23
That Was Probably Nothing
Kylie
Dr. Nakamoto spends fifty minutes on the word nonviolent, and by the end, three people have changed their minds about something, which as far as I can tell is the entire point.
Elias argues with her, because he always argues with her, and today he loses so badly that at the end he says, “Okay, that’s fair,” out loud in front of everybody, and the girl next to me writes ? ?? in the margin of her notes.
I walk out into a gray Thursday with my coffee gone cold and a good mood I can’t shake.
I keep thinking about Nash knocking on my door to tell me he got the spot.
He was clearly excited, and I didn’t congratulate him.
I go back and forth about whether I should, all the way to the dining hall, and I still haven’t decided when I sit down across from Kenzie.
She complains about her econ TA, who has assigned a group project, and then says, “Oh. What are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“Do you want to come to a thing? It’s not a party,” she adds fast, heading me off.
“It’s my friend Theo and his roommate and like four people.
We play games and eat, and everybody leaves by ten.
Last time we played Scrabble for two hours, and Theo tried to put down a word that doesn’t exist, and Sam almost fought him. ”
“Do we only know boys who fight?” I joke.
She laughs behind her hand. “That’s you and Paige. Not me. My friends aren’t fighting like that.”
“So they’re not arrogant, cocky assholes?”
“No,” she laughs.
I’m pleased to have her as a friend. I didn’t know there were college kids who’d get together on a Thursday and play Scrabble instead of partying every second they got. “What time?”
“Six. And bring food. It’s a bring-something thing. Theo does drinks, somebody always brings chips, and one time Bianca brought an entire lasagna, which was insane.”
“I don’t have a kitchen, Kenzie.”
“There’s a kitchen on your floor.” She shrugs. “All I know is that you should bring something.”
And that is how I end up in the third-floor kitchen at five making forty tiny sandwiches. Okay, not forty. Sixteen. It feels like forty. I bought everything at the campus store: bread, turkey, cheese, mustard, and a tomato I regret immediately, because it’s somehow hard and mushy at the same time.
Tessa comes in ten minutes into it with her mug and stops in the doorway. “You’re making food?”
“Sandwiches.”
“For?”
“A game night with Kenzie.” I shoot her a sideways look. “Do you want to come?”
She doesn’t answer. She sets her mug down, washes her hands, and stands next to me, and without asking, she starts cutting them diagonally.
“Why diagonally?”
“Because it’s better.”
We cut sixteen sandwiches in half, side by side. She lines them up on the tray in two neat rows, points all facing the same direction, and then fixes two of mine. At the end, she takes one, puts it on a paper towel, and carries it back to our room with her tea.
“Come with me,” I try again from the doorway, tray in my hands.
She smiles. “Have fun, Kylie.”
“I’d have more fun if you came. I think you’d sit there all night judging everyone, which is my kind of friend.”
That makes her smile wider.
“You can’t hide in here forever,” I say.
“I can,” she teases. “Go. Have fun. I’ll hear all about it when you get back.”
Theo lives in a suite in Halloran with three other guys, which means there’s an actual living room with two couches, one of them orange.
There are six of us. Theo is tall and talks with his hands and hugs me when I walk in, even though we’ve never met.
His roommate Brandon barely says anything.
Sam has a shaved head and about nine face piercings.
Bianca is here, and so are Kenzie and me.
The sandwiches are gone in fifteen minutes.
“These are good,” Theo says with his mouth full. “Who made these?”
“Kylie.”
He looks at me. “Kylie, these are good.”
“They’re sandwiches,” I say.
He takes another bite and smiles at me.
Scrabble becomes a war. Sam is the kind of person who knows two-letter words nobody’s ever heard of and refuses to explain them.
Brandon plays entirely for aesthetics and puts down OBOE for eleven points when he could have had thirty.
Kenzie keeps her tiles pressed to her chest. Theo tries to play QUIZZING with one Z and a blank and argues for four minutes that the blank “can be whatever we want it to be.”
“It can be whatever you want it to be, legally,” Sam says. “It cannot be a second Z when there’s only one Z in the entire bag.”
“How do you know there’s one Z?”
“Because it’s on the box, Theo.”
I win, and by a lot, because I put QUIET across a triple with the Q on a double letter. Theo makes a noise like I’ve struck him, Sam says, “Respect,” and I’m unreasonably proud of myself.
Somebody puts music on low. Bianca and Kenzie get into The Bachelor.
Brandon tells a fifteen-minute story about his cousin’s wedding.
Nobody’s drinking, nobody’s loud, and Theo’s morning plans have come up twice as a kind of curfew everybody has accepted.
Somewhere around nine, I end up on the orange couch next to Theo, who’s been working himself up to something all night.
