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I’m still smiling when the second notification slides down over his.

Not a text. An email. My Woodbury inbox, which nobody uses except professors and the financial aid office and a club I signed up for at orientation and regret.

The sender’s name sits there in bold.

Rafferty Waleska.

No subject line.

I open it. I don’t mean to. My thumb just does it.

You offered your schedule. Send it.

That’s all. No greeting. No name at the bottom. Five words, like an order he’s placing.

I read it three times.

I said it in a stairwell to make him feel stupid. It was a joke. Not a funny one, but a joke, the kind you make when you know the other person will understand exactly what you mean and hate you for it. And he thought it through, looked up my school email, typed five words, and sent them at eleven at night.

He told me to withdraw my application here. He told me he never wanted to see me again. He stood in that stairwell today and offered to pay a year of my rent to get me off his floor. And now he wants my class schedule so he knows where I’ll be.

I lie there in the dark with the sweater sleeves pulled down over my hands and the phone glowing on my chest, and across the room, Kylie breathes slow and even, and I don’t answer him.

But I don’t delete it, either.

If you want to avoid someone, you don’t ask them where they’ll be.

You already know that. You just stay away.

6

Forty Dollars Minus an Hour of Your Life

Rafe

I stare at my phone all night, waiting for an email back, but there’s no reply. When I wake up, I check it before my feet hit the floor. I have a newsletter from the athletic department. Something from the registrar about spring enrollment. A professor reminding everyone the paper is due Friday, in a font size I can’t miss.

Nothing from her.

I shower and get dressed. Nothing. I stand at the window with the cold coming in and drink half a protein shake and check it again.

She’s the one who offered. She said I can give you my schedule, and I sent her an email to fucking send it to me. Now she’s leaving me hanging.

She hasn’t answered.

For four years, I said something and she did it. Whatever it was. I never waited on Tessa Canten. I said stand up, and she stood up. I said look at me, and she looked. I said withdraw, and she said she would.

I stare at my sent email.

Kennebeck’s on the edge of his bed tying his shoes, a protein bar in his mouth like a cigar. Kylie isn’t here, which is a miracle, and the room smells like his deodorant instead of her shampoo, which is another miracle. I pick my phone up off the sill. Check. Nothing.

“You waiting on something?” Kennebeck says around the bar.

I glare at him. “No.”

He finishes the knot, takes a bite, and goes back to the other shoe.

It pisses me off, so I put the phone in my pocket and leave it there.