Chapter 3 #2
“I need her to adopt me.”
I laugh, just once, and the laugh moves through the headache like a small earthquake.
I press the heel of my hand to my eye socket and laugh again anyway, because I cannot help it.
In the four days I have lived in this apartment, Penelope has already started to feel like the older sister I have needed my entire life.
I take another sip and look around the room, and let it land on me properly.
My room.
My room. In my apartment. In a city I chose. At a school I worked for years to get into. With a roommate who has fun friends and keeps this place pristine. And somehow, in less than a week, I believe I might actually be able to do this.
“You did a good thing,” Mila says, half to me and half to the ceiling, “getting this apartment.”
I look around at the painted-brick wall opposite the bed, at the soft, warm light through the curtains. “I’ll be paying it off for the rest of my life, but my God, I love waking up here.”
“Can I move in?” she jokes, and then she launches into a story about a Hawthorne House party she went to last year with some girl named Trina, who, by Mila’s description, was an absolute nightmare.
The party was wild, she says. Keg stands.
Boys screaming. Somebody jumped off the porch into a tree.
Last night, by comparison, was mellow. She says the word like it’s a gift she’s giving the universe. Mellow.
I let her talk, and my mind wanders off without my permission.
It wanders to Blue. Because my brain has been wandering to Blue since I was in sixth grade, and I seem to have lost the off switch.
Mila said mellow, and my mind has already gone to the way Blue was in that stupid black backward hat.
No one, and I mean absolutely no one, has the right to look that good in a hat.
“He was watching you, by the way,” Mila says, casual as anything, swirling the dregs of her coffee.
My stomach drops two inches because I stopped listening to her a minute ago. “What?”
“Blue.” She looks up at me, eyebrows arched, and her mouth is doing that thing where it’s trying very hard to be neutral and failing. “He was watching you. All night.”
“He was not.”
“Trust me.” She prolongs the word, draws it out, and looks at me like I am being deliberately stupid. “I caught him at least three times. You were busy. You were doing your thing. And he was standing there, watching you like he couldn’t help himself.”
I shake my head. I shake it harder than I need to. My head aches, but I won’t listen to this. Blue Golding has spent the entirety of our shared existence making it very clear, in a hundred wordless ways, that he wants nothing to do with me.
“No,” I say. “He definitely wasn’t.”
The only feeling I will allow in my chest about Blue is shame.
I’m beyond embarrassed about how I treated him in high school.
I watched every single one of his hockey games.
I stared at him in class and jumped for joy if we ever got paired together.
I was obscenely obsessed with the boy, and he ran from me every single time.
But if I were him, I would run too. The only way I will survive this college is to stop being that girl.
I don’t intend to have a relationship with him at all.
Ever since I saw him last week and noticed how freaked out he was, I vowed to stop this madness.
Even if I want to look at him, I’ll suppress it.
If I’m in the same room as him, I’ll pretend he doesn’t exist. The shame slides in cold and easy, the way it always does.
It has its own seat in me at this point.
It has a key to the apartment. This is my fuel to leave him alone.
“Maybe it’s because of Chase,” Mila offers, lifting her eyebrows.
I sip my coffee and don’t answer. I don’t let my mind go any further into this. I don’t need to feed myself false hope. I shake my head at her, pushing the thoughts out. I need it to be as far away from me as possible because I cannot fall into that loop again.
Instead, I run through the list of things I should worry about. I have my research methods midterm next Thursday and an APA quiz on Monday. I have laundry to do, and then there’s that email from my advisor I haven’t opened. I run the chapters of my study guide through my head.
“I bet,” Mila says, slowly, like a girl laying a card on the table, “he never thought he’d see the day you’d have a boyfriend who wasn’t him.”
I close my eyes. I don’t trust my face. I keep my voice deliberately, defiantly even. “Blue would never be my boyfriend, Mila. Not in a million years. He had every opportunity, and he didn’t want it. Those years are over.”
I drain my coffee and look at the bottom of the mug.
“Do you want to study for midterms?” I ask, not wanting to talk about Blue anymore.
Mila looks at me like she is going to say something else, and then, mercifully, she lets it go. She nods and blows out a long breath.
