I mean, I know January sucks everywhere, but it particularly sucked for me at Bribury.
And it wasn’t even that we were having a bad winter. Comparatively it’d been pretty mild, hardly any snowfall at all, and when it did come it only stayed on the ground for a day or two before melting.
But Lily and Lucas were in love. And though I was happy for them, it also took my roommate away from the partying I wanted to do.
Oh, Lily tried not to be that girl. The one who dumps her friends for a new boyfriend. And Lucas worked nights, so during the week, Lily was free in the evenings.
But even when we did go to a party or something together, Lily wasn’t interested in any of the guys there.
I wasn’t quite ready yet to confess that I wasn’t either.
I thought about Montrose. Even put myself in his path a few times. He was teaching a few sessions, but they were all of the one class that I’d taken last semester.
The couple of times I would accidentally on purpose run into him, he would be polite, but still call me Ms. Winters like he’d done in class. He never mentioned seeing me at Betsy’s wedding.
The third time I saw him, he actually stopped and talked for a bit. He asked if I remembered what he’d said to me on my last day of his class.
I waved my mittened hand in the air and said, “Yeah, vaguely. Kind of how I should find myself and be true to her.”
That wasn’t exactly it. I, of course, knew every word he’d said. One: because he’d taken me aside, away from even Syd, who’d been asked to stay behind too, and I thought maybe my constant flirting was about to pay off. And two: because the words he said were ones I’d thought of nearly every day since.
“You’re so busy not being who you are, perfecting the persona you’ve got going on, that you might not be able to find yourself when you need to. Find her. Be her…and let the rest of the bullshit go.”
Yeah, I hated how he’d nailed me. And yet hadn’t really at all.
He’d nodded that day in the quad and said he remembered every word, and that now he was thinking that maybe his advice to me had not been the best.
When I asked what he meant by that, he just looked off across campus, obviously in his own thoughts, and shook his head.
He said goodbye to me, and something in it felt…final. I didn’t put myself purposely in his path after that.
I thought Syd might step up and fill the void left by Lily being in love. Syd liked to party, and she’d seemed desperate to be accepted by the Bribury boys.
But she’d picked up a second part-time job this semester, so I barely even saw her anymore. Even less than Lily.
Yes, I could have made more—other—friends. But I was kind of content to just hibernate through January myself. I liked the classes I was taking (though there was no hottie like Montrose teaching any of them), and though I’d never really needed to study, I did enjoy reading the textbooks.
One wasIntro to Psychology. I’d been playing armchair shrink for years (with my parents, how could I not?) and found that most of my hypotheses actually had merit.
I thought once January passed I’d want to go out more, but coming home from my afternoon classes on a Tuesday in early February felt much the same as it had since coming back from break—stale.
The room was crisp, with a fresh breeze coming from the window that Lily had left open a tiny crack.
Which meant she and Lucas had had crazy monkey sex all afternoon before Lucas would have left to get his little brother from school.
Closing the window, I looked down to the frozen quad below me, watching my fellow Briburians (yes, just made that up…but I kind of like it) scurry to class, bodies huddled into their warm coats, knit beanies firmly placed on their heads.
I walked through our shared bathroom to Syd’s room to see if she was around, but her room was empty.
I was just reaching for my phone to text Lily and see where she was when it beeped with a text tone that wasn’t assigned to anyone, just the generic tone. I didn’t get a lot of those. I liked knowing who was texting or calling, so gave specific tones to everyone.
That way I could ignore my father or mother without even having to reach for my phone to see it was them. Big timesaver.
Are you in your room?read the text.
Umm…yeah…like I was going to answer that.
It’s Stick.
