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“What happened with the car?”
“It cost me a couple hundred bucks to have it donated.”
“You live and learn, kiddo.”
“Please don’t say I told you so again.”
“Okay, okay. Here’s your mother. Love you. And I told you so.”
“Love you too.”
“Sweetheart?” my mother cuts in a moment later.
“I have to get going if I’m going to make it in time for study group.”
“At this hour??” she exclaims.
“It’s only seven thirty, Nance. Chill.” Though it will be late by the time I get out. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll take an Uber home.”
I won’t. Can’t afford it. But I can’t have her worrying about me walking around in the dead of night on crutches.
“I don’t know, Alice. This is making me increasingly uncomfortable. Maybe I should come out for a few days. Until you’re better.”
“Mom, stop. I’m fine. Gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Despite seeing blood and guts on a nightly basis at one of the busiest hospitals in Newark, New Jersey, Nancy Bailey is a fretter when it comes to her only kid. She’s also repeatedly said that she didn’t fret a day in her life until she met me and fell in love.
“Call me tonight. I mean it. Call me or I won’t sleep.”
“Fine,” I grumble. “Love you, bye.”
We’re big on the I love yous in my family. After my birth mom died, Dad started to say it all the time. Then I started saying it all the time. And then he met Nancy who says it more than me and Dad combined.
“Love you more.”
An hour later I’m cursing my stupidity. Sweaty and in pain, I’m in a foul mood by the time I reach the library. Only to find a note on the door of study room B explaining that it’s been moved off campus, an address attached, due to a broken pipe that flooded the room.
I want to die.
Anyone who forgot to list their cell number on the sign-up sheet can do so here, it says at the bottom.
As a general rule I don’t write my cell number on something as public as a sign-up sheet, and judging by the list of numbers written on here now, quite a few of us hadn’t. The joke’s on us. Without pause, I take out a pen and scribble it on the designated line. This can’t happen again. My mental health won’t allow it.
As I’m leaving, to begin the torturous journey back home, someone I recognize from class rushes in. “Group has moved off campus. Room is flooded. There’s a sign-up sheet if you forgot to leave your cell number.”
His shoulders slump. “Shit,” he grumbles under his breath.
I know what you mean, bud. I know what you mean.
Chapter 6
Alice
Being a transfer student, I’ve been exiled to the dorm of cast-offs. I share a suite with six other girls. Each of us with a single room since we’re all upperclassmen.
Out of the six, four of us have struck up a fledgling friendship, bonding over our mutually obsessive love of reality television, Netflix, and sarcasm.
Here’s the rundown: Zoe Mayfield, tall, blonde, extrovert (to put it mildly), likes to curse a fair share, grew up in Beverly Hills and is presently slumming it in the dorm as punishment. Some business about being kicked out of her mother’s ritzy beach condo for throwing a party, during which somebody walked away with her mother’s favorite Andy Warhol painting. A real one. That’s the abridged, sanitized version. Zoe’s was a lot more descriptive.
Blake Allyn, medium height, bears a striking resemblance to Halle Berry with long braids. She’s another rich kid from Beverly Hills, reserved, the total opposite of her best friend. From what I’ve observed, they balance each other nicely. Operating in lockstep, Blake is the conscience of the two, and the only thing standing between Zoe and the possibility of a mug shot.
She was living with Zoe in the condo, and from what I’ve been able to suss out, she’s only here out of friendship. Which is seriously admirable considering the mattresses (relentlessly hard). She also wears a medical bracelet and I haven’t worked up the nerve to ask why yet.
And then there’s Dora Ramos. Shy, studious to the point of being obsessive. Small, curvy, redhead. Has a tendency to stutter. Dora, like me, is a scholarship kid.
Together we’re the merry bad of misfits.
On Friday, I hobble back to the dorm and go in search of Zoe, the only person I know who has a functioning car. Hearing the sink running, I knock on the bathroom door in our suite.
“Zoe, you in there? Can you give me a ride to the trailer park?” The unmistakable sound of a sniffle rides above the running water. “Zoe? You okay in there?”
The door bursts open and out steps miles of long tan legs set off by a tiny denim miniskirt. Her large, heavily lashed hazel eyes glisten with unshed tears and her slender nose looks rubbed raw.
