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“Okay.”

I close my eyes. “Sorry.”

I don’t know why I apologize. It comes out automatically. His mouth moves, something sadder than a smile, and then he turns and walks away down the path with his hands in his pockets, that stupid piece of hair still sticking up at his crown. I watch him until he reaches the corner, and I’m still watching when he turns it. Then I make myself go inside.

When I walk into my dorm, Tessa is on her bed scrolling. The sound of the door makes her look up, and she goes still.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “Or do you still not want to talk about it?”

It’s a fair question, and my bottom lip wants to go. I breathe in and walk to my desk like I have something to do there. I don’t. I straighten the papers and say, “I don’t know. He said nothing was wrong with us.”

I stare at my closed laptop and try not to cry. I don’t know why that’s the sentence that stuck. Out of two weeks and complicated, it’s nothing was wrong.

Tessa doesn’t move. She waits.

I sit down and open my laptop, because I have forty pages of reading due tomorrow and apparently being cheated on doesn’t come with an academic exemption. For fifteen minutes, neither of us talks. Tessa goes back to her phone, then opens her laptop, and after a while, she stands.

“Do you want to go get food?” she asks. “Milkshakes always make me feel better.”

I shut the laptop so fast it snaps. “Yes.”

When we walk out, Tessa looks both ways and moves quickly towards the kitchen. We make it as far as the end of the hall. The door to the floor kitchen is propped open, and the whole hallway smells like something frying, and Tessa stops.

“I have dumplings,” she says.

“What happened to milkshakes?”

She tilts her head. “You need to eat. I have ice cream. I can put it in the blender with milk.”

“Okay. Yeah.”

I’m not arguing with anything she says tonight, because only one sentence is running through my head, over and over, like a song I can’t get out. That’s the fucked-up part. Nothing was wrong.

The communal kitchen has two ovens, four burners, one microwave, and an ongoing disagreement inside the refrigerator. The shelves are labeled with layers of masking tape, crossed out and rewritten on top of each other. The only other person here is a girl from the end of the hall microwaving a mug of soup and scrolling on her phone, and when the microwave beeps, she takes her soup and leaves.

Tessa doesn’t go straight to the freezer. She goes to the doorway first and looks down the hall in both directions, toward the stairwell and then toward the elevator, with one hand on the frame. Then she comes back in and goes to the stove on the far side of the room, the one with its back to the wall, where she can see the door.

I don’t ask. Tessa does things like that. She checks the peephole before she opens our door, even when she knows it’s me. She eats with her back to the wall in the dining hall. The first week I asked her once if she was expecting somebody, and she said no so flatly that I never asked again. I’ve decided she’s a hermit crab. She lives in a shell, carries it everywhere, and only comes out when she’s sure the beach is empty.

“Sit,” she says.

There’s one chair, with a crusty ring on the seat from somebody’s cup. I sit on it anyway.

She takes the dumplings out of the freezer, a pan out of the cabinet, and a bottle of oil out of a bag she apparently brought from our room without my noticing. She doesn’t use the communal oil. She doesn’t trust it. She pours a little into the pan, turns the burner on, and waits with her arms crossed, watching the oil. She doesn’t ask me anything. She doesn’t tell me he doesn’t deserve me, or that I’ll be okay, or that everything happens for a reason. She lays the dumplings in the pan one at a time in a neat circle, and they hiss, and she turns them with a pair of chopsticks without looking at me once.

Out in the hallway, a door slams. Somebody laughs, a deep, loud guy’s laugh, and footsteps come toward the kitchen. Tessa’s chopsticks stop. Her whole body goes still, and her eyes go to the door.

Two guys walk past without looking in. One of them is carrying a pizza box.

Tessa’s shoulders come down, and she turns the next dumpling. Hermit crab. Anxiety will slowly kill you, I swear.

“Almost done,” she says.

She makes the milkshakes in the blender, vanilla ice cream and milk, and then, after a second of thinking about it, a few Oreos. She pours it into two cups and hands me one. I take a sip and lean back.

“Mm. You were right. This is exactly what I needed.”

She smiles. “Can’t go wrong with cookies and cream.”