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“Oh.”
“Just until the season is over, and we’ve dealt with all this Coronavirus stuff. I need to text Jessop to see if she needs anything, and we have to find out who we’re playing and prepare for them.”
“We should focus on that, yeah. I agree.”
“You’re not mad?” Shay asked.
“No.” Layne shook her head. “Don’t forget your pizza.” She nodded toward the pizza that Shay then grabbed. “Do you want to steal anything else? Ramen? Chips?”
“No, I’ll be okay. Thanks, though,” she replied. “I’ll see you… when I see you, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Layne said.
CHAPTER 12
Shay: I ran out to the campus store the other day and got stuff, but I might have also already eaten most of it. They didn’t have much left there, honestly. I think other students got there first in the rush to prepare to be stuck in our rooms.
Layne read the text message and replied with one of her own.
Layne: It’s been days of this, and we can basically only go from our rooms to the bathroom. How long do you think Coach will want us to keep inside like this? And how did you escape to go to the store?
Shay: I don’t know the answer to that first question. She’s trying to make sure we’re healthy to play, so maybe until we have to leave. I know this thing has been around for a while. Like, people have been getting sick with it for a few months, but I don’t think anyone thought it would get this bad. So, as annoying and boring as it is, we have to do it. At least, she talked to our professors about classes. Also, no one is guarding our doors. I just left. And before you lecture me, I was careful. I had that bandana you gave me on. I looked like an idiot, and people stared, but I tried to just keep away from them, so it’s whatever. I got, like, a bag of stuff to eat between the meals they bring us.
Layne got out of her bed and walked over to her closet. She found a reusable grocery bag she’d gotten at a store months ago and filled it with some of her ramen and chips, along with a few granola and protein bars she kept on hand for whenever she got hungry in class since she couldn’t exactly eat ramen or chips then without annoying the other students with her crunching. She didn’t have anything other than bottled water to drink because, with the exception of coffee and milk in her coffee, water was pretty much the only thing she drank. She supposed she had Gatorade at practices and on game days, but she didn’t have any of that in her room. They’d been bringing them three bottles of water with every meal to make sure they stayed hydrated, so she assumed Shay was good on that front anyway. She pulled open her door, took a look down the empty hall, and hurried to Shay’s door. Then, she knocked on it and hurried back to her own room, closing the door behind her and breathing for the first time.
She remembered how her dad’s cancer had been slow at first but then had ripped through his body and how any little germ could make him get horribly ill. He’d gotten pneumonia once that had barely been dealt with by the doctors, and he’d been in the hospital for weeks. She still blamed herself because she’d caught a cold at school and was pretty sure she’d been the one to get him sick.
When Layne heard her phone ding, she hurried over to where she’d left it on the bed.
Shay: You didn’t have to do that. I’m okay.
Then, another message came in.
Shay: But thank you. The food they bring us isn’t bad, but sometimes, I just want something else. Are you sure you can spare this?
Layne: Yeah. I haven’t eaten much outside of what they bring us. I think I’m actually eating better with this whole routine, weirdly. I used to skip lunch most days because of class or studying. Now, I’m eating it. I’ll probably gain the freshman fifteen I never got because of basketball soon, though.
She added a rolling-on-the-floor laughing emoji to the end of her message and hit send.
Shay: You could gain the freshman twenty and still look good.
Layne’s eyes widened at that message. In the days they’d been trapped in their rooms by their basketball coach who wanted to keep them from getting sick like Jessop, she and Shay had exchanged any number of texts. They hadn’t called each other or used FaceTime yet, but they’d probably sent at least a hundred or two messages back and forth throughout the day. Coach had them on a shower schedule, too, in order to prevent them from possibly infecting the other players on the team, so they hadn’t seen each other at all, and it was strange to Layne how she’d gone from not seeing Shay at all outside of team things, where they were both required to be, to just a few more times before this all happened, and now, all she wanted to do was see her again.
She missed her, and the texts helped, but it wasn’t the same. This was the first message in all of them, though, that was obviously meant to be flirting. Layne had been flirted with a few times in her life that she knew about, but not all that many, and she couldn’t remember her first and only real girlfriend flirting with her at all. They’d just gotten together somehow. The women she’d dated on campus had flirted a bit, which was how they’d ended up going out on dates, but Layne was so bad at it. She didn’t know how to flirt back. When she got a compliment, she never knew if she was supposed to say thank you or compliment the other person right back. Maybe she could just put an emoji on that comment, and they could forget about it entirely.
Shay: You still there?
“Shit,” Layne said and typed.
Layne: Yeah, I’m still here. Sorry. I was just getting my computer. I have homework.
She lied.
Shay: Okay. Should I let you go?
Layne: No, it’s okay. I can multi-task.
Shay: Oh, you can, can you? That’s good to know.
