“You mind if I put some music on?” I ask because the silence is starting to take on a suffocating quality.
He doesn’t respond, so I take that as a yes and plug my phone into the speaker, keeping the volume low. Some old Arctic Monkeys album I’ve listened to since high school. I used to listen to it while I played guitar in my room, back when I could do that. When my fingers worked right, and music was something I could enjoy.
Now, I’m lucky if I can stomach my old playlists.
Once that’s settled, I pull up my laptop, planning to focus on the assignment I’ve been putting off for too long, but my eyes keep drifting to him.
He’s studying,probably. That’s what people do in college. They sit at their desks, and they study, and they don’t steal their roommates’ stuff.
He shifts in his chair, and my entire body tenses up.
This is getting out of hand. I’m freaking out over the dude stretching. I need to get out of here. I need to find somewhere else to live before I completely lose it and make everything a thousand times worse.
After about ten minutes of pretending that I can focus on this paper, I give up.
“I’m gonna shower,” I announce, grabbing my stuff.
I stand there another beat, waiting for something. Anything. Proof of life. He highlights something in his textbook.
“Okay,” I say tono one. “Cool.”
The safety of the hallway feels like taking a breath for the first time since I got back.
Intro to statistics is at nine, and that should be illegal.
I get there early enough to claim a seat in the back corner, where no one will notice me and pull out my worksheet, spending the next ten minutes finishing up the work I was too freaked out to do last night.
Ryan strolls in at eight fifty-eight, because that’s what Ryan does.
He finds me and drops into the desk to my right, smelling like he came from the gym even though we went yesterday. Dude works out more thanNate. “You survive the night?”
“He didn’t say a single word to me.”
“See? Maybe you were freaked out over nothing.”
“It’snotnothing, Ryan.”
He shrugs, pulling out his phone.
I open my notes and try to remember what we covered last week. Easier said than done because I spent most of last week distracted, too. And every week since the first thing that disappeared, a few days after the new semester started.
Class comes and goes. I hardly understand any of it, but oh well.
Math isn’t my thing.
After class, Ryan falls into step beside me, talking about some girl from his computer science class. I nod in the right places even though I have no interest in what he’s saying.
That’s what makes this friendship work. He talks, I’m nearby, and occasionally we have a real conversation.
Good enough for me.
He’s still going on about her when I see the flyer.
It’s tacked up on a bulletin board in the hall, buried between a lost cat and something about a theater club. Handwritten in Sharpie. Big messy letters.
ROOMMATE WANTED.
There’s a number, an address, and underneath that, in smaller writing, barely legible,
