Chapter 10
ten
LOCKE
I have one specific regret about our movie marathon night.
I didn’t tell Rosie what happened with my dad earlier that day.
At first, I hadn’t even considered telling her. It was more than enough for me to be included in her plans. The apartment is equally shared, but I always felt like the nights she spent cooped in front of the television set belonged just to her.
Her safe space. Her area and hobby I don’t want to encroach on, regardless of it technically being split between us. But she extended the opportunity to me, and I’m grateful I took it.
I’m more comfortable in our dorm. Before that night, it was almost like I existed there because it was where my belongings were, not because it’s where I wanted to be.
Now, though, two weeks after that first movie marathon, I don’t know if I’ve ever lived somewhere more comfortable.
“Good morning,” Rosie sang in a cheery voice the following Sunday afternoon, her matching pajama set wrinkled around her body. She called it morning, but with how late we stayed up binging movies, I don’t think either of us woke up before lunchtime.
“Good morning.” I answered back, a lazy but easy smile falling onto my face. I felt less nervous with her. The night before, we talked so much and learned things about one another. New things, pointless things, meaningful things.
At the time, I was so happy none of it came back to my dad. Years and years of every conversation connected to him resulted in that night feeling like a breath of fresh air. I didn’t want to let it go.
I think that’s why I stayed up until four a.m. on the couch just talking to her. It was easy and fun.
But that Sunday afternoon, when she asked if I wanted to study, I hated that I had to say no. I hated that I didn’t explain the drama from the day prior, and that the reports he wanted couldn’t wait another minute.
When she frowned for a split second and forced her lips into a smile right after, I wished I had told her about the day at his office.
“That’s okay.” She tried to reassure me, but I was already regretting it. I wanted to sit on the couch and study with her.
Rosalie told me the night prior—timidly, under her breath—what kind of scores she pulled together in academics. I guessed she’d be smart. It’s a given in any engineering program, and even more so in financial engineering.
I couldn’t have predicted she secured top honors in undergrad, and a perfect transcript so far in graduate school. It’s much more than I can say of my own.
“Could we do another day?”
I sounded so hopeful. I tucked my hands so deep into my pajama pockets, they could’ve been stitched into the fabric. I’m not sure why I was worried, though. I should’ve known Rosie would smile back at me, nodding enthusiastically.
“Of course. Anytime we’re both free. You know where I live.”
“Anytime” didn’t happen for a while.
As it turns out, Rosie and I both share a secret love of procrastination. We made excuses to go through another three movie nights, and one night where I booted up my favorite video game and let her explore the open world.
“Anytime” turned into tonight—after a Wednesday lecture half-filled with things I didn’t understand, and half-filled with death glares I threw at Trent. He hasn’t tried to talk to me again. That’s for the best.
Over our cramped and aged dining room table, Rosie points to different parts of my assignment. Every word she says makes me hate her ex, and his brothers, more and more.
Listening to her explain this is different than sitting in that lecture hall. My professor’s voice is always so dull, sounding painfully tired of the formulas and coursework. But Rosie’s face lit up when I flipped my notebook open and showed her equations I’ve struggled through for years.
There’s a bright sparkle in her eyes. There’s a joy in her voice when she goes over how X becomes six and division becomes subtraction, and a passion beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else. No industry professional I’ve been forced into meeting has ever oozed with a love for math like this.
“That make sense, right?” She asks, grin unbridled and blinding.
“No. Not at all.” It should be sad how hopeless I am on this topic, but I smile too.
“Locke. Come on. There must be some part of you that gets a little bit of it?”
Her eyebrows rise above her reading glasses and her expression is hopeful. I hate having to pop her bubble of faith in me.
“I wish. I’m not very good at math.”
Rosalie leans back into her wooden chair, uneven legs sending a creaking sound throughout our dorm. “You want to be a software engineer… but you’re bad at math?”
“Ugh,” I groan and toss my pen onto the opened textbook. “That’s what Billie always says.”
“Sounds like she’s the smart sibling, then.”
My jaw drops. If I weren’t so amused, I’d be offended.
My roommate laughs and shrugs. “What? If you’re bad at math, and Grant really procrastinates at the rate Lil says he does, then Billie doesn’t have much to compete with.”
“Billie’s bad at math too.”
“Is Billie in a STEM program?”
A long sigh gets released from my throat. “No.”
“Exactly.”
I can only keep up the facade of annoyance for a few seconds before chuckling. “Fine. Billie is a better student. Technically. That just means I need to work on my assignments even harder.”
Rosie laughs, pushes her round reading glasses higher up her nose, and a thin strap of her maroon loungewear slips down her shoulder. I find a sudden interest in the assignment in front of me.
“I’m sure you’re not that bad at math.”
“I am.”
“Maybe you’re not. Maybe you just feel that way because I’m good at math.”
