5 #2
“You don’t have to say anything tonight.”
A breath of a laugh escapes me. Every other sentence out of him is I know, and if he knows all of this, I don’t understand how we’re standing here.
Then, all at once, I’m so tired my knees want to fold.
It’s heavier than sleepy. It’s in my arms and legs and the backs of my eyes, and it’s the stairwell too, the five minutes I spent crying on a step before I ever came down here.
I sit on the low concrete ledge that runs along the walkway, and the cold goes straight through my jeans.
After a second, Evan sits too, with a foot of concrete between us. I look at that foot of concrete, and then I look away. My shoulders have been up by my ears since I came downstairs, and I make them drop.
Beside me, Evan is picking at something on his pants.
I look at the sidewalk. “Did you like her?”
The picking stops. I wish I could take it back, not because I don’t want to know, but because I want to know so badly I can feel it in my chest.
“I don’t know.”
“That means yes.”
“No. It means I don’t know.”
“You kissed her.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Okay.”
He stops. There’s a crack running through the sidewalk between my shoes, and a line of ants following it, one after another after another, and I watch them for a long time.
“I liked that she liked me,” he says.
It’s barely above a breath, and it goes right through me.
I turn my head, and he isn’t looking at me.
He’s looking at his hands, and his face is miserable and open in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.
For once, I don’t go after the wording. I sit there, because I get it, and I hate that I get it.
Some small, awful part of me knows exactly what he means, and I can’t even be angry about that part, because it’s the truest thing he’s said all night.
“You could’ve told me something was wrong.”
“I should have.”
“Was something wrong?”
“With us?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
He doesn’t hesitate, and it isn’t defensive.
It’s just sure, and that’s the one that nearly breaks me.
If we’d been fighting all summer, if he’d been pulling away, if there’d been anything I could put my finger on, I could put this somewhere.
I could look at the crack and say, there, that’s where it got in.
Evan shakes his head. “No. That’s the fucked-up part. Nothing was wrong.”
I swallow. It takes two tries. “Okay.”
“Kylie—”
“I need you to go. Please.”
He nods, and we stand up. For one insane second, I think he’s going to hug me. I see it start, his arm lifting, his weight shifting toward me. Then he catches it, and his arm drops back to his side, and my body notices. It leans an inch toward where he would have been, and I lock my knees.
“Can I call you?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
I close my eyes. “Sorry.”
I don’t know why I apologize. It comes out automatically.
His mouth moves, something sadder than a smile, and then he turns and walks away down the path with his hands in his pockets, that stupid piece of hair still sticking up at his crown.
I watch him until he reaches the corner, and I’m still watching when he turns it. Then I make myself go inside.
When I walk into my dorm, Tessa is on her bed scrolling. The sound of the door makes her look up, and she goes still.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “Or do you still not want to talk about it?”
It’s a fair question, and my bottom lip wants to go. I breathe in and walk to my desk like I have something to do there. I don’t. I straighten the papers and say, “I don’t know. He said nothing was wrong with us.”
I stare at my closed laptop and try not to cry. I don’t know why that’s the sentence that stuck. Out of two weeks and complicated, it’s nothing was wrong.
Tessa doesn’t move. She waits.
I sit down and open my laptop, because I have forty pages of reading due tomorrow and apparently being cheated on doesn’t come with an academic exemption. For fifteen minutes, neither of us talks. Tessa goes back to her phone, then opens her laptop, and after a while, she stands.
“Do you want to go get food?” she asks. “Milkshakes always make me feel better.”
I shut the laptop so fast it snaps. “Yes.”
When we walk out, Tessa looks both ways and moves quickly towards the kitchen. We make it as far as the end of the hall. The door to the floor kitchen is propped open, and the whole hallway smells like something frying, and Tessa stops.
“I have dumplings,” she says.
“What happened to milkshakes?”
She tilts her head. “You need to eat. I have ice cream. I can put it in the blender with milk.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
I’m not arguing with anything she says tonight, because only one sentence is running through my head, over and over, like a song I can’t get out. That’s the fucked-up part. Nothing was wrong.
The communal kitchen has two ovens, four burners, one microwave, and an ongoing disagreement inside the refrigerator.