“Yeah. I’ve got so much to do. I just don’t know if I’ll ever recover from this hangover.”
“Me either.”
I get out of bed at half-past nine and pull on a pair of black joggers, a sports bra, and the only long-sleeved t-shirt I can find.
When I pad down the hall to the living room, I stop in my tracks because Penelope is in the living room, and she is — there is no other word for it — radiant.
She’s in matching activewear. Soft, dove-gray.
Cropped tank, high-waisted leggings, the seams running clean along her body.
Her dark hair is twisted into a low, elegant knot at the nape of her neck.
Her yoga mat is unrolled in the patch of sunlight between the couch and the window.
There’s a candle burning on the coffee table, and there is a glass of lemon water sweating gently on the floor by her foot, with an actual lemon slice floating in it, like she’s a wellness influencer who has stumbled into our living room.
A pair of small pink dumbbells sits at the edge of her mat.
She’s standing in a tree pose, palms pressed together at her chest, eyes half-closed, breathing.
She looks up when she hears me. Her smile is slow and easy. “Good morning.”
“Pen.” I can hear my own voice, thick and gravelly and full of the previous night. “Hi.” I am, I realize, gawking.
Behind me, Mila appears in the hallway in her own version of regretful glamour — my borrowed t-shirt sliding off one shoulder, her own pajama shorts, her empty mug clutched in both hands like a torch, her hair piled on top of her head in a knot.
“I’m doing a forty-minute workout,” Penelope announces, like she’s offering us a slice of cake. “You guys want in?”
“Yes,” Mila says, instantly.
“I’m hungover,” I murmur.
Mila turns to me. Her eyes glitter with a manic, hangover-fueled determination that I recognize from the trenches of high school. “Today is a reset.”
“You said,” I whisper at her, jabbing a thumb back toward my bedroom, “five minutes ago. That you would never recover.”
“That was five minutes ago.”
“It might’ve been two.”
“I want to do it anyway. Come on.”
Penelope is already moving down the hall. She returns with two more rolled mats tucked under her arm, another pair of small pink weights, and an extra little bottle of lemon water for each of us. She lays it all out, and I’m outvoted.
We place our mugs near the sink and then set ourselves on the mats in a row. Penelope on the left, in her patch of sunlight. Me in the middle, and Mila on the right.
Penelope cues up a video on the TV. The instructor is a thin, ageless woman with a voice that sounds like a scented candle — low, warm, slightly hypnotic. She has us close our eyes. She tells us to set an intention.
I set the intention of not dying.
The workout begins.
Within ninety seconds, the workout reveals — gently, but with the slow inevitability of a tide coming in — that I am not, in fact, in the shape I had been telling myself I was in.
My arms start shaking somewhere around minute four.
My vision swims in little floating rays of pale light every time I bend forward and come back up. My quads are sending up smoke signals.
Mila, to my right, is grunting through a plank like a woman in early labor. Her hair has come undone. She makes a small, agonized noise on every exhale, and once, I’m almost certain, she whispers, take me, Jesus.
Penelope flows from one pose to the next like she’s made of water.
It’s genuinely upsetting. At minute fourteen, I glance sideways at Mila.
She glances back. We have shared a look like this exactly a thousand hundred times — across cafeteria tables and dressing rooms and the backseats of our parents’ cars — and this look says, we are dying, we are actually, genuinely dying, and only one of us is going to survive this.
Mila mouths, “Help me.”
I mouth back, “No.”
We nearly collapse from silently laughing.
“Keep going,” Penelope says calmly, eyes closed, in perfect tree pose. “You’re doing great.”
By minute forty, we are on the floor.
Mila is flat on her back on her mat, arms flung wide, talking to the ceiling like she’s giving a deathbed confession.
I am face down on mine, my forehead pressed against the cool foam, breathing in the slightly chemical smell of it like it might cure me.
Penelope sips her lemon water, watching us with a delighted smile of a woman who has just successfully gotten her two hungover roommates to do forty minutes of Pilates.
“That was good,” she says, primly.
Mila wheezes from the floor. “You. Are a different species. You drank last night, I thought.”
“I did.”
“How?” Mila’s voice cracks into a laugh. “How are you like this? How do I rein it in like you?”