She takes a slow sip with her eyes closed and groans like the coffee has personally saved her life, and I climb back into the bed beside her. I lean my shoulder against the headboard, and for a long, blissful minute, we don’t speak. We just sit there, side by side, and breathe, and let the heat of the mugs seep into our palms, and it is so good I could cry.
This is all I ever dreamed of.
Every time she would FaceTime me in her Camden U dorm, I envisioned these days, and they’re finally here. And somehow it’s even better than I could imagine. The room is warm. The bed is warm. The hangover sits on my chest like a small, fat cat, heavy but no longer trying to claw me. I am not, thank God, a vomiter. I have always been grateful to my body for that one small mercy. Whatever I drink, my body just absorbs and processes like an industrial filter, leaving me with the headache and the dry mouth and the spiritual remorse, but nothing more dramatic than that.
“Your roommate,” Mila says, eventually, in the voice of a girl who has been chewing on her thoughts. “Is so chic,” she goes on. “It’s aggressively offensive. She walked in here last night in that coat.”
I smile into the rim of my cup. The coat. God, the coat. Camel-colored, belted at the waist, soft as butter. Penelope had drifted in from the party, her cheeks pink with cold, the hem of that coat brushing the back of her knees, and she had smiled at the two of us — at me, swaying slightly against the kitchen counter, at Mila, raiding the cabinets for water — and she had said,I’m so happy you girls came, it was a lovely night, and then she had gone to her room and closed her door.
“Yeah,” I say. “That coat was incredible.”
“I love her.”
I smile because I do too.
“I think she likes me.”
I agree. “I think she does.”
“I need her to adopt me.”
I laugh, just once, and the laugh moves through the headache like a small earthquake. I press the heel of my hand to my eye socket and laugh again anyway, because I cannot help it. In the four days I have lived in this apartment, Penelope has already started to feel like the older sister I have needed my entire life.
I take another sip and look around the room, and let it land on me properly.
My room.
Myroom. Inmyapartment. In a city I chose. At a school I worked for years to get into. With a roommate who has fun friends and keeps this place pristine. And somehow, in less than a week, I believe I might actually be able to do this.
“You did a good thing,” Mila says, half to me and half to the ceiling, “getting this apartment.”
I look around at the painted-brick wall opposite the bed, at the soft, warm light through the curtains. “I’ll be paying it off for the rest of my life, but my God, I love waking up here.”
“Can I move in?” she jokes, and then she launches into a story about a Hawthorne House party she went to last year with some girl named Trina, who, by Mila’s description, was an absolute nightmare. The party was wild, she says. Keg stands. Boys screaming. Somebody jumped off the porch into a tree. Last night, by comparison, wasmellow. She says the word like it’s a gift she’s giving the universe.Mellow.
I let her talk, and my mind wanders off without my permission.
It wanders to Blue. Because my brain has been wandering to Blue since I was in sixth grade, and I seem to have lost the off switch. Mila said mellow, and my mind has already gone to the way Blue was in that stupid black backward hat. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, has the right to lookthatgood in a hat.
“He was watching you, by the way,” Mila says, casual as anything, swirling the dregs of her coffee.
My stomach drops two inches because I stopped listening to her a minute ago. “What?”
“Blue.” She looks up at me, eyebrows arched, and her mouth is doing that thing where it’s trying very hard to be neutral and failing. “He was watching you. All night.”
“He was not.”
“Trust me.” She prolongs the word, draws it out, and looks at me like I am being deliberately stupid. “I caught him at least three times. You were busy. You were doing your thing. And he was standing there, watching you like he couldn’t help himself.”
I shake my head. I shake it harder than I need to. My head aches, but I won’t listen to this. Blue Golding has spent the entirety of our shared existence making it very clear, in a hundred wordless ways, that he wants nothing to do with me.
“No,” I say. “He definitely wasn’t.”
The only feeling I will allow in my chest about Blue is shame.
I’m beyond embarrassed about how I treated him in high school. I watched every single one of his hockey games. I stared at him in class and jumped for joy if we ever got paired together. I was obscenely obsessed with the boy, and he ran from me every single time. But if I were him, I would run too. The only way I will survive this college is to stop being that girl. I don’t intend to have a relationship with him at all. Ever since I saw him last week and noticed how freaked out he was, I vowed to stop this madness. Even if I want to look at him, I’ll suppress it. If I’m in the same room as him, I’ll pretend he doesn’t exist. The shameslides in cold and easy, the way it always does. It has its own seat in me at this point. It has a key to the apartment. This is my fuel to leave him alone.
“Maybe it’s because of Chase,” Mila offers, lifting her eyebrows.