The shelves are labeled with layers of masking tape, crossed out and rewritten on top of each other.
The only other person here is a girl from the end of the hall microwaving a mug of soup and scrolling on her phone, and when the microwave beeps, she takes her soup and leaves.
Tessa doesn’t go straight to the freezer.
She goes to the doorway first and looks down the hall in both directions, toward the stairwell and then toward the elevator, with one hand on the frame.
Then she comes back in and goes to the stove on the far side of the room, the one with its back to the wall, where she can see the door.
I don’t ask. Tessa does things like that.
She checks the peephole before she opens our door, even when she knows it’s me.
She eats with her back to the wall in the dining hall.
The first week I asked her once if she was expecting somebody, and she said no so flatly that I never asked again.
I’ve decided she’s a hermit crab. She lives in a shell, carries it everywhere, and only comes out when she’s sure the beach is empty.
“Sit,” she says.
There’s one chair, with a crusty ring on the seat from somebody’s cup. I sit on it anyway.
She takes the dumplings out of the freezer, a pan out of the cabinet, and a bottle of oil out of a bag she apparently brought from our room without my noticing.
She doesn’t use the communal oil. She doesn’t trust it.
She pours a little into the pan, turns the burner on, and waits with her arms crossed, watching the oil.
She doesn’t ask me anything. She doesn’t tell me he doesn’t deserve me, or that I’ll be okay, or that everything happens for a reason.
She lays the dumplings in the pan one at a time in a neat circle, and they hiss, and she turns them with a pair of chopsticks without looking at me once.
Out in the hallway, a door slams. Somebody laughs, a deep, loud guy’s laugh, and footsteps come toward the kitchen. Tessa’s chopsticks stop. Her whole body goes still, and her eyes go to the door.
Two guys walk past without looking in. One of them is carrying a pizza box.
Tessa’s shoulders come down, and she turns the next dumpling. Hermit crab. Anxiety will slowly kill you, I swear.
“Almost done,” she says.
She makes the milkshakes in the blender, vanilla ice cream and milk, and then, after a second of thinking about it, a few Oreos. She pours it into two cups and hands me one. I take a sip and lean back.
“Mm. You were right. This is exactly what I needed.”
She smiles. “Can’t go wrong with cookies and cream.”
She puts six dumplings on a paper plate in front of me, makes her own plate, and we eat.
It’s the first thing I’ve had since breakfast, and I didn’t realize how hungry I was until the first one.
I eat all six fast, burning my tongue on the second and not caring.
Tessa watches me without saying anything.
When I’m done, she takes my plate, puts four more on it, and sets it back down.
“I’m not—”
“Eat.”
I eat.
Outside the window over the sink, it’s fully dark, and the lamps along the walkway have come on. I remember the moment I decided to come to Woodbury, and the first day I moved into Corvin, and it all feels so far away now. Nothing was wrong. I put the milkshake down.
Tessa is washing the pan. She rinses it, sets it upside down on the drying rack, dries her hands, folds the towel in thirds, and hangs it over the oven handle exactly in the middle.
I don’t understand her at all. But she made me dinner, and a milkshake with Oreos in it, and she stood in a kitchen for thirty minutes without saying one thing that would have made me feel worse, and I don’t know how to thank her for that without making it strange.
“Thanks,” I say, finally.
She smiles softly. “You’re welcome.”
She picks up her milkshake and looks down the hall once more, both directions, before she steps out.
Back in our room, Tessa gets into bed with a book and puts her headphones on, and I sit on my bed with my phone. No new messages from Evan. I open our thread anyway.
The last message is from tonight: I’m here. Lobby. Above it is everything else, the apologies and explanations and my short, cold replies. Above that is August. A picture of a hardware store sign that says WE HAVE NUTS. A screenshot of a sushi place. Call me when you’re done. Love you.
I scroll until my thumb hurts, and then I stop, because I know we’re done. He stood a full step back from me. He told me it was just two weeks, and I liked that she liked me, and worst of all, nothing was wrong. If nothing was wrong, there’s nothing to fix, and there’s nothing I can do with that.
The screen goes dark in my hand. I unlock it again, close our messages, open my contacts, and start scrolling for somebody to call, and there isn’t anybody.