Chapter 1 #3
Hayworth is still talking. Pens are still scratching.
The girl two rows in front of me has highlighted an entire paragraph of her notes in pink, and I have written nothing.
I’m the only person in this room who is not currently absorbing any information about research methods, and the midterm is on Thursday.
I cannot fail my midterm at my dream school. I can’t mess this up.
Me: Should I not go?
Mila: Why not?
Me: Hockey players.
Mila: Ohhhhh.
Me: Yeah.
Mila: Well, now I’m definitely coming because someone has to make sure you don’t stare at him all night.
Me: I shouldn’t go. I’m canceling.
Mila: No, let’s go.
Mila: It’s going to be fun.
I lock my phone and put it down on the desk. I force myself to open my notebook to a clean page, and I write the words research methods at the top, and I underline it twice. I need to focus and take notes.
The apartment is quiet when I get back.
I stand in the doorway with my key in my hand for a long minute, just looking.
It’s so beautiful in here. It will not stop being beautiful, no matter how many times I walk through the door.
The light has shifted since the morning — it’s coming in through the west-facing windows now, low and gold, and it’s pooling on the floor in two long rectangles across the rug.
A bird is making a noise outside. I can hear my own breathing, so I inhale because this is my dream. I refuse to sabotage it.
I know exactly what I’ll do. I’ll stress-clean.
I want to take a sponge to every surface and put my hands on something I can scrub.
But I walk around and find that there’s nothing to clean.
Penelope is, as I am quickly learning, a person who does not generate mess.
She wipes down the counter every time she uses it.
She rinses her mug. She folds the throw blanket every morning before she leaves for class.
I walk to my bedroom and clean my room that is already clean.
It takes me five minutes.
The bed is made. The desk is wiped. I dust the fake rose on the windowsill. I sit down at the white curved desk and open my Research Methods textbook to chapter four, and I read the first few pages.
My phone lights up on the desk.
Chase: Here.
I close the book.
I check myself in the mirror, and my whole face is a problem.
My hair could use a dye job, or a trim, or, honestly, just a deep condition.
My face could use makeup, real makeup, the kind Penelope wears that you can’t see but that changes everything about her bone structure.
I think about Penelope’s perfect, rosy cheeks, her perfectly lined lips, and her perfectly thin coat of mascara.
I look at my own face, and I do not understand what anyone has ever seen in me.
I’m a girl with light blue eyes and naturally tan skin, and that’s the entire bio.
I’m not interesting. I’m not styled. I’m not put-together.
Chase is walking on the sidewalk when I step outside.
“There she is,” he says, his face splitting into a smile.
I smile back. “Hi.”
He pulls me into a hug.
He holds me for a long moment. He drove ninety minutes for this — for me, for this hug, for whatever he’s hoping happens between now and tomorrow morning.
His arms stay around me, and I can smell his deodorant, the inside of his truck, and the gas station coffee he stopped for somewhere along the way.
I’m supposed to be a girl who melts into her boyfriend after a week apart. I’m not melting. What is wrong with me?
Chase is good to me. He has always been good to me.
He texts me good morning every morning, even on the mornings when he’s working an early shift, even on the mornings when I forget to text him back.
He has been the most consistent person in my life since I was eighteen years old, and the one thing — the one thing I have ever asked of him that he didn’t want to give me — was for him to let me go to the school I wanted to go to, and he did it.
He didn’t like it, but he stopped fighting with me about it.
And he’s still showing up. He’s hugging me like I’m his entire world, and I’m standing like a piece of crap girlfriend who’s overthinking about a guy who literally never cared about her.
I’m the problem.
One hundred percent.
I make myself hug him back. Then I let go.
“I missed you,” he says into my hair.
I kiss his cheek. It is a quick kiss, and I hate myself for it, but I think he ate a hot dog.
“Ready to see my new place?” I ask. “It’s really nice.”
He nods. “Yeah.”
I take him upstairs.
He’s quiet on the way up. Chase is not, generally, a quiet person — he fills space, he tells stories, he laughs at his own jokes — and the silence in the elevator gets thicker the higher we climb.
He looks at the wallpaper. He looks at the brass elevator buttons.
He looks at the back of my head in the polished metal of the door, and I face forward and watch the floor numbers light up one by one because I cannot meet his eyes in the reflection right now.
