Asterism

16. alter ego

"I am leaving your dorm building in a dress Gabby Collins, and walking with you to a frat party to willingly stay put there. This is the best you get. Converse is literally where I put my foot down."

"I wasn't about to convince you into heels, Mar," her best friend laughed, tucking her straightened hair over her shoulder. "I only asked because..." she reappeared from her tiny coat closet. "Then we'll be matching." She held up her periwinkle pair with a smirk.

Marley looked down at her own red converse, clicking the heels together. "This is why we're best friends. Well, this and the fact that I can solve all the chem questions you get stuck on."

Gabby rolled her eyes to mask her embarrassment as she tied her laces. "Drama queen. It was two questions, not all."

"There's nothing to be ashamed of Gab," Marley began. "Organic chemistry is difficult, those who study it have Alkynes of trouble."

Gabby stood, "Acid what you did there."

They both burst into laughter. "That was Sodium funny, I slapped my Neon that one," Marley added, causing more fits of giggles between them as they left Gabby's room - turning the lights off and closing the door behind them.

Once they were outside, Marley breathed the cool, fresh air, zipping up her leather jacket.

While absentmindedly pressing her thumb to the word Aiden in red stitching on the breast pocket, her eyes found the moon. A little smile tugged her lips, as she remembered a picnic they'd had with Ian and Dylan during some celestial event several months ago.

Ian had named the phase of the moon and was giving facts while Aiden murmured in her ear that it just looked like a giants' toenail. Marley remembers how they sounded when tried to muffle their laughs together like naughty schoolchildren, she remembers the smell of his aftershave when she pressed her lips beneath his jaw, wrapped up in her home while watching a comet zip by in the night.

Almost everything Marley Hoover looks at, and all that she touches tastes of him, somehow. It sparks a memory of them together, it fills her heart with love. Aiden Matthews lives everywhere around her, all of the time and she wouldn't have it any other way because she knows that wherever he is, he's thinking of her too.

Marley pulled her phone out of her pocket when it buzzed with text messages, smiling uncontrollably as she read them.

Aiden Matthews: Hey. I'm walking around outside, waiting for Johnson to let me back in the room and I'm thinking of you and that house in Santorini.

Aiden Matthews: We're going soon and you're packing that little black dress.

Aiden Matthews: PS, the moon is definitely a giants' toenail.

-

Marley wasn't sure what to expect of a frat house at 10pm on a Friday night, but what she imagined most certainly did not include: an entire living room on the front lawn, the imprint of two cakes smashed on the front door, a water ballon fight in the back yard and a house full of enough people to fill a concert venue.

She and Gabby wandered the house together, both quite lost. They had been expecting someone to greet them, or for there to be a host or hostess to be found, but instead walked into the house without a single person around batting an eyelash - the both of them just barely managing to dodge an entire mattress full of bandanna-wearing frat boys, careening down two flights of stairs.

"Didn't you say someone invited you here?" Marley asked over the noise and chaos, finding that no matter where she put her eyes, she was seeing something far from innocent. Choosing to watch a girl in a bikini chug from a keg instead of a topless one shaking her-Marley scooted closer to Gabby.