5 #3
There’s my mom, but she loves Evan, and she’s going to cry when she finds out, and then I’ll have to take care of her too, and I can’t do that tonight.
There’s my cousin Brianna, who I see at Thanksgiving.
There’s a group chat called SENIOR SQUAD that I muted in June and never unmuted.
Six girls, and when I scroll into it, the last message is from July, somebody asking if anyone wanted to go to the lake.
Nobody answered. I didn’t go. I was at Evan’s that weekend. I was at Evan’s most weekends.
There’s Hailey, who was my best friend in eighth grade.
We had sleepovers every Friday. Then I started dating Evan the summer before sophomore year, and every Friday turned into every other Friday, then Saturdays, and then we stopped.
She’s at a school in Ohio now; I know that from her Instagram.
The last thing I sent her was a cake emoji on her birthday in March.
I open a new message and type hey, and I look at it for a long time before I delete it.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling. I spent three years building my whole life around one person and never noticed, because the person was always there.
Every Friday, every lake weekend, every call me when you’re done.
Now he isn’t, and the people I could call don’t know anything about my life anymore, and none of that is their fault.
My eyes burn, and I let the tears soak into my pillow.
My phone buzzes against my stomach. It isn’t Evan. It’s a group chat I forgot I was in, from the first week, Corvin 4 + Kylie, the girls from the fourth floor I walked to the party with on Thursday. I have none of their numbers saved.
Maybe-Kenzie: Emergency bachelor watch party 412 in 10 min.
Maybe-Kenzie: Paige’s making the good popcorn.
Maybe-Paige: It’s kettle corn. It’s elite.
Maybe-Kenzie: Kylie, you in??
Kenzie. Mackenzie, the girl from the beer pong table, the one I’ve been calling Maybe-Morgan in my head because I was too embarrassed to ask. It wasn’t Maddie, or Mia, or Morgan. It was Mackenzie the whole time. I wipe my face and sit up.
Across the room, Tessa slides one headphone off and looks at me.
“Some girls from the fourth floor are watching The Bachelor,” I say. “Do you want to come?”
Tessa looks at me like I’ve asked her to go skydiving. “No.”
“Okay.”
“Have fun,” she says, and puts her headphone back on.
Me: Coming.
Room 412 is Kenzie and Paige’s, exactly as big as ours, and there are three girls in it.
It smells like a vanilla candle that’s losing a fight with something else.
Kenzie opens the door before I finish knocking.
She’s in pajama pants covered in tiny cherries, and she takes one look at my face and doesn’t say anything about it.
She grabs my wrist, pulls me in, and points at the bed.
“Sit there. That’s the good spot.” Then, over her shoulder, “Paige, I swear to God, crack the window. She just walked in.”
“It’s aromatherapy,” Paige says, but she leans over and shoves the window up.
She’s the girl in the black top from the party, the one who told me I had beautiful hair and then said tragic when I said I had a boyfriend.
She’s cross-legged against the wall with an enormous bowl of kettle corn in her lap, and she hands it to me without a word.
A second later she says, “Did you break up with him?”
Everybody in the room stops.
Kenzie says, “Paige.”
“What?” Paige says. “She looks like she broke up with him.”
I look down at the kettle corn. “Yeah,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. “I think I did.”
Paige nods, very seriously. “Good. He was probably boring.”
“I was with him for three years.” The room goes quiet. “More than three.”
“Are you okay?” Paige asks.
I nod.
“Then good,” she says, takes a handful of kettle corn back out of the bowl, and turns to the TV, where a man in a suit is handing a woman a rose.
And that’s it. Nobody asks what happened. Kenzie puts a blanket over my legs. A girl named Bianca, who I’ve seen in the bathroom and never talked to, tells me I have to pick a contestant to root for, because it’s a rule, and I say I’ll take the one with the bangs.
“The one with the bangs is evil,” Paige says.
“I like evil.”
“Respect.”
For an hour, I sit on a bed in a room that isn’t mine with girls I barely know and yell at a television.
The one with the bangs cries in a hot tub.
Kenzie shouts at the screen. Bianca does a voice for the host that’s so bad and so accurate I laugh until I have to put my face in the blanket.
At some point, I realize I haven’t looked at my phone in forty minutes, and I don’t look at it then either.
When the episode ends, Paige says, “Same time next week?” and everybody says yes, and Kenzie looks at me and says, “You too,” like it isn’t a question.
“Yeah,” I say.
When I get back to our room, Tessa is asleep, or pretending to be, with her face to the wall. She’s turned my desk lamp on low, the only light in the room, so I won’t have to fumble in the dark.
I change into pajamas and get into bed. There’s nothing from Evan.
There’s a new message in Corvin 4 + Kylie, a picture Bianca took of all of us on the bed, blurry and mid-scream, with me in the middle and kettle corn in my lap.
I look at it for a while. Then I tap the number I’ve been calling Maybe-Morgan in my head for four days and save it: Kenzie.
I reach over and turn off the lamp, and I don’t turn my phone back over, and I lie in the dark listening to Tessa breathe until I fall asleep.