The Girl Three Doors Down

1

Apparently, Staying In Is Subjective

Kylie

By the third party of welcome week, I’ve figured out there are two kinds of freshmen at Woodbury: the ones who admit they have no idea what they’re doing, and the ones pretending they know exactly what they’re doing. The second kind is louder.

A guy in a backward baseball cap has spent ten minutes explaining beer pong to three girls who were already mid-game when he wandered over.

Every time he says actually, the girl beside me cuts her eyes across the table at me, and I have to bite the inside of my cheek, because watching her try not to laugh is so much worse than the guy.

“Wait.” He holds up a finger. “You want your elbow behind the edge.”

She looks down at her elbow. It’s behind the edge.

“Thank God you’re here,” I tell him.

He squints at me, working out whether I mean it, and she breaks first. Then I’m gone too, turned into my own shoulder before he decides sarcasm needs explaining as well.

I don’t know her name. I did, twenty minutes ago.

Something with an M. Maddie, Mia, Morgan, maybe.

She lives on the fourth floor of Corvin Hall with a girl in a black top who keeps disappearing onto the porch and coming back smelling like weed and spearmint gum, and during welcome week that’s apparently enough to make them my plus-ones.

Six of us walked over from Corvin Hall together.

Two vanished the second we got through the door.

The black top is out front again. Another girl announced she needed water about forty minutes ago and hasn’t been seen since, which means she either found water or died.

Nobody seems worried. Honestly, neither am I.

The house is packed. Bodies fill the living room and down the hallway, half of them in Woodbury shirts still creased from the bookstore bag.

The bass comes up through the soles of my sandals, and every thirty seconds, someone opens the front door and a rush of cool night air cuts through the heat before it swings shut again.

I’ve been nursing the same drink so long it tastes like melted ice with a sprinkle of vodka.

There’s nowhere to set it down unless I’m prepared to never see it again, so I hold it, and the floor pulls at my sandals every time I shift my weight.

The party is fine. What I like is everything around it: the new room, the new dining hall, the new shortcut across the quad.

People knock on our door and ask if we want to come, and half the time I don’t know where come is until I’m standing in it.

Back home, I knew everybody. Who’d been dating since middle school, whose mom taught fourth grade, which car in the student lot belonged to who.

Here, nobody knows a single thing about me, and I like that more than I expected to.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket, and I’m smiling before I’ve pulled it out, because I think it’s Evan.

It’s Tessa Canten, my roommate.

Tessa: If you come back tonight and the door is locked, knock. The lock is sticking again.

Me: Good to know you’re planning to imprison me outside.

The dots appear, disappear, come back.

Tessa: I’m warning you so that doesn’t happen.

A laugh slips out of me. Five days is how long Tessa and I have shared a room, and so far I know four things about her.

She’s asleep before I’ve started getting ready for bed.

She folds her T-shirts instead of hanging them.

She owns exactly one mug. And every text she sends reads like she’s filing a report.

Above hers, Evan’s message from an hour ago is still sitting there.

Evan: I’m wiped. Staying in tonight. Call you tomorrow? Love you.

I’d told him I was going out with the girls from my floor. He’d told me to have fun, and I’d sent him a heart and finished getting dressed.

I slide the phone back into my pocket as somebody in the living room yells at the song change, and Maybe-Morgan grabs my wrist, already grinning.

“No, no, no,” I say.

She doesn’t listen. The music is loud enough to feel in my teeth, and she’s dancing before we’ve even cleared the kitchen doorway, and I’m moving my hips with her before I’ve decided to.

For the next twenty minutes, Evan doesn’t cross my mind once.

I dance badly with people I barely know.

The girl in the black top comes back in off the porch, shouts that I have beautiful hair, and in the same breath asks if I have a boyfriend.

I tell her I do. She says “Tragic” so sincerely that I laugh until my stomach aches.

Somebody’s elbow clips my shoulder and he apologizes three separate times, leaning closer with each one.

I find our missing water girl perched on the arm of a couch eating chips straight out of the bag beside a guy who nods at everything she says.

I’m squeezing back toward the kitchen with my hair stuck to the back of my neck when I hear Evan laugh.

My head turns so fast my neck twinges. I know that laugh.

