3
There Are Rules to Laundry
Kylie
By Monday morning, I’ve learned there’s no socially acceptable answer to How was your weekend? when your weekend started with watching your boyfriend kiss somebody else. Good is a lie. Bad gets a follow-up question. Fine is suspicious.
So when the girl in the next seat leans over before my first class and asks, “Did you do anything fun this weekend?”
I say, “I went to a party.”
This satisfies her for two seconds. “Oh my God, me too. Which one?”
I have no idea what street it was on. “Some house near Corvin Hall.”
“There were, like, six.”
Six. The odds. “Then one of those.”
She laughs and launches into a story about a guy who threw up on a couch, and I write the date at the top of my notebook while the professor fights with the projector. I nod in the right places. I do care, just exactly enough to be grateful somebody’s weekend was fun, since mine wasn’t.
My phone is in my backpack, zipped into the front pocket under a granola bar and a pack of gum, where I’d have to go looking for it.
I put it there on purpose. Last night, after an hour of lying on my bed reading Evan’s messages without answering, I turned it face down on my desk and went to brush my teeth.
I took my time. I flossed. When I came back, there were two more messages, and this morning there was one.
Evan: Can we please talk?
I noticed what was missing before I’d finished reading it, sitting on the edge of my bed with one sock on: no Ky, no I love you, no I’m sorry. The absence landed as a little lurch in my stomach, and I hated myself for it. I have better things to do with my brain right now. I have a whole list.
The projector finally flickers on. The professor introduces herself again, because half the room is still adding and dropping and there are new faces scattered through the rows.
Laptops glow everywhere, and three people in the front row already look like they’re preparing questions.
I like the professor anyway. She talks fast and doesn’t slow down for anyone, and when she passes the syllabi down the rows she says, “This class has a participation component, so if your plan was to disappear into the furniture for fifteen weeks, adjust.”
Behind me, a guy whispers, “Fuck,” and my mouth tugs up before I can stop it.
For fifty minutes, I try to think about something else, and Evan keeps finding ways in through the stupidest doors.
The professor says the word pattern, and I’m counting: forty minutes to answer a text, a phone turned face down, a group chat that buzzed twice in a row.
The girl beside me twists a piece of hair around her finger while she reads, and I’m back at the party with the dark-haired girl stepping away from him, you told me you were single.
Across the room, a phone vibrates against a desk, and my whole body jolts before my brain catches up that it isn’t mine.
I press my pen into the page until the tip bleeds a dark dot through the paper.
Then the professor calls on me. I answer.
She disagrees. I disagree back, and she raises an eyebrow and asks me to defend it, so I do, and for four full minutes, Evan doesn’t exist. There’s just the question, the heat in my face that has nothing to do with him, and the satisfaction of being right about something, or possibly wrong.
She moves on either way, and my brain goes straight back to him.
Outside, campus has settled into its weekday shape.
The welcome-week tables still line the path, but people walk past them faster now, eyes forward, like they’ve all agreed to pretend they know where they’re going.
A guy on a bike nearly takes out two girls in front of the student center.
Somebody’s handing out flyers for an improv club and looks so tired that I take one just so he has one less.
By the time I get back to Corvin Hall, I have three flyers, an iced coffee I didn’t need, and a blister on the back of my heel that gets angrier with every step.
Tessa is at her desk when I walk in. I’m dumping everything onto my bed when she says behind me, “You’re bleeding.”
I look down where I feel it. The new sandals have rubbed the skin raw, and there’s a small smear of red above the strap. “Great.”
“I have Band-Aids.”
“Of course you do.”
She slides open her top drawer and takes out a small zippered case, and when she pops it open, there are bandages, alcohol wipes, painkillers, tweezers, a tiny pair of scissors, and moleskin cut into neat squares.
I look at her. “You keep a first-aid kit in your desk?”
“It isn’t a first-aid kit.”
“That’s a first-aid kit.”
“It’s a travel kit.”
“What are you traveling into, combat?”
She doesn’t answer that. She tears open an alcohol wipe and holds it out, then a square of moleskin instead of a Band-Aid. “This first. A Band-Aid will just slide off in those shoes.”
I take both. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
This is how we’ve been living, five to ten sentences at a time.