“Can I ask you something? You’re a girl.”
“This is how I was born, yes.”
“There’s this girl,” he says.
He tells me that her name is Justine. They have a lab together and she’s in his study group. She laughs at his jokes, which he has analyzed extensively. She once brought him a coffee, which he has analyzed more extensively.
“Okay, so the coffee,” he says. “Is that—”
“Have you asked her out?” I ask.
He looks shocked. “What?”
“Have you asked her out?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know if she likes me. You have to know first. You get, like, signals, and then you—”
“Theo.” I put my cup down. “How long have you been trying to figure out if she likes you?”
“Since September.”
“It’s October. That’s a month of overanalyzing a coffee.”
“When you say it like that—”
“Just ask her.”
“What if she says no?”
“Then she says no, and it’s over, and you get to stop thinking about it.”
From the floor, Sam says, “That’s the advice.”
“That’s brutal advice,” Theo says. “Have you ever just gone for it?”
“No,” I say. “I got cheated on instead.”
Bianca says, “Yeah.”
Kenzie looks like she’s about to intervene and then doesn’t.
“Sorry,” I say, and laugh, because Theo looks horrified. “I’m blunt. That’s what happened, and I’m over it.”
“How long were you together?” Brandon asks.
“Three years. Since the summer before sophomore year. It ended the first week here.”
Theo puts both hands on top of his head. “That’s heavy. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine, I swear. That’s why you should ask her. I spent three years with somebody who didn’t say one true thing to me for the last two weeks of it, and it turns out I’d rather he’d just told me.”
Theo looks at me for a second. “Okay. I’ll ask her.”
“When?” I say too quickly like it’s a test.
He side-eyes me.
“When, Theo?” I ask. “Put a date on it.”
“Fine,” he sighs, smiling. “Tomorrow.”
I point at him and open my mouth to promise I’ll find out if he doesn’t, and the door opens, and all of us turn our heads.
It’s Nash, in a hoodie and joggers with his hands at his sides. His eyes go around the room once, fast, and land on me, and then on my finger pointed at Theo. I drop my hand and look at Kenzie, who’s staring at him with her cup halfway to her mouth.
“Uh,” Theo says, standing up off the couch. “Wrong room, man. You might be looking for two doors down.”
“Who are you?” Brandon says.
Nash looks at Theo, then back at me, and doesn’t say anything. He crosses the room. Theo says, “Hey, man,” but doesn’t get in his way, because Nash has about four inches and forty pounds on him.
“Come on,” Nash says to me. “We’re leaving.”
I laugh. “We’re leaving? What are you even doing here?”
The room goes silent. And Theo, who has known me for two and a half hours and is a genuinely nice person, squints at Nash and says, “Kylie, is this the guy who cheated on you?”
I laugh so hard I have to cover my mouth. Nash’s head turns very slowly toward Theo.
“No,” I say through my fingers. “No, no. This isn’t my ex.” I look up at Nash. “Told you. Told you you have the vibe.”
Nash bends, and a second later, I’m over his shoulder. I shriek at the impact of my stomach on his shoulder. “Nash!”
The room explodes.
Kenzie yells my name and stands up so fast her drink goes over.
Bianca says, “Oh my God.”
Theo looks horrified. “Hey. Hey.”
Nash walks out with my hair hanging in my face. I wave an arm at the room. “I’m okay! I’m fine! Thanks for having me!”
“Your stuff!” Kenzie yells.
Nash walks back two steps and grabs my bag off the couch.
“Your tray!”
He doesn’t turn around again. “Bring it back to Corvin for her.”
Theo follows us to the door with his hands out, like he isn’t sure whether to intervene physically. “Kylie, do you want me to—”
“Ask her out!” I yell as Nash turns me around to shut the door behind us.
“Nash, are you fucking insane? Put me down!”
He doesn’t. He carries me down every flight without a word, and I’m laughing so hard by the bottom that I can’t breathe, my ribs aching from his shoulder.
When we get out the side door of Halloran into the cold, he sets me on my feet on the grass.
I shove him in the chest with both hands.
He doesn’t move. It’s like shoving a door.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“That guy was all over you.”
“He was not all over me!”
“He was sitting—”
“He was sitting on his couch, where he lives.” I shove him again, with the same result. “I was giving him advice.”
His eyes narrow. “About what?”
“About a girl he likes and is too scared to ask out.”
He goes quiet. I push my hair out of my face and try to get my breathing back, and it’s freezing out here. My jacket is still upstairs on Theo’s couch.
“What did you tell him?” Nash says.
“What?”
“The advice. What did you tell him?”
“Are you serious?”
“What did you tell him, Kylie?”