Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn by Sarah Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

Gid the dorm he pointed out before.
    "White," says Gid, to show that he has been listening.
    "We call it White Wedding," Cullen says, punching Nicholas on the arm. Nicholas doesn't react and walks a few paces ahead.
    "Don't worry about him," Cullen says. "He needs more alone time than a community like this affords."
    The dining hall is one vast space with maybe eighty round tables and two doorways —one where students line up and the other where they emerge with their trays. Gideon was really hoping for something more grand, maybe with higher ceilings, or more dark wood. It's not much nicer than his high school cafeteria, and the smell and sound—cheap wheat bread and bananas, clinking silverware and ice thundering into squat glasses—is the same.
    "So this girl that you're hooking up with that you were talking about, Lucy," Gid says to Cullen. "Have you hooked up with her before?"
    "No," Cullen says. "She's new."
    "So you never talked to her before?"
    I can see where Gid's going with this, and he's not going to like where it leads.
    "No, not before tonight. Wait...I'll catch up with you in a second." Cullen takes off.
    So wait a minute. Gid would never dispute that Cullen's better with girls than he is, but according to the terms of the bet, Cullen believes he can get laid sixty times faster than Gideon, and Nicholas, even worse, thinks Cullen can get laid two hundred times faster!
    Gideon finds Nicholas waiting in the food line with his tray and silverware. He tells Gideon exactly what I would tell him if I could.
    "I wouldn't think of it that way," he says, and, after accepting a scoop of rice, moves along.
    Poor Gid looks miserably at a middle-aged cafeteria worker, with vapor covering her bifocals, poised to drop a greasy chicken breast onto his plate. He thinks she has some kind of weird skin disease. Gid, that's a hairnet. "How else should I think of it?" Gid says, out loud to no one in particular, nodding yes for the chicken, nodding again for rice.
    Gideon finds Nicholas at the salad bar, where he is loading his plate with chickpeas and sunflower seeds. "Did you know," he asks, gesturing at the chicken on Gideon's plate, "that when an animal is slaughtered, it feels fear, and we're essentially eating that fear?"
    I've heard this before and think that is total crap. But Gid thinks about the bet and how he never even asked out a girl in his whole life. Not even Danielle, who just wrote "I like u" to him on a Post-it note, then went to second base with him that very day. He throws the chicken away and decides not to eat chicken until the day he gets laid.
    Gideon fills a beige plastic bowl with lettuce. "Put some beans in," Nicholas says. "You need some protein."
    Now Nicholas is examining a bunch of bananas in a stainless-steel bowl, with oranges and some Red Delicious apples. "Don't eat those," he warns. "Nonorganic bananas are the worst." He takes an apple and smells it. "Pesticides," he says, putting it down. He takes an orange. "Look," he says. "It's all going to be okay."
    Nicholas cocks his head and Gid follows him, wondering, exactly, as I am, What is so okay about this? Nothing could be further from okay.
    They pass a table of plain brown-haired girls who look like they're actually in prep school to study, a table of foreign students arguing and holding straws in their hands like cigarettes, a table of pretty, thin girls who eat slowly and deliberately to make their tiny amounts of food last. Again, Gideon can feel people looking at him. He has never,
    ever felt so visible.
    To his right, about five tables over, he sees the girls from earlier in the day. Molly and Edie. The blonde, Marcy, isn't with them. He guesses that Molly and Edie are those sort of pretty but not spectacular girls who prefer each other's company to all others.
    Twenty paces ahead, under a round window looking out on White, is Cullen. In front of him is an ugly heap of casserole and he holds a large spoon in his hand like a child. And