Just as I’m about to launch into my ten-minute rant about how amazing and special she is, my phone buzzes on the table, flashing my mom’s contact.
My heart lurches in my throat, but I swallow back the anxiety, turning my phone face-down on the coffee table.
“Okay, now wereallyneed to get back to the topic at hand. This was supposed to be a study session,” I say, tapping my pen against my notebook for extra emphasis, and Wren scrambles from the couch as if she’s just remembered the whole reason we’re having a meeting in our living room.
The apartment that we moved into the summer after freshman year has become our sanctuary. It’s part of a quiet complex not too far from campus, spacious bedrooms,a kitchen/living area of our dreams, and a slightly mangled bookshelf that’s pushed up against the wall behind the couch I’m sitting on. Most of our furniture has been thrifted and upcycled, so nothing really looks put-together, but that’s what I love about it. The coffee table is filled with purple candies and usually some sort of cereal dust that Kennedy trails in here after digging her hand into a cereal box and collapsing on the couch.
It smells like the burn of cookies that Wren stress-baked last night and the burritos we ordered to cheer her up. A lavender diffuser that we all silently agreed on not changing. The faint smell of weed. Fresh laundry. The distinct smell of secondhand book pages that have probably travelled more places than we have. It’s a weird combination and a little off-putting but this place isours, and it’s perfect.
Wren returns to her position in front of The Whiteboard we’ve wheeled into the living room. Compared to the six-foot board, she’s not that much shorter than it, but she stands a little straighter anyway, pushing her blonde hair over her shoulder.
“Well, wewerehelping you study, but you definitely weren’t listening,” Wren argues.
I sigh heavily. “I am listening.”
“Really? Then what was the last thing I said?” I open my mouth, about to make a snarky remark about the literal last thing she said, but she pins me with a look. “Before all the sex position talk.”
“Something about numbers . . . ?”
Kennedy gives my arm a chaste slap as she stage-whispers, “Oh my God. Scarlett Voss has no idea what she’s talking about.”
“Now can you tell how badly I need this study session?” I groan out the words before I press the heels of my palms to my eyes.
Sticking my face into a pile of textbooks and overwhelming myself with stats and business plans is usually the only thingthat can calm me down. It soothes my brain in a way nothing else can. But since the middle of last semester, my usual cure has become like something foreign to me.
My friends are clearly concerned by my lack of motivation to study, which is why Wren agreed to host an intervention—or, as she calls it, study session—to help me prepare for my fashion and business module this semester. Kennedy insisted she’d help too, but has been too busy fussing over the right snacks to be of much help.
Neither of them are majoring in business analytics like I am, but Wren’s convinced her skills from her English degree and Kennedy’s skills from communications will help.
“I’m sorry, okay?” I say quietly, lifting my head out of my hands. “Can you go through that last part one more time?”
Wren juts out her bottom lip, dropping the pen into the holder at the bottom of The Whiteboard with a sigh before sitting on the edge of the coffee table in front me.
Okay.I guess we’re giving up.
It’s official. I’m a lost cause.
I drop my head onto the back of the couch with a dramaticthud, hitting my head a couple more times to get the message across that I am absolutely fucked.
Kennedy shuffles closer to my side, dropping her head to my shoulder, her curly afro tickling my neck. I’d be pushing her away if she wasn’t the literal definition of a puppy, so I can’t help but snuggle a little closer into her side.
“Scarlett,” Kennedy says softly. She hesitates and though it’s only for a second, I can tell how badly she doesn’t want to say what she’s going to say next. “Maybe it’s time that you—”
“No, I’m not going to tell my professor or my parents,” I say, swallowing hard. “I’m failing a class, I’m not dying.”
“Don’t they mean the same thing to you?”
I shake my shoulder to bump Kennedy’s head, and she laughs. “Ken, you’re not helping.”
“Fine, then what will help? Scarlett Voss doesn’t quit, remember?”
“I said that when I was, like, thirteen. Why do you still remember that?”
“Because it was iconic,” Kennedy says seriously, and I roll my eyes. “I know it isn’t what you want to hear, but you can’t keep ignoring your parents forever.”
“Oh, I can, and I will,” I grumble.
It’s then that my phone decides to ring again, and this time I throw it across the room, watching it tumble into the kitchen.
