Chapter 19
A CRISIS OF FAITH
SIMONE
My desk lamp hums, a tiny blue sun burning a hole in the center of my forehead.
There are five—no, six—empty coffee cups orbiting the base, some gone cold, some growing new life.
The surface of the desk is a shame spiral of highlighted notes, torn-out notebook pages, fat textbooks wedged open to the same chapter, their spines cracked and splayed like broken birds.
Finals week is a slasher movie, and I’m the first girl to hear a noise in the basement.
I’ve been sitting here for three hours. My right leg is numb, pins and needles marching up my thigh, but I haven’t moved because I keep telling myself that if I stay perfectly still, I’ll be able to finish this review packet before my brain turns to oatmeal.
I keep telling myself that if I read the same paragraph from American Literature one more time, it’ll imprint on my retinas and I’ll have something to offer at the altar of tomorrow’s exam.
But all I can think about is him.
This is supposed to be a Simone’s New Leaf Moment.
I swore to myself that after everything with Liam—after the apology, the confession, the psychoanalysis and the weirdly tender recitations of Rilke—I would focus.
I would get my shit together, ace my finals, and decide what kind of person I wanted to be, independent of anybody’s expectations.
I would not become a cliche: the girl who self-immolates over a man.
I would not, I repeat, not lose my scholarship or my self-respect or my mind.
But then there’s this: the lamp casting a shadow so stark it splits my face in half, the words on the page wriggling away from me, my phone blinking from its exiled spot on the windowsill, begging me to pick it up and spiral.
There is nothing in this room that doesn’t remind me of Liam.
Not the battered paperback of The Scarlet Letter (his favorite), not the borrowed sweatshirt draped over my chair like a dead thing, not even the scratchy desk chair that he once said made my ass look “ripe and swollen.” Where does he even get this stuff?
The comment made me giggle and then soon, we were tearing at each other’s clothes.
I shift, stretch my neck until it cracks. I can hear Andie somewhere in the hall, her voice rising and falling with someone on speaker. Her laughter sounds close, then far, as if the whole building is shrinking and expanding around me.
The page in front of me is splattered with yellow highlighter.
The topic is Hawthorne, and the note I’ve scrawled in the margin reads, in all caps: “PURITANISM = SHAME AS SOCIAL CONTROL.” Next to that, a little doodle of a woman in a whale-bone bodice, her mouth twisted in a scream.
Liam once made me do a close reading of that novel and told me I had a mind “as sharp as a guillotine.” He said it in bed, with his hand curled around the back of my neck, and I wanted so badly to believe it was true.
Now I stare at the words, but all I see is the subtext: am I just the sum of my traumas, the aggregate of all the secrets I’ve learned to keep?
Is my future anything more than a negative space left behind by his desire?
I should care about the test tomorrow. I should care about my GPA, my future, my rent, my ability to stay on at Century.
But all I can think is: What if I never get over Liam Thomas?
What if this is all I’m ever going to be?
I let my head fall onto the desk. The paper is cool against my cheek. For a second, I think about falling asleep right here, letting my body shut down and reboot without my permission. Maybe when I wake up, the world will have rearranged itself and I’ll know what to do.
A text buzzes on my phone: one short vibration, then silence.
I don’t look. I won’t look.
I stare instead at the ceiling, at the pop-corned texture, at the way the lamp shadows creep up the walls like mold.
I wonder what my life would be if I’d never met Liam Thomas.
Would I be a better student? Would I be happier?
Sadder? Would I still be convinced I was “broken,” or would I have found a way to want something that wasn’t just a reflection of what someone else wanted from me?
I wonder if I’ll ever learn how to stop.
The heat in the room is stifling. I kick off my slippers, pull my knees to my chest. The highlighter slips from my hand and rolls off the desk, vanishing into the fossil record of snacks and dust bunnies under the bed.
What I want: I want to pass all my classes. I want to be proud of finishing something. I want to not feel like a walking repository for other people’s needs. I want to stop looking at every man and wondering what they’ll take from me.
But if I’m honest—and that’s the assignment, isn’t it? To be honest, at least in your own mind?—I want him. Even after everything, even after the contract and the ugly truths and the sharp, bright humiliation of being a variable in his plan, I want him.
Maybe that’s why I can’t study.
Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep.
