Chapter 48 – Josie
chapter
forty-eight
Josie
As it turned out, wine and ice cream did not cure a broken heart.
So this was what being completely alone felt like.
0/10 would not recommend.
I sat with my knees pulled to my chest and my chin resting on top.
From floor level, I could see everything — crumbs, dust along the baseboard, a single rubber band that had been on the tile since October because I kept meaning to grab it and hadn’t.
I’d hung curtains in this apartment. Bought a plant.
Lined my shoes up by the door. Done everything I could to make it mine, and it felt empty.
Waylon’s hat was still on the hook by the door. It was burnt orange and blue, the brim bent from weeks of wear, the one from his survival kit that first game. I’d worn it every morning since, but I hadn’t touched it in days. Every time I walked past, I looked anywhere else.
I could call Kimmy. Kimmy would be here in forty seconds flat with food and opinions, and for a little while, my chest would stop feeling so tight. I’d almost called six times since yesterday, but I didn’t.
I lay there in the middle of my floor instead, and at some point, I reached out and rolled the rubber band under one finger, back and forth across the tile, just to have something to do with my hand. I picked it up, put it down, and left it where it was.
My phone was up on the counter where I’d put it on purpose so I’d stop checking it, which had worked for about twenty minutes before I climbed up, confirmed that no, my mother still hadn’t called back, and set it down again.
On the last trip up, I ate girl dinner standing at the counter.
Three crackers, some cheese, and a couple of grapes. Balanced. Every food group represented.
That shitstain had gotten my scholarship killed, and I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.
He’d watched me grind through two years of community college and claw my way back with an academic scholarship and too many late nights. He’d let me be proud of it and never said a word.
He’d handed me tissues over the scholarship I’d lost and let me thank him for being so kind about it.
I tried my mother again and got voicemail on the second ring. She might have been in a meeting. Damn it, I needed to talk to her. I set the phone beside me and curled tighter around my knees.
The window over the fire escape rattled.
What the actual fuck? Like my day hadn’t been shitty enough.
I scrambled backward and grabbed my lamp as a weapon.
Then the window shrieked upward against four coats of old paint, and a sneaker came through first, followed by the rest of Kimmy, who swung down into my kitchen like Spider-Gwen or some shit.
“Found her,” she called back over her shoulder.
Lena’s head appeared in the frame behind her, braids going every which way, one leg already hooked over the sill. “Is she alive? Tell me she’s alive, because I did not climb a fire escape in these jeans for a body.”
“She’s alive.” Kimmy looked down at me. “Debatably.”
I scrambled to sit up straighter, which fooled exactly no one. “How did you even—? That window sticks.”
“Everything sticks in this building.” Kimmy got both feet on the tile and dragged the window shut behind her.
“You went dark on us three days ago, so we improvised. We knocked first. For the record, you ignored that, too. Lena bet me five dollars you’d be doing this exact thing and Lena’s never wrong, which is honestly her worst quality. ”
“I’ve been busy.” Even I didn’t believe that.
“You’ve been horizontal.” Lena crouched, hooked a hand under my arm, and pulled me up off the tile like I weighed nothing, which, for the record, I did not.
She steered me by the shoulders toward the bathroom.
“I love you, and you smell like the inside of a cleat. Breaking up with a man is not a good enough reason to turn into a bridge goblin.”
“I’m not a—”
“You’re on the floor in three-day-old clothes, communing with a rubber band.
” She reached past me and cranked the shower on, held her hand under the spray until it ran warm, then pointed at it.
“Hot water. We’ll be in the kitchen. If you’re not out in fifteen, I come back in, and it gets worse for you. ”
I had the whole argument loaded — that I was fine, that they didn’t need to do this, that I could handle it. Then Lena raised one eyebrow, and I shut the door and got in, because nobody ever won an argument with Lena.
I put my forehead against the cold tile and let the water run down my back, and through the door I could hear them: the clink of plates, Kimmy saying something I couldn’t make out, Lena laughing low. I stayed under the spray a minute longer than I needed to.
When I came out in clean clothes with my hair wrapped, my kitchen looked like a different room.
Kimmy stood at the sink, working through the stack of dishes I’d ignored for three days.
Lena had my laundry basket on the counter and was folding everything into neat squares.
The rubber band and the crumbs were gone.
Somebody had cracked the window I never crack, and the whole place smelled like cold air and dish soap.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“We know.” Kimmy didn’t turn around. “Grab a towel and dry. The glamorous part of friendship is the unpaid labor.”
So I dried dishes beside Kimmy while Lena folded.
The plates came out of the rinse water warm against my palms. Kimmy hip-checked me once, just to do it, and handed me the next one, and somewhere in the middle of it, not looking at me, she said, “I texted you Tuesday. And Wednesday. And then I just sat there watching it say delivered. I didn’t know if you were okay in here. Don’t make me do that again.”
My throat went tight. “Okay,” I managed.
Then Lena, matching a sock to its partner without looking up, asked, “How far behind are you in class?”
“I’m not.” It came out too sharp. I set the plate down. “I’m not behind. I’m caught up. I’m ahead, actually.”
Lena finally looked up.
“I know how this looks.” I waved the towel at myself, at the hallway, at the patch of floor I’d recently been a part of.
“But school is the one thing I haven’t let slide.
It’s the only thing I have the energy for right now.
I get up, I go to class, I do the reading, I come back here, and then I fall apart.
I worked too hard to get here, Lena. Two years to claw my way into this place.
I am not going to be the girl who loses it twice. ”
Kimmy had gone quiet at the sink.
Lena set the sock down and looked at me a long moment.
“Good,” she said. “Keep doing exactly that. Don’t you dare slip on that one.
” Then her voice dropped. “But the rest of it. The floor. The dark windows. Not answering anyone for a week.” She tilted her head.
“You know that’s the exact thing he wants, right? ”
My hands went still on the dish towel. “Who?”
“Marcus the fuckwad.” She folded the next thing without taking her eyes off my face.
“A guy like that doesn’t want you happy, and he doesn’t want you gone.
He wants you small. In an apartment with the shades down and nobody around to remind you the door isn’t actually locked.
” She set the basket on the counter. “He wants you exactly where we found you twenty minutes ago.”
“So fall apart,” Lena said, picking the basket back up and settling it on her hip.
“You’re allowed. But you’re going to do it with the window open and your friends in your kitchen, because that’s the one part he doesn’t get to have.
” She held my eyes. “I’ve watched you outrun every girl on that track. I didn’t figure you for a quitter.”
She pushed the laundry basket into my arms before I could answer, the weight of it settling warm against my chest, straight out of the dryer.
“Closet,” she said. “Then come back and dry the rest of these. We’re not anywhere close to done with you.”