate Tavern, and a comedy club manager from New Orleans had told him he had the gift. He was the gem of the debate team. He was on the Dean’s list, was in the honors program, looked like a movie star, and rock climbed on the weekends.
    People who didn’t know him hated him. Nobody likes the idea of somebody who’s good at everything .
    We ’d been dating for the last two years.
    Jeffery came over and sat down next to me, his eyes narrowed and teeth white in a sun grin. He kissed me. A big, long, everybody-look-at-us kiss.
    “ What you up to, kid?” he asked, tucking a strand of hair behind my left ear in a way that had become a kind of signature.
    “ Are you DTF?” I asked, which in our in-lingo could mean one of two things. Here I meant: “Down to Food?”
    Jeffery shrugged. “I could eat. Let’s stay away from the Union, though.”
    “ Why?” I asked.
    “ News crew or something over there.”
    “ Really?”
    “ Yeah,” he said. “It’s about the… you know. Last week.”
    “ Oh,” I said, suddenly cold in spite of the heat.
    “ Right,” he said. “They’re interviewing people and stuff. I don’t think they’d, like, recognize you or anything, but they might. So… Secret Subway?”
    “ Yeah,” I said. “Secret Subway.”
    Behind the library and tucked under Foster Hall lay a Subway sandwich shop so unadvertised and out-of-the-way that most people didn ’t even know it existed. We walked there holding hands because we were just sickeningly adorable like that.
    “ You planning on joining any clubs this year,” Jeffery asked between bites of his chicken teriyaki on wheat.
    “ I don’t think so,” I said.
    “ Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to do something extra-curricular.”
    “ In fact, I don’t,” I said. “That’s why they call it ‘extra.’”
    “ Yeah, but you’re missing out on a lot of cool stuff. I mean, your world can boil down to just a few people pretty quickly if you’re only doing the academic stuff.”
    “ The academic stuff is what I need to focus on,” I said. I was eating a broccoli and cheese soup which I regretted ordering. It was too