The highlighter clatters against the metal leg of the bed. I flinch, then laugh. I’m losing my mind.
In the window, the reflection is unkind: my hair in a tangled bun, dark circles under my eyes, lips bitten raw. I look older than my age, but also impossibly young. A girl who tried on adulthood and found it too big in the shoulders.
I push the lamp away, plunge the room into a gentler dusk.
The computer’s screen saver is a carousel of old photos: me and Andie at the lake, me in a Halloween cat costume, me at my last birthday party, grinning like I’m still capable of joy.
The Simone in those photos is an artifact, a record of a person who might still be in here, somewhere, if I can dig her out.
Another text. The screen lights the window with its false dawn. I close my eyes, try to remember the last time I truly wanted something. Not because of a man, not because of my transcript, not because I was afraid. Just because it was mine to want.
I can’t.
That’s the saddest part.
I lean back in my chair and let my eyes close, just for a minute.
Outside, a siren wails. Inside, the radiator ticks. The world goes on, indifferent.
I tell myself I’ll wake up in twenty minutes and get back to work.
But for now, I just want to feel nothing.
For now, nothing is enough.
The next day is all static and migraine aura, the morning sun coming in harsh and low through the grime-streaked dorm window.
At some point in the night, I must have migrated from the desk to my bed, because I wake to the feel of a heavy fleece blanket and the faint, percussive rattle of my phone alarm.
I sit up and blink at the room. There is no order.
My notes have slithered off the desk and onto the floor, fanning out like a tide of yellow and pink.
A box of granola bars has been cannibalized to a pile of wrappers, and my laptop is asleep with its lid half-closed, as if it, too, gave up on the night.
I’m staring at nothing when Andie bursts in, holding two coffees overhead like a conquering champion.
“Morning!” she stage-whispers, then, seeing my face, dials it down to a gentle: “Hey, sleepyhead.”
The girl is a sight. She’s wearing leggings printed with cartoon avocados and a hoodie from our campus mental health awareness week. Her hair is in a lopsided braid that would make Elsa weep. She looks, in a word, functional, which is the most anyone can hope for during finals.
I squint at the coffee. “Is that—”
“Of course,” she says, setting one down on the edge of my bed. “Triple shot, oat milk, extra sugar, and a dash of whatever cinnamon dust they put on top.”
She flops onto the desk chair, sending a stack of old readings tumbling to the floor. “Jesus, Simone, you’ve built a fort in here.”
“I was studying.”
Andie raises an eyebrow, then gestures to the mess. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
She has a point. There are, I realize, four tabs of TikTok open on my computer and a not-insignificant amount of time lost to online quizzes about which American Novel Character I most resemble. (The answer is always Hester Prynne, which probably isn’t a good thing.)
Andie sips her coffee, watching me over the rim of the cup. “You didn’t sleep again, did you?”
I shake my head, then reach for the coffee and take a grateful swig. The bitterness is so violent it makes my gums tingle, but the aftertaste is pure, liquid hope.
Andie sets her cup down, folds her hands, and waits. There’s an art to Andie’s silences: not heavy, not judging, just open. She waits until you fill them yourself.
I fidget with the edge of my blanket, picking at a loose thread. “You ever feel like you’re living someone else’s life?” I say, not really expecting an answer.
She nods, solemn. “I feel like I’m playing a background character in a sitcom that’s been running too long. Everyone’s in season five, but I’m still stuck in the pilot.”
I laugh, and it feels less fake than anything else I’ve done all week.
We get down to the business of finals: comparing note cards, rehashing the finer points of Puritan shame, diagramming the love triangles in The Great Gatsby until it looks like a conspiracy board.
For a while, it almost works. We’re two students, battered by the end of term, the whole world boiling down to bullet points and caffeine.
But Andie sees through me, as always.
After an hour, she leans forward and drops the hammer: “Do you want to talk about it?”
I keep my eyes on the notes. “Talk about what?”
She waits.
I cave. “I saw Liam yesterday.”
Andie’s face doesn’t change, but her fingers tighten on her mug. “And?”
“He said he was sorry. He tried to explain.” The words come out flat, like a recitation.
Andie waits for the rest.
I take a breath, try to organize the truth. “He told me everything. Why he did the surrogacy thing. Why he couldn’t just want me like a normal person.”