9. Sadie
Nine
Sadie
God, I want to throw my alarm clock across the room, but I can’t because my alarm clock is also my phone. Throwing the cover off, I sit up on my bed and get up to get the coffee going.
The moment I open the door, I freeze.
New flowers.
They are dark purple-violet, fresh, and sitting in the vase like they grew there overnight.
Which they didn't, because that's not how flowers work. My door was locked. I know because I checked it five times, and there’s no way someone is getting through the window, my dorm is on the fifth fucking floor. So how the hell did they get there?
I stand there for a good ten seconds, just looking at them. Hating the fact that they’re gorgeous.
This is the second time now. The second time I woke up to fresh flowers in a room I locked before I went to sleep.
The thing is, and I'm aware this says something about me, my first feeling isn't fear. It's not even confusion, not really.
Someone is doing this deliberately. Someone who knows where I live, has access to this building, and has decided I should have fresh violets on my kitchen counter when they feel like it.
I should probably find that scary and make sure the alarm is even working. Yet the biggest question I have is How are they getting into my dorm room when it’s a fucking card to enter, it’s not even a key?
I walk over to the flowers and smell them.
They’re faintly sweet, just at the edge of noticeable.
The morning light is coming through the window at an angle that makes the whole kitchen look warmer than it is, and honestly, they do make the room look better.
That's the most unsettling part. Whoever is doing this has genuinely good taste.
I make a coffee for myself, lean on the counter staring at the flowers, looking at them, and turning it over in my head.
I have one too many questions. Who is it? How are they getting into my apartment? Am I the only one getting them? I could ask Juno if she lives on this floor, but if she doesn’t then she’ll be worried and want to be here all the time.
My phone beeps from my room, and I walk back, looking around to make sure there is nothing else out of place.
Juno
Meet you at Grounds in 30 mins.
Placing my coffee on the table beside me, I quickly get in the shower, and go about my day, wondering who is coming into my dorm and not hurting me.
Juno spots me walking through the door at Grounds and her face does the thing where she's been waiting to say something since she woke up and is physically holding it in until I sit down. I can’t help my smile as I look over at the server who is used to us coming in all the time.
“The usual?” he asks.
I smile and nod. “Yes, please.”
“I’ll bring it over to you,” he says as he turns around to grind the coffee beans. "Okay," Juno says immediately. "Yesterday."
"Good morning to you too,” I joke, placing my coat on the back of the chair as I sit down.
"Yeah, yeah, morning. Yesterday. Spill.” Juno leans in closer as if I’m about to tell her the biggest secret ever.
"I told you everything yesterday, and it was an accident."
"You spilled coffee on Miles Crawford and then just left." She says it the way you'd say someone had won the lottery and then handed the ticket back. "You just walked away, and he brought you a coffee. I want details."
"He told me to watch where I was going, and I didn’t walk away. He brought me a coffee and he walked away.”
The table goes briefly quiet in the way that means everyone has an opinion and is deciding the order in which to deliver them and, knowing my friends, I’m going to hear all of them.
"Okay first of all," Juno starts.
"Here we go," Bree says.
"First of all, you had him. Right there. Coffee everywhere, perfect excuse to offer to sort it out, get his number, something"
"I was not going to offer to sort out his T-shirt, Juno." I thank the barista for my coffee, and even though I only had one thirty minutes ago, I feel like I really need this, particularly if they’re going to keep asking me questions about the spilled coffee yesterday.
"Why not?"
"Because that's insane." What world is she living in? Surely, she doesn’t think the Crawford twins are on the same level as us. “You’re insane, have you seen them, they look like they date and fuck models, not girls who look like me.”
"It's not insane, it's an in, there's a difference." She tears a piece of her croissant off. "You completely wasted it, and they sleep with girls at college, and they look like the models." Juno says, making us all laugh.
"I didn't waste anything, and like you just said, they sleep with model looking girls, and I’m far from a model.” I point to myself.
"You look amazing, and he's stupid if he thinks you don’t.” Cara adds her opinion.
"She's doing the face," Maya says.
"What face?" I question.
"The thinking face… are you thinking about him?” Maya looks around to make sure no one is listening to the conversation, the last thing I need is the college spreading things about me.
