“We’re going to be friends,” he said and gave me the same warm smile he’d given me before.
I’M LYING in bed with another guy’s come all over me, I texted Will once I was back in my room, tipsy with alcohol and overwhelmed by the night, the only light my gently glowing phone screen. Still no sign of my new roommate, and I was glad I’d have a little time by myself. As freaked out as I’d been before, and as lonely, I didn’t think I could’ve stood facing a stranger while trying to strip off come-stuck clothes.
It was a lie. My text. I’d taken a shower as soon as I unstuck myself. But still.
I stared at the screen as it dimmed halfway, any hope of a response fading with it. Fuck, I couldn’t believe I actually sent that text. I didn’t know what I was hoping for. That it’d make him jealous? Punish him for not wanting me? Both were ridiculous in light of our earlier conversation. God, there should be a function where you can unsend a text for thirty seconds like there is in e-mail.
Just as I buried my head under the pillow, my phone chimed. My breath came quicker as I looked at Will’s text.
That’s exactly what you should be doing in college. Play safe, kiddo.
I squeezed my eyes shut as if I could unsee the words. Obliterate them. But the hollow feeling gaped in my stomach, and I curled around it, pulling the covers up though it was warm in the room.
The extra-long jersey knit sheets from the bookstore smelled of the plastic package they’d come in. Not comforting at all. No history of sleep or relaxation in their fibers. Just the reminder that they were brand-new, with nothing to make them inviting except time.
Chapter 3
September
I STARTLED awake to the train whistle blowing and wondered for the millionth time why I’d chosen that as my alarm and yet, like always, was too asleep to do anything about it.
Charles was perched on his desk chair, muttering furiously at his computer as usual. For the first week or so that we’d lived together, I’d never seen Charles sleep. I assumed that he just went to bed after me and got up before me, but I legit had a moment once, waking in the middle of the night to find him pacing his side of the room restlessly, where I’d wondered if he had some kind of never-sleeping vampire shit going on.
His trackpad clicks got increasingly more aggressive, and his bony shoulders hunched closer to the screen.
“Are the interwebs hurting you again?”
He wheeled around like he was shocked to see me there, though my alarm had blasted a train whistle through our room not thirty seconds before. He did that a lot: seemed to forget I existed. But it was kind of nice. Like he was so used to me he could forget I was there and just be. I, on the other hand, never forgot about Charles because he practically vibrated this manic energy, and I could feel it from anywhere in the room.
He’d blustered into the dorm room the day after I’d met Milton, a huge lumpy duffel bag strapped to him and four boxes stacked on the seat of a wheeled desk chair that he was pushing like a dolly. He’d stuck out a hand to me, nearly overbalancing the chair and boxes, and introduced himself, explaining that he was supposed to go to MIT but had changed his mind at the last minute—for some reason I’ve never fully understood—and now he was here, only yikes, he didn’t have a room and so they’d put him with me.
The whole explanation took place while he was holding my hand, like he’d forgotten we were touching or that hands even existed. He made the kind of eye contact that would’ve been creepy if he’d seemed douchey, or intimidating if he’d seemed overconfident, but was just intense in the way that everything about Charles was intense.
He was tall and far too thin for his frame, bony shoulders poking at the seams of his T-shirts and knobby spine perpetually bruised from sitting folded into lecture hall seats. His hands and feet looked disproportionately large and his Adam’s apple tested the boundaries of his skin when he swallowed. When he gestured, his long arms and bony hands looked skeletal and precarious. But in front of the computer, hunched and intent, he looked completely at home, just as he did walking down the streets in expansive, long-legged steps, his clothes billowing around him like some kind of Arthurian cloak.
His curly brown hair was always frizzy and mussed because he pulled on it, and he had these permanent dark smudges under his eyes, but when he talked he was animated, and I had the suspicion that he might be some kind of secret genius. He’d said he wasn’t uncommonly smart, he just went to a good high school, had basic reasoning skills, and didn’t allow his personal beliefs to get in the way of reason, which made him seem smarter than most people. But I didn’t know. All that seemed pretty uncommon to me.