Victor: Her Ruthless Crush by Theodora Taylor (beach read book TXT) 📕

“Why don't you look happy?” Lena asked me as we moved even closer to the stage.

I didn't dare answer, her or myself.

Instead, I ran through all my reminders yet again…

Victor's father was a criminal. Extortion, money laundering, trafficking—the drugs, weapons, and human kind. He deserved nothing less than to rot away in prison for the rest of his life. He wasn't a good guy.

And neither was Victor if he followed in his father's footsteps. Which according to my father, was exactly what Victor planned to do, “no matter what lies that boy told you to get in your pants.”

What we had…the promises we made each other…it wasn’t real.

I had matured and could see first love for what it really was now. College was a dumpster fire when it came to carrying over high school relationships. So many of my friends at Mount Holyoke had dumped and been dumped over the phone—sometimes over emails and texts. It wasn’t a good idea to expect your first love to last through your first year of college, much less marry him beforehand.

Everything Victor and I had planned could have only ended in disaster.

There was no reason I should still be thinking about him.

But that was exactly what I’d been doing for the last four years. I had even looked up when Tuft’s graduation would be at the beginning of May. And I’d sighed when I saw it was scheduled for a week before mine. It wasn't like he was there. I had no idea where he was in the world right now, but it wasn't there.

He was somewhere far away.

And that future I'd imagined for us had been nothing more than a silly girl’s fantasy. I hated, absolutely hated, that I couldn’t stop daydreaming about the parallel timeline where we pulled it off.

I had tried my best to enjoy my college experience. Still, every break was tinged with sadness, especially when I went home with Lena to Boston—the place where I would have visited Victor whenever I could in my alternate timeline. And when I was studying in the library with Lena on Friday nights, I often wondered what it would have been like to take the Peter Pan bus over to Tufts and spend the whole weekend doing the same thing with Victor.

There was this wild despondency always lurking just below the surface. I rarely let my hair down, but when I did, it got nasty. I’d earned a bad reputation at college for drinking too much at parties and then weeping all night over things I couldn't talk about to anyone about even when I was drunk.

But that was nothing to tell Lena. The fact was I should be happy. There was absolutely no reason not to be. I was graduating with honors. I had my whole life in front of me.

I pasted on a smile for Lena, pretending to be all the things I should be. “Sorry, I was just thinking about everything I have to do before moving to New York.”

“Yeah, I bet. I can't believe you got such a great internship—” Lena cut off, probably realizing how that might sound.

Manhattan University had turned her down and pretty much every other med program she had applied to with me. But I knew she was happy for me and wouldn’t ever want to come off as catty or jealous.

If I had been animating her, I would’ve drawn some embarrassed smoke coming out of her head and a chibi version of her bending over backward as she said, “I mean, I do believe it. You’re brilliant, and you deserve the world. It's just such a great match for you. It's like your life couldn’t have worked out any better. That’s so cool.”

“Is it a great match for me?” I asked, my smile slipping just a little bit.

I never told Lena about my art dreams—we’d both been too busy just trying to get decent grades. But another detail from my parallel timeline spun into my mind then. The college acceptance email I never answered from RhIDS. What would it have been like to go there? To major in animation and maybe start making the stories that still unfurled in my head sometimes, no matter how much math I threw at them?

I loved Lena. There were no words in the world to express how nice it was to meet someone with a similar background and worldview after eighteen years of feeling like a freak. But…

Sometimes it felt like I was only pretending to be the person she thought of as her best friend, the person who’d gotten that internship.

“Having everything work out exactly as it should, feels super weird,” I confessed to her. “Like I'm playing a role somebody else assigned to me.”

Lena nodded knowingly. “Sounds like you're struggling with imposter syndrome. I was reading an article in Psychology Now about how a lot of grads feel like that, no matter how much they’ve achieved.”

I grinned at her answer. Lena’s forbidden love wasn’t nearly as secret as mine. Ever since I met her, she’d been obsessed with modern psychology.

“So have you broken it to your dad that you’ll be interning at that kids’ therapy program instead of trying to get a job that will look good on your next round of med school applications?” I asked.

Lena rolled her eyes. “No, he’s still getting over my perfect Indian boyfriend dumping me. No need to pile on.”

Now it was my turn to dig. “Are you still getting over your Indian boyfriend—who, by the way, was not so perfect if he didn't see your value, girl.”

Lena had been a little off ever since our trip to Daytona for spring break. We’d gone there just a few days after Rohan, her zero personality Indian boyfriend, dumped her, claiming he just couldn't date someone without his mother’s approval. I had thought that it would be a good way for my best friend to finally blow off some steam. And the first