Her voice doesn’t teeter into a gloating tone. It doesn’t raise with cockiness—it stays level. Like what she said isn’t a compliment to her; It’s just a fact of life.
“You are good at math.” I repeat her words and find anything but that strap on her shoulder to stare at. “How did you get so good?”
The question held weight in many ways. To keep my focus off that damn piece of fabric, for possible advice on what I could do to not suffer in my classes anymore. And, without knowing, to cause Rosalie’s bright grin to spread across her face. Full of passion and joy.
“To be honest, I’ve always been kind of good at math.
It was always my favorite subject in school.
When my parents immigrated from the Philippines, it was with my Tito, so he lived with us.
When I was in elementary school, he got really into the stock market.
He would dumb it down for me and my brother because he wanted us to feel included in his interests.
My brother was only playing along, but I got really, really into it. ”
“You got really into the stock market when you were a kid?”
She shrugs. “He didn’t make it feel so intense. He described it as people using math to tell the future and then using it to get rich. I was like, ‘Math can make me psychic?!’ I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.”
A long chuckle escapes me. The more I learn Rosie, the less surprised I am by the freeing way she sees things. I’m both jealous and inspired by how she lives her life.
“It was the future-telling that sold you? Not the money?”
“Psh. I’d become rich no matter what I did. I’m just lucky I can become rich from what I love, and what I’m good at.”
She laughs again, but mine dies in my throat.
Rosie is right. About me being—on some levels—good at math. I’m probably better than the average person, but nowhere near the skill set of my peers. Nowhere close to as competent as she is.
And my roommate is lucky to have found something she’s good at, that she loves, and can set her up for a lifetime.
There’s a sinking feeling in my chest. All things considered, our situations are entirely unfair.
We both ended up in the same program, both chasing a master’s degree, and it’s her who cares more.
She’ll dedicate a lifetime of passion and training to her craft, but it’ll be me who advances faster, solely because of my last name.
I’ll get the opportunities she earns, and I don’t even want them.
Our classmates criticize her but praise me. She’s the one sitting here, brilliantly explaining things while I struggle to comprehend numbers on a page. Everything is so unfair.
If I could give up the opportunities I know will come to me, so she gets what she deserves, I would.
Thinking about that, the small regrets I have from our first movie night, and how much I’m dreading seeing my father this weekend, it only feels right to tell her all my truths.
I clear my throat. “Honestly, I’m half-decent at math. My dad gets me where I am now.” It’s quick, but her face falls for a millisecond before she recovers. My chest burns. “I’m not sure how much Liliana has told you about him-”
“Nothing. I mean, she’s told me Grant doesn’t like him.
And she implied you have some… issues with him.
” Her hand traces her arm before pushing the strap back up her shoulder.
I should look away while she painstakingly fixes it, but I hang onto the movement like I do to her words.
“She didn’t tell me any personal stuff, though. She would never.”
I wring my hands under the table and tell myself to focus on the topic, and not the piece of fabric already creeping down her skin again.
“Sounds like her. There’s a lot to tell. Don’t want to get too much into it.”
Without thinking, I reach up to lift and pull and push on the frame of my glasses.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I do want to tell you.”
Her deep brown eyes are inviting, like the day we met. “Are you sure? You’re nervous.”
I open my mouth to say something—an explanation for Saturday, ideally—but it never comes. Rosalie’s lips lift into a small, comforting smile, and whatever I would’ve said gets lost.
“Your glasses. When you’re nervous, you fidget with them.”
She’s so sure when she says it, a thick accent of confidence in her. I fixate on the pair of glasses she’s wearing—how it’s tilted just a tad, and she doesn’t seem to twitch.
In the seconds I ponder how and why she’s so certain about this, I lift my hand to my glasses again, and she smirks.
“See?”
She shrugs. The strap of her top falls again. The lump in my throat gets swallowed.
Yes, I definitely see.
“I don’t know why I’m nervous.”
Yes, I definitely do.
I pay too much attention to Rosie’s hand when it reaches up to adjust her top, then moves over our textbooks to pat my forearm. More attention than any one person should afford such a common sequence of events.
“You don’t have to know. It’s okay. When you feel better about it, tell me.” A deep sigh leaves my body when she pulls her hand back and taps my assignment. “Let’s do this first and we’ll have a heart-to-heart later. Whenever. We live together. There’s a fuck ton of time.”
Part of me wants to blurt it all out, but Rosalie makes a point to throw every formula and equation at me, at a pace, with no breaks. It doesn’t allow time to bring the topic up again, but it does make me memorize stuff that becomes useful in my lecture the next morning.
I consider telling her on Friday, but it still doesn’t feel right. She lets me put on a list of anime movies and is so excited to ask questions about storylines and artwork. I can’t bring myself to insert family trauma in the middle of it.
When the time is right, I’ll feel it. I’ll know.