Something in me cracks down a fault line I didn’t know was there. She’s exactly right. I haven’t had my best friend for two years because she went straight to Camden U after high school graduation. I’ve been a lost cause without her. My feet shuffle around the counter, and I hug her. I wouldn’t be who I am without her. She’s the person who’s going to encourage me to grow a backbone, teach me to be brave, and live my best life. I hug her hard. I’ve missed her.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Of course. I love you, Melly. You’re my sister.”
I nod, agreeing. She really is like family. I pull away and look at Penelope, feeling my chest become lighter. I needed that hug.
Penelope smiles when we both look at her. She looks down at her phone and then at us. “Who’s ready to study?”
“Me,” we say at the exact same time, in the exact same tone, and the three of us laugh, and the moment ends, and the morning resumes.
Something has moved in me. I can feel it as I reach for my plate, and I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with it.
Chapter 4
Blue
Ispendtheentiremorning feeling heavy.
It’s not a hangover. I had two beers last night and went to bed at ten o’clock like somebody’s grandfather, so it isn’t that. It’s something else. It’s a low-frequency hum under my skin that I can’t get rid of, and I’ve been trying since I opened my eyes at six.
I go for a run.
I do six miles up to the river path and back along Wexler and through the park where the leaves are starting to crunch under my feet, and my lungs are burning by mile four because I’m pushing too hard. I tell myself that pushing too hard is going to do it, sweat it out of me. I get back to the house at seven-forty, and my shoulder is screaming. I’m soaked through my hoodie and the thing in my chest is still there.
I do a workout.
I throw the garage door open and turn the heater on. I get under the bar and rep out four sets of squats, three sets of benches, and a set of clean-and-presses that I’ve got no business doing on a shoulder that took a check on Friday night. The trainer would kill me if she knew. I do them anyway, and by the end of it, I’m shaking and can’t feel my legs. I sit on the floor of the garage with my back against the wall, and I thinkokay, that did it,and then I stand up, and immediately feel that the thing in my chest is still there.
I shower. I eat. I sit in the kitchen at the island with a bowl of oatmeal. I scroll through my phone for fifteen minutes without absorbing a single thing on the screen.
By eleven-thirty, I’m desperate.
Benson comes downstairs in basketball shorts and a Wolves hoodie, hair sticking up, looking like a man who’s been up for two hours doing something that I assume involved his girlfriend. He gets coffee and sits across from me at the island. He pulls his laptop out of his bag and opens it.
I look at him.
I think — and this is how desperate I am, this is how out of my mind I’ve become —Benson’ll know what to do with this. Benson’s a man in a relationship. Benson is, technically, a subject matter expert in the field of being knocked sideways by a woman.
So I say, before I can stop myself, “What’s going on with you and Lucy?”
Benson looks up from his laptop. He looks at me for a second too long. Benson has known me for two years, and he’s known something is off with me since Friday night, but he hasn’t asked, because he knows not to push. But he’s reading me now. I see the read happen on his face. He could call me on it, but he doesn’t.
“What do you want to know?”
“Just.” I lift one shoulder. “How it’s going?”
He puts his coffee down.
What follows is twenty minutes I won’t get back. He explains how his sister didn’t approve of the relationship and the falling out they had, but once he gets that story out of the way, he starts in about Lucy Moss. Oh, this Lucy Moss sounds like something. Math genius. Professional at her job. Hardworking. Shy. Cute. He describes her laugh. He’s into how she takes her coffee. He’s into the specific way she holds her pencil, and apparently, he’s kept one from their very first tutoring session.
I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Love makes me fucking sick. I’ve known this about myself since I was twelve years old, and I’ll know it until I’m dead. And I don’t know what possessed me to ask the most in-love man in this house about the woman he’s in love with.
I stand up.
“Cool,” I say. “Cool, cool. Glad it’s going well.”
