“They’re already dead,” I said.
Suddenly, a light flickered on, and the room was swirling with activity, anesthesiologists pushing the bed forward to place a breathing tube, a medical student losing his glasses in the yellow-stained tangle of sheets in the patient’s bed as he did compressions. Dr. Makinen stood, ghoulishly tall and perfectly still, at thefoot of the bed, peering at me from behind thin-rimmed glasses. I hadn’t noticed him there before.
“How could you let this progress?” he said calmly, his voice preternaturally loud against the dissonance. “You call yourself a doctor?”
On the bed, the patient began to buck, their chest arching to resist the compressions, their withered hands raised toward the ceiling. Then, between one blink and the next, they were facing me.
Ezra stared at me through cloudy blue eyes. The mottling had progressed to his face, bruises blossoming up his neck like ink crawling along a wet page. A tear pooled and crested in his eye before streaking to the corner of his dry, cracked mouth.
“You left me,” he croaked.
I stepped back, horrified, and then his face changed, became rounder, his hair lengthening and becoming coarse, the eye sockets widening, irises darkening to black.
My mother.
“You ruined me,” she said.
My chest seized, and I scrambled backward, searching for an exit. But the scene chased after me, the room shifting to keep up like a predator as Prudence Boateng spoke.
“I was right to never love you,” she said, her voice echoing in my skull like she was speaking directly into my mind, and finally, with effort, I wrenched myself awake.
I sat up, cradling my head. It was still bright outside; by the time flashing on my digital clock across the room, my attempt at a midday nap had lasted only forty-five minutes. My mother’s face lingered in the darkness behind my closed eyelids. It had been thirteen years since I’d last seen her in person, and so in my mind, she’d remained forever in her late thirties, not so much older thanI was now. I wondered, not for the first time, where she was, what she was doing. Whether she was even alive.
And then I shook my head. I’d filed for emancipation at age sixteen, and in that time, Prudence Boateng had made minimal effort to establish contact. Surely she could have found me if she wanted to. I had to be one of the more prominent Josephine Boatengs in the country, and I hadn’t changed my phone number from the one I’d handed her on the day I moved out of her apartment. If I was still a stranger to her, it was because Prudence wanted me to be. And if that fact still gave me grief, well, that just meant I wasn’t as healed as I liked to pretend.
My pillow began to vibrate. I fished out my phone from under it.
“Hey, Dr.B,” my building’s doorman, Raymond, said. “You’ve got a package at the front desk.”
I gritted my teeth, suspicious. I’d played this game before.
“Didn’t realize we got personal phone calls for our packages these days,” I said flatly. “Ezra send something?”
“Yup,” Raymond said brightly. He was a kid, young enough that the shift work didn’t wear on him, brazen enough to pull the kind of stunts an older man knew could cost him his job, like accepting bribes to guilt his tenants into picking up unwanted gifts.
Groaning, I tossed away my sheets, threw on a pair of athletic shorts, and made my way down to the lobby.
The irony of trying to get over Ezra Adelman was that I’d never wanted anything to do with him in the first place.
College may have been a place where reedy teenagers went to become capable adults, but I arrived at Gertrude B. Elion University fully grown. Unlike my roommates, I had already paid taxes, found roommates on Craigslist, worked retail, challengedmy bank’s overdraft fees. My admittance to a prestigious college was a golden ticket, a chance for a girl like me—poor, Black, effectively orphaned—to find stability through education. There would be no delving into dormitory drama; no house, frat, or pool parties; and certainly no boys, who would offer little more than obstacles to my goal of independence.
And then, one fated Friday night, a very drunk Ezra Adelman barreled into my dormitory room.
“What the fuck?” I’d said, holding my pillow in front of me like a weapon. Ezra didn’t know me, but I knew him. Everyone at Elion University did. In our ritzy private college full of filthy rich trust-fund kids, he was the filthiest and the richest; his matriculation at Elion was hailed by an article in the local newspaper:ceo of knydus buys $1.3 million home near elion university campus. Adelman sightings filled the class Facebook groups, grainy shots of the handsome heir buying coffees at the library café or running across campus in the rain to make it to his next class, accompanied by heart-eye emojis. We shared a class, American Literature, and on the first day, it had taken the professor fifteen minutes to settle everyone down after Ezra had walked in.
Most of the time, I felt sorry for him, for his inability to disappear. At that moment, however, I was very pissed to find him in my room.
“What are you doing here?” I’d said when he didn’t respond. “Get out!”
Ezra raised bleary eyes to me. I remembered thinking that they were jarringly blue, stark against his pale skin.
“Oh shit,” he slurred, pushing his hair off his forehead. “Ellie didn’t tell me she had a roommate. Sorry. I was just going to take a piss.”
“There’s a common bathroom!” I said. “Use that!”
Ezra shook his head, already making a turn into our bathroom.
“It’s occupied,” he said. To my horror, he didn’t close the door, and I caught the sound of his zipper being undone, our toilet seat being lifted, urine hitting the center of the bowl. When he reemerged (after washing his hands, thank goodness), he grinned up at me. “You’re in my American Lit class, aren’t you? I don’t think we’ve met.”
