Better, I type back.Wanted to catch up. It's been a while.
Another fast response.I've missed you.
I know she has. I set the phone face down on my chest and look at the ceiling again.
Serena is many things, very few of them useful in polite company. But she has one quality that I have always valued above the rest — she cannot help herself. She knows things, and she says them. She observes, and she reports. She was at that party. She has been on this campus. She moves through the edges of my world like a satellite I've never had to program.
She already knows whatever there is to know.
I pick the phone back up.
“Tell me what I missed.”
She talks for forty minutes.
I ask small questions in the spaces — casual, curious, like we’re two friends catching up. She tells me about the team, about Coach's mood, about the UCLA loss, and who she blames for it. She tells me about campus, about a party she went to, about a girl in her Political Theory class who keeps giving wrong answers with complete confidence.
I wait.
She gets there eventually.
She always gets there.
"Beck's been weird," she says. The phrasing is careful in the way that means she's been thinking about how to say this. "Like, around."
"Around where?"
"Campus. More than usual." A pause. "Near the dorms mostly. Elm Hall."
The name lands in my chest like a stone dropped in still water. I watch the ripples move outward and keep my voice easy. "Yeah? Visiting someone?"
"I mean." She makes a sound that is trying very hard to be neutral. "Probably."
"Who do you think?"
Silence. The specific silence of someone deciding whether to say the thing they came here to say.
"Serena."
"I don't know for sure," she says quickly. "I just saw him a few times. And your girl's been around campus, so I just— I don't know. I don't want to start anything."
Your girl.
"You're not starting anything," I say warmly. "I appreciate you telling me. It's good to know people were looking out for her while I was out."
She relaxes. "Of course. She seems like she's doing okay. She's been at the library a lot."
"The library." I keep every trace of anything out of my voice. "Studious."
"I guess. I've seen her up on the third floor a few times. Political science section." Another pause. "She's usually not alone."
The ripples move outward.
"Good," I say. "I'm glad she had company."
We talked for another ten minutes about nothing. I thank her. I tell her to visit soon. I hang up and set the phone on my chest and lie very still in the dark hospital room and breathe through it.
Beckett.
