The Roommate Arrangement

Chapter One

One

YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST brush with a musty, crusty athletic sock. At this point, I’m so well-acquainted, I have only myself to blame for thinking I was safe reaching thoughtlessly into the back pocket of Starr’s passenger seat, just because soccer season ended a month ago.

“Oh, gross,” I say as I pull my hand out, a pair of stiff, pungent soccer socks threaded between my fingers. “God, Starr, when are these even from?” I toss the socks across the back seat, where they land on the floor.

Starr sighs, flicking her blond ringlets over one shoulder. “Who cares? It’s my car.”

“It’s objectively disgusting.”

I look to Leni for confirmation, but she turns her head toward the window, oddly quiet. Her long, dark hair is down, frizzing around her freckled face, making it impossible to see her expression.

I stick my hand into the back pocket of the seat again, unearthing the travel pack of tissues I stashed there the last time I was in Starr’s car.

My allergies are at an all-time high now that summer is here.

After two hours at a party in an old, overgrown paddock, I’m sniffly, and my arms and legs are itchy, skin streaked with red scratch marks.

I need an ice pack and a hot shower, so I’m almost glad when we pass through the unmanned gate into my neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses.

In one week, I won’t have to look at these Stepford houses for months. But tonight I’m relieved to be home.

“Speaking of ‘ew,’ he wasn’t supposed to be back for two more days,” I say when Starr pulls into my driveway behind the crappy silver Honda that belongs to my older brother, Sawyer.

The trunk is latched with a bungee cord; one side mirror hangs by the last desperate threads of decaying duct tape, and the hood is a completely different color from the rest of the car.

Our parents hate the eyesore, but Sawyer refused to let them buy him something parent-approved, acquiring this death trap with his own money two years ago.

The HOA has delivered us several notices about not parking the beater in the driveway, where anyone might have to look at it.

I glance at Starr for a commiserating eye roll, but she doesn’t move, and neither does Leni.

That’s when I know something is really off.

They’ve both been absurdly quiet tonight, even at the party with half our graduating senior class.

Normally Starr would promise to drive and then get wasted, and I’d end up taking us home in her car.

But she didn’t have a single sip of beer all night; neither of them did.

We stood awkwardly in that field, as sober as three undercover cops and looking just as obvious, until Starr finally grabbed Leni’s arm and announced we were leaving.

“Thanks for driving,” I say to Starr when no one speaks. I slide toward the door. Starr is looking at Leni, who continues to stare out the window.

Starr lets out a small, frustrated sound and twists around to look at me. “Blair,” she says, and I stop with my hand on the door. “I have something to say.”

“O… kay? Is this about the party? I only wasn’t drinking because I thought you’d want to—”

“It’s not about the party. It’s about the house.”

My tense shoulders droop in confusion. “What?”

“Leni and I have been talking, and…” She glances at Leni, then grits her teeth. “We don’t know if the three of us should move in together.”

I turn to stare at Leni. In the window’s reflection, I see her pouty mouth, her watery eyes.

She sniffles. Leni is an easy crier—she’s set off by car commercials, dog videos, singing competition shows, and when other people cry about anything.

She’s soft in ways Starr and I are not. Starr is all sharp points and skepticism. I’m blunted edges and logic.

Which is why this moment is not making sense to me.

We’re moving in a week. Leni’s parents bought a house by the school—an investment property—that they’re letting us rent while we’re in college.

It’s two blocks from campus, and when we went to see it three months ago, we’d squealed over the porch swing, the flower boxes, and the sunroom where Leni said she’d spend her time writing, and Starr would nap, and I would work on my miniatures when I had free time.

What could have changed since then?

“What…?” I trail off, confused. “What are you talking about?”

Leni sniffles again, and Starr’s expression softens slightly.

Starr has always felt protective of Leni—of us both.

She fell into the role easily back in middle school, when we all met.

Leni was bullied relentlessly for being a crybaby, and I was bullied for being fat, and Starr was bullied for being poor, but bullying Starr was a bad idea, because she bit back harder, faster, fiercer, and she always, always drew blood.

