Every college student inevitably learns their painful lesson from participating in the torture project of the random roommate exchange, and as it happens, Veronica is mine. With Sophia already locked into a five-person lease, I had no choice last fall but to enter the university’s roommate assignment program, a sadistic algorithm that I wholeheartedly believe takes great joy in forcing unlikely pairs together just to watch us claw each other apart.
Luckily for me, Veronica stays with her boyfriend most days out of the week, but I dread every time she deigns to return with a pile ofdirty clothes and a heap of misdirected anger. I grab my bag, slinging Mikhail’s heavy jacket over my arm, and race for the door.
“Cassandra, just because I’m gone doesn’t mean you just forget how to run the dishwasher. Just once I’d like to come back to my apartment clean,” she seethes, dangling my morning coffee cup with a finger wrapped around the handle.
So close. I stop, eyeing the tidy surface of the kitchen table.
“The only thing on the counter is an empty cup and a plate from breakfast. Not to mention the pile of moldy takeout containers and wet towels you left draped over my textbooks last time you packed for Jason’s house,” I shoot back. She sets the cup down with a heavy clunk and crosses her arms, the dark circles that stripe beneath her eyes deeper than usual. She’s probably just exhausted from whatever they do over there, and she’s taking it out on me.
“Look, I’ve gotta go. We can talk about the coffee cup crisis later if you want,” I snap, making my move towards the door. She mutters something behind me while I’m pressing it closed, but I just lock up and head to my car. I really can’t be late for this class, especially because of a pointless round of bickering with my sometimes-roommate. I wish she would just move in with her boyfriend, but unfortunately for me, I know I can barely afford rent as it is with my loans and scholarship. I just have to ride out this shitty lease.
By the time I arrive in the lecture hall, all of the nice, spread-out aisle seats are taken, and I have to squeeze into a middle seat in the back row, pressed between someone’s desk and a long, hairy thigh that has no business being out in the dead of winter. The tight fit sends warning signals shooting through my chest, my body remembering the weight of someone pressed too close, the feeling of being trapped with nowhere to run. The musty smell of old textbooks and body odor mingles with the recycled air, and suddenly I’m seventeen again, locked in a room that smells like stale beer and desperation.
I suck in a tight breath, my ribs caging into a defensive stretch. The walls feel like they’re closing in, and for a moment, I can hear the distantecho of my own voice, younger and more desperate:Please, just let me out.
I’m not there, I remind myself, emptying the volume from my lungs.
I’m in Brecks Hall. The ugliest lecture hall on campus, which also happens to be exactly 43 miles away fromthatroom. I stare at the institutional green walls coating the room in a sickly hue. I look up, burning my retinas on the unforgiving glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. The harsh brightness grounds me, so different from the dim lamp that cast shadows across?—
No. Stop.
Slowly, my mind retreats from the locked-away corner where I keep the worst memories, and sound begins to filter back into my ears. The dull drone of the professor’s voice creeps back to the forefront, and I sigh, my hands trembling slightly as I realize how close I came to completely losing it, surrounded by hundreds of my peers. I slide my laptop out of my bag with unsteady fingers and narrow my focus back to the research project being outlined for the class.
A bagof food in hand, I climb the steps of the Biology building, a palm held up in front of my face to shield from the harsh, midday winds. Taking care not to draw attention, I make my way down the narrow hallway and slip into Lab 224. An excited gasp sounds out in the room.
“Oh my god, did you really sneak in sustenance just for me?” Sophia beams, her face lit up in a wide grin. She sets down a pipette and snaps off her gloves.
“You get so focused on your experiments, you forget basic human needs. How is your beautiful brain ever gonna reach its potential if you don’t feed it?” I tease, pulling a carton out of the bag and handing it to my best friend. She opens it, moaning, and then jumps up to hug me. Technically, the lab assistants aren’t supposed to bring any food or drinkinto the labs, but I’m not a lab assistant. Besides, they haven’t caught me yet.
“How was your day? You had marketing this morning, right?” Soph asks, her mouth stuffed to the brim as she struggles to chew.
“It was...” I sigh, sliding onto a stool. “It was okay. I had to sit in a middle seat and?—”
“Did it happen again?” She asks, swallowing. The concern in her voice is immediate, automatic. She knows me too well.
“Yeah. It happened again, but I got it under control after a few minutes.” I admit, resting my head on my propped-up hands. The shame burns in my chest. Sophia is the only one I’ve shared my past with. She’s the person I whisper secrets to during late-night library sessions when we’re desperately trying to stay awake, the one I tell when I have a weird dream about being a worm. We tell each other everything.
Well, almost everything, I remember, guilt flooding me as I remember my lie from this weekend.
“That’s the fastest recovery yet, right? And you didn’t even have to leave the class? I know this fucking sucks, but you’re making progress.” She pauses, choosing her words carefully. “Remember that time I was showing you my closet last fall?”
The memory hits like a punch to the gut. My first real panic attack in front of her, when the small space and hanging clothes triggered something so primal I could barely breathe for twenty minutes. She spent hours holding me, working to calm me down after my episode.
“You’ve come so far since then. You have to give yourself a little credit. A little grace, Cass.” She says, circling the table to wrap her arms around mine in foundational support. I don’t know what I did to deserve this girl in my life, but without her support, I’d have crumbled into nothing a long time ago. I hold her to me for a second, relishing in the comfort she radiates into me.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and mean it more than she’ll ever know.
She pulls back and settles into her chair, finishing her lunch while I gather myself. The silence between us is comfortable, healing.
Tuckedinto the safety of my bed, I stare down at the missed calls lining my phone screen like a ticking bomb, ready to go off the second I touch it. There are three attempts from mom to reach me, but I couldn’t get myself to pick any of them up, dreading the strained endeavor of conversation just as much as the guilt from ignoring her efforts to communicate.
It’s painful to remember how close we used to be, back in the early years of my childhood when I’d run to tell her my latest discoveries and all my scariest dreams. With my dad never in the picture, my mom held up all the stars and the moon in my pre-adolescent world view. We did everything together, took care of each other, but that was before.
When Joe came into the picture, our relationship was irrevocably shattered before my eyes. It was slow at first, an initial crack of verbal abuse, another screaming match in the kitchen, but soon the glass webbed with enough tiny fissures and fractures that the foundation split, and we’ve never been the same. We stopped telling each other things. We stopped taking care of each other. And I never dared to tell her about a weekend in June when I was 17, the weekend that taught me what it really meant to be trapped, to beg for freedom that never came.
Now, every time I pick up her call, I start an internal countdown of seconds before I hear his voice yelling somewhere on the other side of the line. The voice I once begged to come back, the man I cried to let me out. My stomach turns at the memory, and I push it away, lifting up the screen and calling back.
“Cassandra?”
