Page 14

Rafe stops walking and looks at Koda, then at me. “You’re kicking me out of my own room?”

“I’m giving you a warning.”

“I’m not sleeping at Koda’s.”

“Then stay and listen to me fuck,” I say. “Your call.”

A slow grin comes up across his face. “I’ll go for ten minutes. That’s all you need.”

“Fuck you, Waleska.”

“You’re right,” Rafe says, and starts walking again, loose and cocky, hands in his pockets. “It’ll probably be five.”

3

There Are Rules to Laundry

Kylie

By Monday morning, I’ve learned there’s no socially acceptable answer to How was your weekend? when your weekend started with watching your boyfriend kiss somebody else. Good is a lie. Bad gets a follow-up question. Fine is suspicious.

So when the girl in the next seat leans over before my first class and asks, “Did you do anything fun this weekend?”

I say, “I went to a party.”

This satisfies her for two seconds. “Oh my God, me too. Which one?”

I have no idea what street it was on. “Some house near Corvin Hall.”

“There were, like, six.”

Six. The odds. “Then one of those.”

She laughs and launches into a story about a guy who threw up on a couch, and I write the date at the top of my notebook while the professor fights with the projector. I nod in the right places. I do care, just exactly enough to be grateful somebody’s weekend was fun, since mine wasn’t.

My phone is in my backpack, zipped into the front pocket under a granola bar and a pack of gum, where I’d have to go looking for it. I put it there on purpose. Last night, after an hour of lying on my bed reading Evan’s messages without answering, I turned it face down on my desk and went to brush my teeth. I took my time. I flossed. When I came back, there were two more messages, and this morning there was one.

Evan: Can we please talk?

I noticed what was missing before I’d finished reading it, sitting on the edge of my bed with one sock on: no Ky, no I love you, no I’m sorry. The absence landed as a little lurch in my stomach, and I hated myself for it. I have better things to do with my brain right now. I have a whole list.

The projector finally flickers on. The professor introduces herself again, because half the room is still adding and dropping and there are new faces scattered through the rows. Laptops glow everywhere, and three people in the front row already look like they’re preparing questions. I like the professor anyway. She talks fast and doesn’t slow down for anyone, and when she passes the syllabi down the rows she says, “This class has a participation component, so if your plan was to disappear into the furniture for fifteen weeks, adjust.”

Behind me, a guy whispers, “Fuck,” and my mouth tugs up before I can stop it.

For fifty minutes, I try to think about something else, and Evan keeps finding ways in through the stupidest doors. The professor says the word pattern, and I’m counting: forty minutes to answer a text, a phone turned face down, a group chat that buzzed twice in a row. The girl beside me twists a piece of hair around her finger while she reads, and I’m back at the party with the dark-haired girl stepping away from him, you told me you were single. Across the room, a phone vibrates against a desk, and my whole body jolts before my brain catches up that it isn’t mine. I press my pen into the page until the tip bleeds a dark dot through the paper.

Then the professor calls on me. I answer. She disagrees. I disagree back, and she raises an eyebrow and asks me to defend it, so I do, and for four full minutes, Evan doesn’t exist. There’s just the question, the heat in my face that has nothing to do with him, and the satisfaction of being right about something, or possibly wrong. She moves on either way, and my brain goes straight back to him.

Outside, campus has settled into its weekday shape. The welcome-week tables still line the path, but people walk past them faster now, eyes forward, like they’ve all agreed to pretend they know where they’re going. A guy on a bike nearly takes out two girls in front of the student center. Somebody’s handing out flyers for an improv club and looks so tired that I take one just so he has one less. By the time I get back to Corvin Hall, I have three flyers, an iced coffee I didn’t need, and a blister on the back of my heel that gets angrier with every step.

Tessa is at her desk when I walk in. I’m dumping everything onto my bed when she says behind me, “You’re bleeding.”

I look down where I feel it. The new sandals have rubbed the skin raw, and there’s a small smear of red above the strap. “Great.”

“I have Band-Aids.”

“Of course you do.”