Now that typical Starr sureness seeps into her expression as she faces me again. She clears her throat. “We don’t want it to ruin our friendship. That’s why we’re doing this now. Sometimes people just… aren’t meant to live together.”

“But—but we haven’t even lived together yet. What…?”

“And we don’t want to move in together and have it mess things up for us later, when we’re stuck together.”

“So Leni’s moving into the house, and we’re…?” I look from Starr to Leni and back. “Where are you going to live?”

Starr winces. “I’m going to live in the house. We’re… I think this came out wrong. Leni and I think it would be better if you didn’t move into the house with us.”

I stare at her, my heart picking up speed as what she’s saying doesn’t just sink in—it whacks me across the face with the force of a major-league swing.

I am jarred into another plane of the multiverse, ears ringing, as my best friends tell me that our dream house-share, where we were supposed to spend the next four years of college bliss together, is no longer mine.

They don’t want me.

“Look, we love you. You’re our best friend. And we always knew you were… kind of a neat freak. But we’re worried that living together might make us hate each other. We don’t want to be micromanaged by you.”

“I’m not micromanaging—”

Starr cuts me off with a pointed look toward the back seat, her green eyes lasered on the socks I tossed away.

“That wasn’t—Come on, Starr, it’s gross! Soccer ended over a month ago!”

“This is exactly what I mean,” she says. “I don’t care about dirty socks. Leni doesn’t either. And if we all move in together, you’ll end up resenting us for being messy, and we’ll resent you for wanting us to keep things pristine—”

“I wouldn’t!”

Starr keeps going, not even a hitch in her words now. “—and we’ll end up hating each other. We don’t want that, right?” She looks at Leni again, her eyes begging for backup, but Leni just continues to cry.

“We wanted to give you time to find a new place,” Starr says when Leni doesn’t jump in. “You’ll be able to get a spot in the dorms or a campus-affiliated apartment—”

I would laugh if my chest weren’t collapsing in on itself. My parents will never, ever go for an apartment. It took seven months of me begging for them to agree to let me live with Starr and Leni, and only because Leni’s parents own the house and promised extremely reasonable rent.

Which leaves the dorms. Three times what I was supposed to pay at the house, easily.

It’s not that we can’t afford it, but I know the first superfluous cost to be cut from the budget will be the one thing I’ve been looking forward to—sculpting classes at Stone & Spiral, Deonne Tran’s studio near campus.

Dread sweeps through me, numbing everything in its path.

“Okay,” I say at last, dragging my gaze to Leni, willing her to look at me. But Leni refuses to turn around even now. “If that’s what you want.”

“We think this is the best option.” Starr’s smile is forced and overly bright, like this will smooth everything over. “We’ll still hang out! We’ll see each other all the time.”

I don’t respond, my throat closing against the threat of tears. As I climb out of the car and start up the driveway, neither of them says a word to stop me.

Goose meets me at the front door, his nails clicking against the hardwood, tail whipping hard.

He sniffs at my shoes, then my shorts, inhaling all the interesting scents of the outside world—the gas station, the paddock, and Starr’s car, which I’m pretty sure has never been cleaned and is an amalgamation of every smell that’s ever wafted inside.

I reach down to pet him but pause as that thought hits me.

Is that why they find me so unbearable? Because I can’t stand the thought of letting the stench of old hot dogs and sweaty soccer uniforms and rotting iced coffees stew in my car?

Because I’ve spent the last four years picking up after them?

I sit on the floor in the entryway and hug Goose into my lap, pressing my face into the tan fur at his neck. Tears burn at the backs of my eyelids.

As I sniffle, the camera bell trills, announcing that someone is nearing the front door. My heart gives a leap as I twist around to peer out one of the sidelights. Maybe it’s Leni and Starr coming back to tell me this was all a big misunderstanding. Obviously they just meant—they meant…

I sag, rolling my eyes as I reach one hand up to fling the door open.

Goose scrabbles in my hold, panting in excitement as our guest is revealed.

Not my friends, returning to apologize and take me back, but the looming figure that has darkened our doorstep for the better part of a decade.

One I was free of for a single blessed year once he and my brother went off to separate colleges in separate cities, hours from each other for the first time in nearly a decade.

With my brother coming home today, I shouldn’t be surprised.