Only, what was normal now?
I probably would have helped Keaton with his documentary and then asked him to help me study. But he was gone.
I looked at the desk and narrowed my eyes. He was gone, but he had left his laptop.
I glanced at the door and back at the desk. He wasn’t here. I couldn’t hear his voice in the hall. He’d gone to take that phone call. Maybe it was his sister – in which case, he’d be gone for a while.
I could just take a sneak peek at the project, couldn’t I? Maybe it would tell me something. Maybe I would understand how he saw me.
I got up, hobbling and grabbing my crutches to get me over to the chair. I sank into it and nudged the touchpad on his laptop. The screen sprang to life. He hadn’t bothered to lock it.
He must have been looking at his emails.
Just like his side of the room, his inbox was neat and tidy. It was the tidiest inbox I had ever seen, in fact. There were folders down one side that covered every conceivable topic. In the inbox itself, there was just one email sitting there.
It was the email he had opened up in the side window.
The email from the Dean telling him his new room assignment was ready.
I read the date and my eyes widened. This had come through ages ago. Had he not wanted to take it at first? Had he just not seen it? With an inbox this tidy, I couldn’t believe for a minute he hadn’t known it was there.
He had to have known this whole time that he could move. But he hadn’t.
Why?
I put my thumb in my mouth, biting the nail. He wasn’t here. He wouldn’t see me do it. And it would be for both of us, really. He’d said he would stay. I was just helping him out with the admin.
And if the Dean knew that he didn’t want the new room, he wouldn’t offer it to him again.
I started typing before I could stop myself. I was slower at it than Keaton was but I knew I didn’t have much time.Dear Dean, I wrote. I had no idea if that was the right thing to say or if Keaton would have written it that way. There wasn’t any time for that.Thanks for your help but I actually don’t need the room anymore. I’m fine with my roommate now. You can give it to someone else.
There.
I hit send before I could talk myself out of it.
Now he wasn’t going anywhere, even if he changed his mind.
That was a stupid thing to do. I knew it even while I was doing it. But this time, I just didn’t care.
I got up and scrambled over to the other side of the room. If Keaton came back in, I needed to pretend I wasn’t doing anything. I grabbed my phone and sat back against the wall to scroll through it.
If he came back in, I needed to be ready to try to get him to talk again.
Keaton
Seeing my sister’s name flash up on my screen felt like a godsend for a moment. Then I looked again and realized she wasn’t supposed to be calling me today.
I forgot completely that I was supposed to be taking all of my stuff to get away from Olly and rushed outside to answer it.
“Hey, Clar,” I said as I rushed down the hall. I still had the video camera in my hand, even though it was going to be useless without my laptop to do the edits on. “What’s up?”
“Keaton,” she said. She sounded relieved to hear from me, which instantly had me on alert. It wasn’t like I expected her to be annoyed to have to talk to me – we enjoyed our weekly calls – but she wasn’t usually this relieved.
“What’s happened?” I asked. I found a window ledge in the stairwell and sat down. It was a little echoey here, but at least I didn’t have to go outside in the cold – and we were relatively alone since most people weren’t coming up and down the stairs in the middle of Sunday morning.
“It’s Dad,” she said, and when her voice caught on a sob, I knew it was bad.
“Is he ill? Or hurt?” I asked, mentally preparing to get to the hospital. How would I get there? I’d have to take a train or a bus, or both. I didn’t have a car, and there was no one here with a car that I could ask for a ride all the way home. A taxi was out of the question thanks to the cost, even if it would have been the most direct route.
