Chemistry of Love

Dennis appeared first, to Bill's surprise. Heading for the science building no doubt, Bill surmised correctly, as he held up his poli sci text to make sure Dennis wouldn't see him. Highly unlikely he ever would anyway, since the moron always looked at the ground as he walked, just like Jay back in junior high, but better safe than sorry. It took another twenty minutes but Jay appeared as well. Of course the little schoolboy wasn't going to hang around his room when he had his hot date for a walk around town in a few hours!

Bill once again held up his book in front of his face, knowing all too well that Jay would never guess anyone studying this early on a Sunday would be him, and waited until his old friend was a safe distance away. Then he got up and headed for the dorm.

Jay had whined to Bill many a time that his roommate, Ken, brought a new girl home almost every weekend. He was now banking on the likelihood that Ken would be in there now, as Jay surely would have heard about what happened to Dennis and taken to locking his door. His gamble paid off, as his knock on Jay's door was answered with a "Come in!" in Ken's smarmy drawl.

"Hey, Ken," Bill said as he opened the door to find Ken sitting at his desk. Another young woman Bill didn't recognize was curled up on Ken's bed in last night's party clothes. She looked up from her chemistry book long enough to see the visitor was someone she vaguely recognized from somewhere, and gave him a smile before turning back to her studies.

"Hi Bill. Jay isn't here," Ken said.

"I know," Ken said. "I'm just here to give him a little gift." No sense in trying to hide what the gift was, and he suspected Ken would appreciate the joke anyway. With a grin he pulled the panties out of his jacket pocket and lay them on Jay's pillow.

"That's quite a gift," Ken said.

"Oh my God, guys!" added his date.

"He'll get the joke, believe me," Bill said. "Just please leave it there."

"Uh, yeah, okay!" Ken said, giving the woman an uncertain look. "Whatever you say, Bill."

"Later, guy," Bill said, and he saw himself out.

It was his lucky day all right, he reasoned as he reached Dennis' room at the other end of the hall. Still no one in sight as he opened the door, not at all surprised that it wasn't locked. Idiots like Dennis never learned!

Bill considered tipping Dennis' entire desk over this time, but figured that would make too much noise. Instead he pulled out the drawers and spilled their contents in a huge pile in the middle of the room, following them with the notes from the calendar and all the papers he'd found stacked on top of it. He walked around in several circles in the pile of papers, making sure to rustle them up as much as he could. Then, for good measure, he overturned all the boxes of books within easy reach, and flung the empty boxes across the room at Dennis' bed. Satisfied with his handiwork, he retreated to the door and, with one last look straight ahead at the drawn curtains, he held his hand up to his mouth and gave Dennis a kiss-off.

Then it was just a matter of making sure no one saw him leaving the building. To see to that, Bill ran upstairs and let himself out by the fire escape. As far as he knew, no one saw him there except a townie walking her dog in the street behind the dorms. He smiled and nodded at the woman as he hopped down to the pavement and scampered off.

Kathy was a bit tickled at spending time in public with Jay now that she knew him in the biblical sense. But she was also utterly comfortable and happy with him as they strolled through the dewy spring afternoon in town. There was talk of plans for the summer, and Kathy found she was already dreading saying goodbye to Jay for three long months; but how wonderful to have someone to miss! Jay was thinking ahead to the spring formal in May, which he hadn't planned to attend at all but now he certainly wouldn't miss it. The afternoon breezed by without ever a thought of the time as they walked hand in hand through town and then campus.

"I sure am looking forward to meeting Bill," Kathy said as they approached Jay's dorm. "Can't wait to hear some of his stories of you back in high school!"

"I hope they don't put you to sleep," Jay said. "Listen, neither of us were party animals!"

"I know you weren't, and that's what I like so much about you!" Kathy replied, squeezing his hand. She couldn't quite bring herself to say "I love you" just yet, but it was coming soon, that she knew.

Jay sighed contentedly as he drew his keys out of his pocket. "So nice to hear that for a change instead of 'why are you so quiet?!'."

"Believe me, I know!" Kathy agreed. "Some people just don't understand, do they?"

"Amen." Jay opened the door and welcomed her into his room.

Kathy saw it first, but she didn't believe it. Jay saw it a split-second later, and he didn't understand it. In shock and disbelief, Kathy crossed the room and snapped up her missing panties from Jay's bed. "Jay?! What on earth is this?"

Jay was dumbstruck. "I don't know! I've never seen those before! I don't know whose they are!"