She takes my bad attitude like it’s weather, which I guess it is.
It’s a little unsettling that she never bites back.
I’ve known girls like her, the quiet ones who let it build until one day it all comes out at once.
But maybe I’m wrong, because she’s also careful in a way that doesn’t feel like holding anything back.
She asks before she opens the window. Her alarm goes off at seven sharp, one tone, and she’s up before it plays twice.
She knows I’ll use her scissors if she leaves them out.
We’ve mostly stopped apologizing every time we both need the mirror.
I sit on the edge of my bed and pick at the backing on the moleskin. Tessa’s eyes flick to my backpack, then back to her screen. My phone has been on Do Not Disturb since before class, sitting in there holding whatever it’s holding.
“Do you want to ask me?” I say.
She turns back to her laptop. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Now I know you’re thinking something and being polite about it.”
She looks at me and doesn’t deny it.
I point at her. “See?”
The corner of her mouth twitches.
I press the moleskin over my heel and smooth the edges down with my thumb, slower than I need to. After a minute, she says, “Did you talk to him?”
“No.”
It’s true, mostly. Yesterday afternoon, on the floor with my back against the bed frame, I typed and deleted a message five times before I sent one.
Me: I saw you kiss someone else. I’m not listening to explanations right now. Stop calling me.
My hands were shaking so badly I had to hit send twice.
He wrote back six paragraphs, and I read them until the words stopped looking like words, and I didn’t answer.
Now I don’t know what we are. I haven’t said we’re done, and he hasn’t said we aren’t, so we’re both just not talking about it, and I hate that more than I’d hate either answer.
She doesn’t ask anything else, so I wait, and she catches on without my saying a word.
“You said you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“That was Thursday.”
“You seem like you still don’t want to talk about it.”
I laugh. It comes out so suddenly it catches in my throat, and for one awful second my eyes sting, hot and fast, right behind the lids.
I look down at the wrapper in my hand and fold it in half, then in half again, then again, until it’s a tiny hard square that won’t fold anymore.
Tessa keeps her eyes on her screen and her fingers on her keyboard, and she doesn’t say a single word while I swallow until my throat unlocks.
“I need to do laundry,” I announce, to fill the silence.
“Okay,” she says.
The laundry room in Corvin Hall is in the basement, with twelve washers, ten dryers, and absolutely no reason to be this hot.
The air is thick and damp and smells like dryer sheets with something metallic underneath.
Three of the washers are out of order. One has an index card taped over the controls with a single word in Sharpie: DON’T.
Not broken, not out of service. Just don’t. I respect the urgency.
I get my first load in, then spend three full minutes reading the back of the detergent bottle, because my mom buys pods at home and apparently cheap liquid detergent requires measurements.
There are four lines inside the cap, and none of them are labeled in a way that helps with the amount of clothes I actually have in the machine.
I’m squinting at one when a washer two machines down creaks open.
It’s him. The guy from outside Corvin. Dining-hall asshole.
He has a laundry bag over one shoulder and the same blank expression he had outside the dorm, like being screamed at by a stranger didn’t make the list of interesting things that happened to him last week.
His eyes land on me, register nothing, and move away, and he starts loading a washer. Somehow that annoys me too.
I pick a line that looks reasonable, pour, dump it where the diagram says, and screw the cap back on. He throws a pod into his machine. I look at the pod, then at my bottle. I need to just buy the pods.
We close our washers at almost the same time. His starts immediately. Mine makes me select six different settings before it decides I’m qualified to wash my own clothes. His says forty-one minutes. Mine says forty-three. Great.
I set the detergent on top of the machine and pull my phone out before I can stop myself. Nothing from Evan. My stomach drops, a small, stupid, sinking thing, like I’d been hoping, and I hate it enough that I lock the screen and shove the phone back in my pocket.
Beside me, a washer door opens. The asshole is loading the rest of his clothes into the machine between his and mine, the one I was about to use for my second load. The one on my other side is out of order.
“I was going to use that one,” I say.
He glances at me. “Okay.” He keeps loading.
“Okay?” I scoff. “I said I was going to use it.”
“You weren’t using it.”
“My basket is literally right here.”
He looks down at my basket and reaches for another pod.