I close my chemistry book with a dull thud. I stare at my hands: chewed-up cuticles, faint lines of ink along the knuckles, a single scar on my left index from a run-in with a broken pipette last semester. They don’t look like the hands of a person who could have changed someone’s life in a closet, but here we are.
My phone buzzes again.
8:36 am: [YouTube link] He’s gone public. This is not a drill.
I watch the video with the sound off, just in case my roommate—still asleep, somehow—has ninja-level hearing. Aaron is talking into the lens, earnest and unironically handsome in his jade green crewneck and perfectly tousled hair.
“If anyone knows the real identity of Jessica Rabbit from the Pi Omega Halloween party, please let me know. This is 100% serious. She is a legend. We need to find her for… scientific reasons.” He does finger quotes. There’s real desperation in his eyes, or maybe it’s just a trick of the lighting.
The view count is already over 200. I close the link, then set my phone face-down on the desk and push back in my chair so hard it nearly tips over.
I can’t take this. I can’t take the not-knowing, the waiting for it all to implode. I am the last person on earth equipped to handle even one person’s attention, let alone that of an entire campus.
I grab my phone and text Sara. She’s the only person I know who might understand. Or at least, the only one who won’t make it into a reality show.
Me: If I drop dead in the next 48 hours, please erase my hard drive. Also, do not let Hunter speak at my funeral.
She replies instantly.
Sara: You’re not going to die. And if you do, I’m putting the wig on you before the casket closes.
An involuntary laugh escapes me, and the tension in my shoulders goes from knife-blade to paper cut. For a moment, I think maybe it’ll all be fine. Maybe Aaron will lose interest. Maybe the world will spin on, and I can go back to the way things were—quiet, predictable, ruled by logic and the occasional panic attack, but never this.
I stand and pace the perimeter of my room, counting the steps: eight to the door, five to the window, six to the closet. I circle twice, then collapse onto the bed and stare at the ceiling.
My phone buzzes again. This time, I ignore it.
I close my eyes and let the memory of the kiss roll over me—uninvited, unstoppable, a chemical reaction that refuses to run to completion. I want to blame the party, or the anonymity, or the weeks of pent-up academic stress, but that’s just cowardice. It was me. I did it. And now it’s my problem to solve.
—ΠΩ—
Sara’s “studio” is technically half her bedroom converted, but it’s somehow more alive than any other space on campus. The light is always artificial, cycling through soft gold and sharp white from a ring lamp she got for free on Craigslist. The air is a solid, breathing thing, saturated with the sharp chemical sweetness of paint thinner, the undertow of cheap coffee, and, if she’s been at it late, the plastic snap of microwave popcorn.
It’s late enough tonight that the campus outside is more shadow than light, the windows reflecting the bright little worldshe’s built in here. I hover at the doorway, not wanting to disrupt the geometry of it: canvases stacked along the wall, floor tiles freckled with drips of indigo and blood red, three sets of brushes fanned out on the workbench like surgical tools. Sara doesn’t look up. She’s layering oil onto something abstract and menacing, her hair scraped back in a bun and streaked with pale green pigment.
She senses me anyway. “You look like you’re about to give blood,” she says, glancing over her shoulder. “Come in, Spence. You’re making the hallway look desperate.”
I edge inside, hands in my pockets. “You got a minute?”
She keeps painting, but her eyes track me in the ring lamp. “For you? Always.”
I take a circuit around the studio, picking up a brush, setting it down, then drifting to the far wall where her senior project—six feet of stretched canvas, mostly black—looms like a warning. There’s nowhere to sit except a folding chair with duct tape on the seat and a plastic crate full of gesso buckets.
Sara finally sets down her palette knife. “So, are you going to pace until you wear a hole in my floor, or do you want to tell me what’s up?”
I stall. “I just… needed to get out for a while.”
“Bullshit,” she says, but kindly. She grabs a mug from the window ledge and gestures with it. “Decaf. Want?”
I shake my head and scan the shelves for something to focus on. The best I can do is an empty Red Bull can.
Sara waits, not with impatience, but with a kind of gentle stubbornness. She starts cleaning her brushes, working the bristles through a jar of turpentine, then wrapping them in a blue shop towel with hands that are steady and stained from years of practice.
I take a breath, open and close my mouth a couple of times, but nothing comes out.
Sara’s lips twitch in a not-smile. “Is this about Aaron?”
I sigh. “Yeah.”