"I don't have a face."
"You do have a face," Cara says, without looking up from her coffee.
"Go talk to him," Juno says. "Next time you see him, just go up and…"
"Absolutely not." I’ve never been the girl to just go talk to a guy. I mean, I’ve always wanted to try but always too scared. Maybe that is why I like my camera, everything happens behind a lens, no one is there to judge you. It’s more of a behind closed doors thing.
"Why?"
"Because he told me to watch where I was going and walked away to his brothers’ table. That is not an invitation, that is a stay out of my way comment,” I continue but stop when Maya talks again.
"Some men are just bad at invitations," Maya says wisely.
"Some men are also just not interested," Bree says, equally wise. "He's not interested," Juno says, pointing at Bree. "Cold rude is different from uninterested rude." I don’t even know what that means.
"Can we please stop ranking the types of rude."
"She has a point though," Maya says to Bree. "If he wasn't interested, he would have just said sorry and moved on."
"He didn't say sorry," I say. "I said sorry. He said, ‘Watch where you're going.’"
There’s another brief silence between us all. I know I’m right and they are crazy.
"Okay that is a little cold," Maya admits.
"Thank you."
"But also kind of…"
"Don't say hot."
"I wasn't going to say hot." She was so going to say hot. "I was going to say, interesting."
The door opens, and Juno glances over, then her expression changes. The smile spreads on her lips, and for some crazy reason I already know who's walked through the door.
Mason Crawford comes in as if he owns the general concept of a room. Behind him, half a step back, with his hands in his jacket pockets, and his eyes doing a slow sweep of the space the way they always seem to, is Miles. I know this because I’ve been watching him whatever chance I get.
Something in my chest just stops, then starts again at a slightly different pace.
"Oh," Juno says, very quietly, directly at me.
"Don't," I say, at the same volume.
They go to the counter. Miles doesn't look at our table, not even once. He orders something, says something to Mason that makes Mason laugh, and stands there looking like he's thinking about seventeen things that have nothing to do with anyone in this room.
"Sadie." Juno's voice is gentle and deeply amused. "You cannot get into that man's bed by staring at him from across a coffee shop."
Maya chokes on her drink.
Bree closes her eyes briefly. "She's not wrong."
"I'm not staring." I try to fight my case, which is hard when I actually am staring.
"You haven't blinked in forty-five seconds," Cara says.
I blink deliberately, looking back at the table and pick up my coffee, taking a very long sip while the girls descend into laughter which gets looks from the tables around us. They don’t stop laughing.
Miles and Mason both look over at our table. How can they not? My friends are laughing so hard at the moment, and everyone is looking at us.
Miles collects his order, says something to the girl behind the counter, and walks out.
"You should have talked to him when you had the chance," Juno says, still laughing.
"I hate all of you."
"No, you don't."
She’s right, I don't.
***
My communications professor is called Dr. Alton, and she has the energy of someone who genuinely loves what she teaches and has made peace with the fact that not everyone in the room feels the same way. I like her.
She starts the class, and the first thing she tells everyone is.
“If your essay isn’t handed in by the end of the week, you will fail.
To the ones who have, well done, and I will hand them back to you.
” She starts walking through the rows, and I make a note and underline that I need to hand mine in.
I still have a lot of changes I need to make.
She stops in front of me and places a paper with a grade on it. "Really strong work," she says. "Confident argument, well-sourced. This is the standard I'd like to see from you going forward."
I look down at the paper in my hand.
Then I look at it properly.
The title is correct. My name is right. The formatting is mine. I recognize the font, the margins, and the way I set up the header. But the words underneath are not mine. I know this because I know my own style, my own voice and I know how I put sentences together. This isn't how I write.
This is much better than how I write.
The argument is structured in a way that mine wasn't. It wasn't even close to this. The citations are sources I'd never found, pulling from journals I didn't know I had access to. The conclusion lands cleanly on a point I'd been circling for three drafts without ever quite reaching an ending.
It's good. It's genuinely, uncomfortably good.
I read it twice while Dr. Alton moves on to the next row. Then a third time, slower, looking for something that might explain it, a section I wrote while was half asleep and forgot about, or a draft I'd saved without realizing.