Chapter 24

Despite my setbacks with Gerri and Kendall, I felt that both girls were basically good people that I had the misfortune to encounter in unusual circumstances. Some really weird circumstances, I thought wryly. So I wasn't automatically transferring any negative karma from them to the rest of the women in the world.

Gerri had called that same Monday night. It was clear she knew Kendall and I had split up, though she didn't reveal how she knew. She offered a shoulder to cry on if I needed one, and said we should 'do lunch' sometime during the week.

I suspected Wes had called her, since he and Gerri had conspired before to play doctor and nurse to my bruised psyche. I doubted Kendall would have called Gerri this time. Kendall seemed to instinctively try to keep her options open, whether or not she would admit it to herself. Pushing me at Gerri might permanently lock me out as an option for her.

Okay, maybe I was a little soured on women.

Kendall and I continued to sit with the group of Hayley, Wes, and Cynthia for Western Civ, though we didn't always sit immediately next to each other.

Over the next few days, the post break-up tension and regret between me and Kendall largely dissipated. We didn't talk about staying friends, but it seemed to land that way between us. Knowing we'd be seeing each other in school for years probably was a big part of that.

Maybe if we'd had an angry split, our reconciliation couldn't have happened. But we'd had a melancholy parting, and somehow that seemed to lend itself toward renewed friendship. I guess disappointment is faster to heal than vitriol.

Another healing factor was having a front row seat to watch Wes pursuing Kendall.

After a few days he'd cautiously asked me if I would have a problem with it, and I gave him the green light. If what Wes was offering was what Kendall was seeking, then more power to them.

When he made his first pass at her (starting with, 'I've lost my phone number, can I borrow yours?') she turned to look at me in surprise. After I shrugged and grinned at her, the game was on.

Wes pulled every trick in the book to charm her into going out with him, and Kendall clearly enjoyed the sport of being a temptress while staying just out of his reach.

One downside to these developments was they took place right in front of Hayley Devlin. She smiled at the right times while Wes and Kendall toyed with each other. But when she thought no one was watching, she seemed to look at Kendall with an unusually focused gaze.

Hayley derided non-Greeks on general principles, and I wondered if she thought Kendall had crossed a line. Kendall had taken Gerri's place with me, after Hayley had deftly paired us up. Then she broke up with me, another slight to a Greek. And now she was flirting with Wes, yet another Greek.

In the fraternities, we didn't really know how aggressively the sororities discouraged their members from dating outside the Greek system. But it was clearly a serious matter to them. One of a sorority's pillars of power was controlling access to fraternity members. And Hayley played more power games than anyone I knew.

I would guess that a beautiful and smart girl like Kendall, that could seemingly charm her way through one Greek's love life and into another, had the potential to threaten that balance of power.

Kendall flirted on, blissfully oblivious. Since anything with Wes would only last a few weeks at most, I didn't see any reason to spoil her fun. After that, her only contact with Greeks would be with me in pre-med classes, and we certainly wouldn't encounter Hayley or any of her crew there.

When Gerri called Friday night, it was ostensibly to do another check on how I was feeling, 'post-Kendall.' The fact that I was in my room to answer the phone on a Friday night must have told her something. But she was in the same boat, and we teased each other about our sorry state as lonely discarded lovers.

She confirmed what Wes had warned me about, that Hayley would try to pair her up with Rod. She told me with some satisfaction that she had refused to have anything to do with him, despite Hayley's vigorous efforts to sell her on a trial date.

I told her about Wes's pursuit of Kendall, and had her rolling in laughter as I described every cliché laden approach that Wes had tried so far.

We wound up talking for over an hour. Her call cheered me up a lot, and when she suggested we get together for lunch the next day I agreed without hesitation. We got together a couple other times over the next few days.

We were both avoiding giving signals about wanting to date again. We'd recently separated from each other, and then broken up with others on top of that. But that was okay; we were enjoying being friends. Feeling no pressure for anything beyond that was nice.