"They're mine!" Kathy whipped them across Jay's face before shoving them into her purse. "What kind of pervert are you? When were you in my room, anyway?"

"Friday night! You know that! But I didn't take them!"

"I know you didn't take them then! They were already missing! When were you in my room before that?"

"Never!" Jay was nearly in tears. "I wouldn't do that!"

"Then how did they get here?" Kathy demanded.

"I have no idea."

"Yeah, right!" Kathy marched back to the door and tore it open. "Should've known you were too good to be true. The nice guys are always the worst underneath it all!"

"Kathy, wait --"

"Forget it!" She slammed the door, and Jay was left to ponder just what had happened.

Bill arrived minutes later, with Jay still in the fog of shock. "Fashionably late, is she?" he asked.

"No," Jay said. "Kathy's...well, she couldn't make it. Sorry."

"Figures," Bill said. "Women never keep a date, can they?"

"Right," Jay said absentmindedly. "Let's go eat." And he kept his guard up throughout dinner, giving Bill one-word answers and letting his latest boasts about Jen go unchallenged. There was plenty of studying to keep his mind occupied -- at least he hoped it would. In any event, there was no display of emotion through dinner and the casual goodbye with Bill and his slog to the library to try to lose himself in research for his English paper.

Later, alone in his room, he wept.

Kathy had gotten her own crying out of the way when Jen finally got home that night. "Kathy, you'll never guess what!" she said as she burst into the room. Then, seeing her friend curled up in a ball of melancholy on her bed, she stopped in her tracks. "Oh, no, what happened?"

"Jay's a pervert," Kathy said. "I should've known."

All at once, everything fell into place for Jen, albeit incorrectly. "Oh, Kathy, come here!" she opened her arms and Kathy reluctantly got up to hug her. "I'm sorry! I found out this afternoon that his friend, you know Bill? He's a cretin too."

"Figures," Kathy said.

"What'd Jay do?" Jen said. "I was just starting to trust him."

"Remember that missing underwear of mine? He had it!"

"What?!"

"He laid it on his bed and invited me to his room so I'd find it there! What the hell?!"

Jen was speechless...and also suspicious. But she couldn't prove anything, and it was no use to get her friend's hopes up. So once again she held her tongue.

"Guess it's good I found out so quickly," Kathy mused. "This too shall pass. So what is it you were going to tell me?"

"Oh, that doesn't matter," Jen said. "I mean, it does, but it's good news. My brother's room got broken into again, but this time he caught the guy on camera. I've been over there helping him clean up. We're going to student affairs with it first thing tomorrow."

Chem was murderously uncomfortable for Jay the next afternoon. But, having figured it was all the more important to show Kathy he really was up to the challenge, he kept a stiff upper lip and answered a couple of Ms. Schilling's questions. Her feedback was positive as usual, which was slightly comforting. Throughout the brutal hour, Jay looked only at Ms. Schilling and at the whiteboard, lest there be any more absurd fallout from Kathy. When it was over, he grabbed up his books and left without daring a look around the room. So he never noticed that although Kathy was there (and trying just as hard to avoid him as he was to avoid her), both Jen and Bill were absent.

Having no desire at all to talk to anyone for the time being, Jay holed up in the deepest reaches of the library for the rest of the afternoon. Kathy was feeling the same, and retreated to the even more forbidding silence of the science library. Jen, therefore, had no way of reaching out to either of them when she was finally free to leave student affairs late that afternoon. She was nearly bursting with the urge to share the news when Kathy finally came home well past dinnertime.

Kathy looked as glum as ever, but that barely registered with Jen as she leapt up from her desk chair. "Kathy, Bill's been suspended! We got him!"

"Bill, Jay's friend?" Kathy asked. "That's...nice?"

"It certainly is! He's the one who was trashing my brother's room, or at least the second time! Dennis set up a webcam and caught him in the act this time. And there's more..."

"Jen, what do I care about that? It doesn't make Jay any less of a freak or a thief!"

"I think it does, Kathy. Listen --"

"I don't want to hear about it, Jen!" Kathy turned around and stormed back out of the room.

"Kathy, wait!" Jen called. But she didn't.

"So I didn't get to tell her anything," Jen groused to her fellow Equestrian Club members at their weekly lunch the next day.

"What's to tell?" asked Nora Lincoln. "It wasn't Jay who got caught messing with your brother's stuff, is it?"

"What's this horrible thing Jay did to Kathy, anyway?" asked Linda Crymzyck for the second time.

