“I’m not okay all the time,” I say stiffly. “But I’m working on it.”
“Okay,” he says lightly. His smile doesn’t flicker. It doesn’t fade, and it doesn’t intensify. He stands at the counter, swallowing tablet after tablet, and when he’s had six, he puts the glass of water down and chases his meds down with a few spoonfuls of yogurt. “Does it come for you worse at night?”
It takes me a moment to understand the question. Almost as though I’m translating it from a second language I’m not fluent in, into my first language. It’s so blindingly accurate, it throws me, and I answer honestly before I have time to come up with a lie. “Yes.”
He nods slowly, rubbing his palms together in long, leisurely strokes where he traces his fingertips from one hand down the fingers and palms of his other and back up again. “Okay,” he says again. “Let me think about it, and I’ll come up with a plan.”
A frisson of fear creeps up my legs.
A plan?
A plan to do what?
“Don’t look so scared, it won’t be anything bad,” he says, holding out a hand to placate me. “And honestly, it was probably a good thing you went to bed early last night. Those lentils got to me, man. I swear, I was farting to kill.”
It’s so unexpected and he looks so earnest when he says it that it rearranges my organs. My lungs expand, and a loud, sudden bark erupts from my chest.
21
Lennon
Ipickupthephone and pin it to my ear with my shoulder. “Student services, housing department, how may I help you?” I say, taking care to drag the words out in an overly polite tone my mom often uses when she answers the phone.
Blake shoots me a death stare. Anna tilts her head and looks at him as though he’s endearing, not homicidal at all.
I check my calendar to try to see if I can find a good time to resign.
I manage to get off the call easily enough because it’s a simple maintenance request, thank God. As I hang up, Bev turns herI’m here to helpsign toBack in five minutesand snaps the blind at her station shut. She leans back in her chair and unwraps a candy bar.
Unfortunately, as she does it, a student approaches. With Bev out of commission, the student takes the seat in front of my station because I’m the next closest person.
She’s wearing baggy jeans, a baggy top, and an expression that can only be described as aggrieved.
I smile wanly. “How can I help?”
“I’m here to make an official complaint about my roommate,” she says, getting straight to business.
I’m on the fence about how I feel about dealing with in-person complaints. On the one hand, we have an app designed specifically for raising tickets and lodging complaints, and students are supposed to use that as their first port of call. On the other hand, talking to them and hearing firsthand accounts of nightmare roommates can be a welcome respite from the intense boredom of working here.
Technically, I should ask for her ticket number so I can investigate the trail of previous complaints she’s made. But if the time I’ve been here has taught me anything, it’s that students get more riled up, not less, when reminded that they’ve complained about their situations repeatedly and nothing has changed.
I ask for her student number and pull up her details. Her name is Sophie, she’s a first-year student, and she lives in a nearby dorm.
“What can I do to improve your day?” I ask, parroting the question I’ve heard Bev ask more times than I can count.
Sophie sweeps the back of her hand across her forehead and lets her eyes flutter shut. “It’s my roommate,” she says with regret. She takes a small notebook out of her bag and flicks it open to a page with bullet points and a lot of blue-ink writing on it.
I bob my head supportively as she reads through her notes.
“Basically”—she snaps the notebook shut abruptly, changing her mind and opting to go it alone—“she’s just there, you know? Like always. She’s in my roomallthe time. When I wake up, she’s there. When I go to sleep, she’s there. Literally the onlytime she isn’t there is when she’s at lectures, or with friends, or at meals.”
I study her face intently, as I try to piece together what she’s just said. Best I can tell, this girl is here to formally complain about the fact that her roommate lives in the room they share. “Is there anything else that seems to be the problem?” I prompt. “A personality clash, hygiene and cleanliness issues, drug use, problematic behavior? Anything like that?”
“No, no,” she trills. “It’s not like that. She’s fine. It’s just that she’s always there. I really mean it. It’s driving me crazy. I—” She starts tearing up. “I can’t take it.”
Before I have time to respond, Bev scribbles something on a Post-it and sticks it on my computer screen. Her writing is barely legible, but I make out the wordsfrequent flyer.
Ah.
