sadie’s calling.
Lucy lifted the phone back to her ear. Her own face felt clammy against her fingers. She didn’t have time to take any of that in. Her first order of business had to be what it always had been: to calm Jillian down.
“I’m—sorry, Mom,” she said haltingly. “I…think I might have been sleepwalking last night. I don’t actually remember sending these. I don’t know a Sadie.”
“I don’t care about Sadie,” Jillian said brittlely. “I don’t need to know all your little friends.”
Lucy swallowed back a rush of poorly timed anger. Jillian had never liked any of Lucy’s friends growing up. But whether or not she liked them was beyond the point, seeing as Lucy had barely spoken to any of them since graduation.
In any case, this wasn’t the time to relitigate a five-year-old fight.
“Anyway,” Lucy said, “I’ll call you back later, if you want? I’m not feeling very well, so I’m going to the health center.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Then again, when Jillian got fired up, there were very few right things to say. “Have you been drinking?”
“You know I’m allergic, Mom,” Lucy said.
“Well,” Jillian said. “You don’t always make the best choices for yourself, sweetheart.”
Oh. Lucy did not have the energy for the rush of rage that washed over her then. “Why don’t I just text later?” she said. “I don’t think this is the best time for us to talk about this.”
“Are you upset about what I said?” Jillian said. “I’m not saying you didn’t care about your grandfather. I’m just trying to explain how I feel. If you want to punish me for that—”
Well. As long as a fight was inevitable, why not? “I told you, I’msick,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry I scared you. But I didn’t do it to punish you. I don’t do anything to punish you.”
“Then you could have waited,” she snapped. “Two weeks after his death, and you tell me you’re leaving?”
Lucy rubbed at her temple with a shaking finger. She could have told Jillian the full truth. That she started the application when she knew he was close to the end. That she told herself she’d defer for a year if he hung in there a little longer. Or maybe even the worst part: that even if he had hung on longer, when Rollins said yes, she might not have had it in her to say no.
But she’d never have to find out what she would have done. And she already felt close enough to throwing up. No need to push it further. “They had an acceptance deadline,” she finally said. “I waited as long as I could.”
“And why not apply anywhere else?” Jillian plowed on like Lucy hadn’t spoken. “I know how long you’ve waited to go to college. You think I don’t understand, but I do. But we could have talked about it. You could have applied somewhere where I’d be close by, whereanyonewe know would be close by. How am I not supposed to worry?”
“I didn’t come here to make you worry, Mom,” Lucy shot back. “I never want to make you worry. That’s the entire problem.”
It was another mistake in a conversation of mistakes. The silence that followed was electric. “What’s the entire problem?” Jillian asked.
Lucy froze, her knuckles painful around the phone. For the past year, she’d been on the precipice of understanding all the age-old forces that had shaped her relationship with her mother. But it was still a raw, fresh understanding. Barely a real feeling, let alone something she’d been able to put into words. And even if she did find the words one day, she had decided that Jillian never needed to know what they were.
It was sitting there, with that wordless understanding at the tip of her tongue, that she heard movement from the hall behind her. And then, a voice.
“You want me to take that?”
Lucy, her phone still pressed to her ear, swiveled around. The source of the voice stood at the mouth of the hallway leading to the first-floor dorms, her considering gaze drifting first to Lucy and then to the phone itself. She was tall, white, and lean. Her shoulder-length hair framed her face in soft, deep brown waves.
She crossed the lobby with a catlike silence, held out her hand, and then lifted a pointed eyebrow at the hand Lucy held to her ear.
Lucy was miles away from anyone who would know this about her, but there was nothing that could stun her into compliance quite like a beautiful girl wielding a certain, effortless competence. She had, rather famously, fallen for her ex after listening to her order a sandwich.
She wordlessly handed the phone over. The girl brushed her hair aside from her ear—her hair was so fine that a few strands immediately slipped back against her cheek—and cradled Lucy’s phone against her face. “Hello?”
Lucy didn’t hear what Jillian said in response, but she heard the pitch of it. The girl seemed unfazed. “Yes, this is—” The girl paused, then mouthed,Name?
Lucy felt dizzy. It was, at the very least, a completely different kind of dizziness than she’d been feeling before. “Lucy,” she whispered, too baffled to do anything but play along.
“I’m Lucy’s friend,” the girl said. Another pause. “No, she can’t, she’s throwing up. Ah, no, I don’t know how long she’s been sick. You know, college campuses. We basically invent new diseases here.”
Lucy grimaced. By the sound of the tinny little voice on the phone, Jillian reacted exactly as anticipated, but the girl smoothly went on. “I’m sure it’s just one of those twenty-four-hour things. We were actually just in the middle of getting her to the health center. Maybe she could call you back later?”