"She's not going to spill that!" Nora reminded her. "But what's that got to do with this Bill guy anyway?"

"What it's got to do with Bill, I think anyway," Jen began with a sigh, "is that last weekend Bill told Brett and me that Jay'd been spreading rumors that Kathy was really easy, and --"

"What?!" Lucy Agstrom interrupted. "Shy Kathy?!"

"Exactly," Jen said. "I talked to my brother about it, and he said Jay had told him all about their first date, and he was a perfect gentleman. He never said they'd done anything beyond a kiss good night. And I also know Bill lied to me about going to Jay's room to tell him to knock it off when I know Jay was really with Kathy because I'd just seen them together. Brett and I both saw them." A quick breath, and Jen continued, "On top of everything else, I think that was when Bill was trashing my brother's room the first time! When he told me he'd just been in Jay's room, I saw he had a sticky-note stuck to his pants. Dennis uses sticky notes for everything!"

"Wow," Lucy gave her friend a sympathetic look. "Why would he want to mess up his friend's relationship like that?"

"Because he was jealous," Jen grumbled. "He had a crush on me."

"But I don't understand," Linda said. "If you know Bill lied about Jay calling Kathy a slut, why's Kathy still so angry about that?"

"It's not that!" Jen slammed her glass down on the table. "It's -- oh, all right, somebody stole a pair of Kathy's panties, and she found them on Jay's bed. I'm convinced it was really Bill who stole them. If he broke into my brother's room, why wouldn't he break into ours too? He probably thought they were mine. Besides, if Jay stole them, why would he leave them where Kathy would be sure to find them?! But I can't prove it."

Linda's face lit up. "Oh my God, Jen, why didn't you say so?! I can prove it!"

Ten minutes later, Jen ushered Linda into her room, where Kathy was curled up under the covers with a Laura Stewart book. "Jen!" she snapped, pulling the covers up defensively when she saw there was company.

"Sorry, Kathy," Jen said. "But believe me, you want to hear this!"

"If this is about Jay --"

"We were wrong about him, and Linda can prove it!" Jen interrupted. "Unless you want to wallow in your own misery, is that it?!"

"No!" Kathy said.

"Then listen!"

"Fine," Kathy conceded. "Sorry if I don't get out of bed," she told Linda. "I'm...not feeling well."

"I'm sorry to bother you while you're sick," Linda told her. "But anyway. Sunday afternoon, I was studying in Jay's room with his roommate -- Ken, you know him?"

"Every girl on campus knows that name," Kathy said with disgust.

"Don't I know it!" Linda admitted. "Yeah, we got together for brunch and all these other girls were --"

"Linda, the point?" Jen interrupted.

"Right, sorry. I was studying chem -- I'm in your class, you know?"

Kathy nodded.

"Right, well I was studying with Ken, and Bill came in and -- Kathy, he's the one who put your panties on Jay's pillow!"

"What?!" Kathy sat up and let the covers fall, clutching at them just long enough to remember she was decent from the waist up anyway.

"I can't prove it, Kathy, but I think Bill stole them because he thought they were mine," Jen said. "He had a crush on me. I didn't tell you before, but he made a pass at me at a party, the same night you had Jay up here."

"You can't prove it..." Kathy repeated.

"Kathy, for Pete's sake, if Jay were going to steal anything from you, and especially something that private, why would he put it where you were certain to find it?! And we do know for certain Bill was willing to sneak into other people's rooms!"

"Your brother," Kathy acknowledged.

"I suspected already, but I couldn't prove it until Linda told me what she'd seen," Jen said.

"I didn't know who it was," Linda said. "I knew he was in our chem class, but there must be fifty people in that class. I didn't realize it was the same guy until Jen told us what happened."

"How many people did you tell?!" Kathy demanded.

"Oh, Kathy, come off it!" Jen said. "What if I hadn't told them? Then you'd never speak to Jay again for something he didn't even do? And the answer is three. Three people."

"And she almost didn't tell us," Linda added.

"it's not like you come off badly in the story!" Jen said.

"Not unless I let Jay think I'm still pissed at him," Kathy admitted. "Thank you, Linda. And Jen. I'd better call him."

After two phone calls to his room went unanswered, Kathy left a voicemail with an apology and an explanation. Feeling stir-crazy after that, she went off to the science library to study and was absent when Jay called back to accept the apology. "I want to apologize, too, Jay," Jen told him when she took the call. "I misjudged you in a big way."