I know the real one from the polite one, and the one he uses when he’s pretending something doesn’t bother him.

This is the real one, and I turn toward it smiling, because he found me.

He’s here to surprise me, and he’s going to act like he wasn’t looking, and I’m going to act like I believe him.

He’s across the room, half hidden behind two guys arguing in a doorway, so all I can see is his shoulder. Then one of the guys shifts.

There’s a girl in front of him. His hand is on her waist, and her mouth is on his.

The music keeps going. A guy carrying a case of beer bumps me from behind, mutters, “Sorry,” and steps around me, because I’ve stopped in the middle of the hallway.

I want to turn around and walk back into the living room and let this be something I didn’t see, but my eyes go to his hand and stay there.

His fingers flex against her side. It’s on her, grabbing now, pulling her closer.

My face goes hot, and then all at once cold, like somebody opened a window behind my eyes. He tilts his head and kisses her again, and my feet are moving.

I’m three steps away when Evan opens his eyes.

His face empties so fast it would almost be funny if it were happening to anyone else. His needy hand drops from her waist. The girl feels it, pulls back, and follows his stare.

“Kylie,” he says. It comes out like a question he already knows the answer to.

“You’re tired,” I say.

Fuck this. I turn around.

“Kylie, wait—”

I storm back. “You said you were tired.”

The girl looks between us. “Evan?”

I look at her properly for the first time, and what I take in is that she’s horrified. Openly, genuinely horrified, one hand drifting up toward her mouth. I wanted to hate her, and she isn’t making it easy.

“Do you know about me?” I ask her.

She blinks. “What?”

I point at him. “Do you know he has a girlfriend?”

“Kylie.” Sharper now, a warning, like I’m the one making a scene.

Her face answers before she does. It crumples. “No.” She takes one big step away from him, like standing near him might count against her. “I didn’t know. He never said—”

“It’s fine,” I tell her, which it isn’t, but she’s not the one I can’t stop looking at.

She turns to Evan, and her voice goes thin. “You told me you were single.”

My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my throat, but everything else in me stops.

My lungs, my thoughts, like the whole room paused to let that sentence walk past slowly so I could get a good look at it.

Not you didn’t mention it. Not it never came up.

Told. He had to open his mouth and decide to say it.

Evan closes his eyes. It’s barely a second, but I see it, and I’ve seen it before, when his mom asks where he’s been, when a teacher asks where his assignment is. I’ve just never had it pointed at me.

“You told her you were single,” I repeat. My voice sounds like it’s drifting in from the next room.

“Kylie, can we go outside?”

“How long?”

“Not here.”

“How long, Evan?”

The room is noticing. I can hear it get quieter and feel eyes slide sideways, and the space around us gets a little wider. The girl backs up until a wall stops her. Evan reaches for me, and I step back, and his hand hangs in the air between us before it drops.

“That was—” He glances at the girl and lowers his voice. “It was stupid. Okay? I fucked up.”

“Just now?”

“Yes.”

He says it too fast, like the answer was already sitting there waiting, and his jaw goes tight, and my mind starts putting pieces together.

Three weeks ago, he took forty minutes to answer a text after telling me he was lying in bed on his phone.

When I asked, he said he’d fallen asleep, and I believed him.

Last week, he flipped his phone facedown when I sat next to him, and thirty seconds later, he picked it back up to check the time and it buzzed in his hand, and buzzed again.

When I asked who kept texting, he said it was the group chat and laughed at me for asking.

Told me I was being weird. Kissed my forehead.

There are more, little things that came with explanations already attached, neat and reasonable, the kind that make you feel silly for needing one. I took every single one.

“You met her tonight?” I ask.

His eyes flick to the side and back. Something in my stomach drops so far and so fast my knees go loose, and I have to lock them.

“Did you meet her tonight?”

“Kylie.”

“Wow.”

“Can we please not do this in front of everybody?”

One laugh comes out of me, cracked straight down the middle. “You’re embarrassed? You’re worried about people watching?”

“No. Jesus Christ. I’m trying to talk to you.”

“You were doing plenty with your mouth five seconds ago. You didn’t mind an audience then.”

His face goes hard. “Come on.”

“No,” I say, and when he says my name again, “No,” and I turn around and walk out.