I open the apartment door, and immediately, he says, “Damn, Melly.” He says it under his breath. “This is fancy.” He looks at the high ceilings, the white walls, the paintings, the windows, the rug, the trinkets on the bookshelf, and the marble counters in the kitchen.
“Penelope has really good taste,” I say quickly.
He laughs — short, surprised — when he sees the window seat. The little cushion. The throw pillow with the embroidered bird on it.
“Holy shit.”
I cringe.
“How much is this a month?”
The number sits on my tongue. I’m not going to say it out loud because I cannot afford this apartment. I am paying for it with a combination of student loans, the summer I worked two jobs, and a kind of magical thinking that I do not recommend as a financial strategy.
“Yolo,” I say with a bright smile and shrug my shoulders at him.
He gives a small, surprised laugh. He walks the length of the living room like he’s in a museum.
He stops at Penelope’s drafting table. He looks at the sketches pinned above it — careful pencil drawings of building elevations, a watercolor of a courtyard, a half-finished rendering of a stairwell with the dimensions written down the side in tiny block letters.
He says, “Huh.”
He looks at the stack of architecture magazines on the coffee table, fanned out just so.
“Your roommate’s a senior?”
I nod. “Senior. Architecture.”
“And she — what, her parents are —”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no idea.”
I don’t know, but it’s not something you ask outright when you meet someone. But I know what he’s asking. He’s wondering how a girl like me ended up living with a girl like her. I don’t have a good answer.
He looks at me. His face changes when we make eye contact.
It’s obvious that he thinks this is too much, but I can’t bring myself to explain to him that this is actually the kind of life I want to live.
I want to reassure him that everything’s fine and tell him he’s still my favorite.
But I don’t move. I actually don’t miss living with him.
And that’s not something I want to dissect right now.
“Where’s your room?” he asks.
I point. “This way.” I scurry my feet across the room.
He follows me.
He sets his overnight bag on my bed, and then he looks around at the room — at the canopy, at the gilt-framed mirror, at the white curved desk and the bud vase and the soft cream of everything — and he says, again, quieter this time, “Holy shit, Melly.”
“Yeah.”
He takes two steps toward me. He starts to say something. He gets as far as the first syllable, his hand coming up toward my waist, his face doing the thing it does before he kisses me —
The front door opens.
“Oh,” I say. I’m out of my bedroom before he can finish the syllable. “My roommate. Come.”
I don’t look back to see if he’s following.
Penelope is setting a paper coffee cup down on the kitchen counter when I walk out, a tote bag of groceries slung over one shoulder.
She lifts the tote onto the counter with one practiced motion, and she pulls out a bunch of dill, a lemon, and a small glass jar of organic jam.
Her hair is in a low ponytail. She’s wearing wide-leg jeans and a soft grey sweater.
She sees Chase behind me, and her face shifts into a careful, polite expression.
“Hi,” she says.
Her eyes flick to me. Just for a second. Then back to him.
“This must be Chase.”
“Hi. Yeah.” Chase steps out from behind me. He wipes his palm on his jeans — I watch him do it, the small unconscious gesture, and I think please don’t, please don’t, please don’t — and sticks out his hand. “Chase. Good to meet you. Thanks for taking care of my girl.”
My girl.
I don’t flinch. I make a point of standing perfectly still and letting the phrase land where he meant it to land, which is in the soft territory of aren’t we sweet, and not where it actually lands, which is in the slightly harder territory of just so we’re clear.
Penelope takes his hand.
She looks at me for the smallest half-second, and then back at him, and her smile is gracious in a way I need to practice.
“Penelope. Nice to meet you.”
“Place is beautiful,” he says.
“Thank you. I can’t take credit for the building. Just the furniture.”
“It’s really nice in here,” he says.
The compliment lands flat. He knows it. He shifts his weight to his other foot. I can feel him retreating into himself, and I can feel myself not stopping him. I am so tired all of a sudden that I want to lie down on the rug.
She turns back to the groceries, graceful about it. She doesn’t make him feel small. She does, however, move on.
“You guys are coming to the party, right?”
Chase’s eyes flick to me.
My stomach.
“There’s a thing tonight,” I say lightly, like it’s nothing because it is nothing. “A house party. Pen’s friend invited me this morning. I was — I was going to tell you.”
He looks at me for a half-second longer than he needs to.