"I guess I've been misjudging Bill for years," Jay said. "I still don't know what to make of it. I'm really sorry for what he did to Dennis, too. You know, I didn't know he was your brother."

"A lot of people here don't," Jen said. "I kept our father's name after the divorce, he didn't, and our personalities are so different. Anyway. I hope you don't mind, he told me you've been doing a great job with the tutoring."

"Thanks. You know what's sad, I've always kind of known Bill was a jerk, but..."

"Friends are like that, Jay. Believe me, I know."

Though they did finally connect by phone later that night, Jay and Kathy didn't see each other again until the following afternoon in chemistry class. As they arrived for class, Jen stepped back to a respectful distance as they threw themselves at one another with no reservations about what their classmates might see. Jen reasoned that word traveled fast on their little campus and plenty of the others knew just what had happened anyway. She also noted that no one questioned her own tears of joy at the beautiful sight.

"I love you, Jay," Kathy said. "And I'm so sorry!"

"No need to apologize, and I love you too!" Jay replied.

After class, Jen paused their reverie just long enough to tell Kathy she had to go see her brother. "So I won't be in the room for a while," she added, not quite able to suppress a laugh.

"I understand!" Kathy blushed and joined in on the laugh.

In her brother's room shortly afterward, Jen provided an update that was welcome news to Dennis. "Think I should tell Jay I sent the rose?" he asked Jen.

"Don't," Jen said. "They both think it was some random secret admirer. No need to reopen that can of worms. And can I ask why you did it?"

"Just a lucky guess that Jay was the kind of guy who'd need some help with a thing like that," Dennis said.

"Remind you of somebody, does he?" Jen asked, remembering all her brother's misfires in love back in high school.

"All too much. But I mean, you should've seen him that first time he came to me for help, Jen. So sincere."

"So sincere he told a tutor he barely knew that he had a crush on Kathy?"

"He didn't say it was Kathy," Dennis said. "Just the way he talked about her, it sounded like it must be. I figured if it wasn't, he'd just think it was from whoever it was he had a thing for."

"Then how did you know to send Kathy that note?"

"What note?"

"You mean you didn't?"

"No idea what you're talking about, sis."

"Then I wonder who...oh, wait a minute. Bill."

"What'd he do now?" Dennis didn't like hearing that name one bit; he was still undoing some of Bill's damage to his files.

"We're pretty sure he was in our room to steal Kathy's underwear. He must have also been the one to leave the note."

"What note?!"

"Sorry! Kathy got a beautiful little love note, signed with Jay's name but Jay says he didn't write it. It must have been Bill who wrote it. But why would he try to bring them together if he wanted to hurt them once they were together?"

"So you'd notice him, of course," Dennis said. "You said he had a crush on you, right? And he did try to make you think he was sticking up for Kathy. He could only do that if Jay and Kathy went out at least once, and he didn't think Jay would ever ask her out without being certain she'd say yes. So..."

"Dennis, you're a genius."

"I know."

In Kathy's room, she and Jay sat facing one another on her bed, not touching and a little nervous. "So I've always known he was kind of a creep even though we were best friends," Jay said. "But I never imagined he'd pull a thing like this!"

"It's over," Kathy said. "And isn't it the best revenge if we get back together to stay?"

"Couldn't agree more," Jay said. "I just...I'm really happy we are back together, but..."

"But what?" Kathy was concerned.

"I don't know!" He dissolved into nervous laughter and she joined him. "Just seems too good to be true, doesn't it?"

"Love usually does. But it isn't." Kathy reached over and held his hand. "So just how does this work? Trust each other, communicate about everything that's bothering us, be honest...I think we can handle that now, don't you?"

"I do," Jay agreed. He was dying to suggest another sort of reunion, but the words just wouldn't come. Failing to find them, he stood up instead. "I guess I'd better get back and study for now, though."

Kathy hid her disappointment. "Okay. Have you got another history club meeting or something, is that it?"

"Something like that," Jay said, although he didn't have any meetings with Dennis scheduled for the moment and he longed to stay. But it didn't seem the sensible thing to do in the middle of the day. After a second's hesitation, he threw his arms around her and kissed her on the cheek. "Friday night? What do you think?"

"Sure," Kathy said, though she had no desire to wait that long.

"Great!" Jay turned to go.

He got as far as the door, where he paused, his hand on the knob, resisting the temptation to look back into the room. After another moment's reflection, he locked the door rather than open it.