This time, Lucy heard Jillian’s voice a bit more clearly—“Let me talk to her.” The girl turned and shot her the same questioning look as before, and Lucy knew she should at least make an attempt to salvage the situation.
But an exhaustion unlike anything she’d ever felt had settled over her. And for the first time in her life, Lucy couldn’t make herself talk to her mother. She could barely bring herself to shake her own head.
Without missing a beat, the girl said, “She just started throwing up again, actually. Is there anything you want me to—Yes, I’ll make sure she gets to the health center. Yes, I’ll ask her to give you a call back. Nice talking to y—”
There was a beat. And then the girl ended the call, and handed the phone back to Lucy with a rueful little shrug. “She hung up.”
Lucy attempted to arrange her face into an expression other thangaping. She’d never had a rescue unfold quite that spontaneously before. Though when she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she’d ever been rescued like this at all. “Thank you,” she said.
The girl grinned. “Kinda seemed like you were struggling.”
She knew that sympathetic look. She got a lot of them when it came to Jillian—from teachers and classmates, from customers at the hardware store, even from strangers. It made her want to stick up for her mother, or at the very least, contextualize things a bit. ButShe lost her fatherwas enough of a damper on polite conversation.She lost her father, and her mother a few years before that, and my father when I was a kidwas a cold bucket of water.
So she kept things light. “Do you make a habit of saving people from awkward phone calls?”
“Well, I saw you looking distressed. And then heard you say ‘Mom,’” the girl said. “And not to brag, but I’m an expert at managing helicopter parents. They can’t resist my No-Nonsense RA charms.”
Lucy laughed for real that time. The girl was the building’s residence assistant—that made sense. Her air of confidence didn’t seem easily shakable. At least, not by anxious mothers.
“I don’t think we’ve met yet,” the RA said. “Big campus, I know, but still. Are you a junior or a senior? I’m a junior, but don’t tell the other residents. Some of the seniors think I’m a grad student, I want to see how long I can keep that going.”
Lucy kept smiling, but abruptly realized she was a bit too queasy to launch into even the abridged version of her life story. “I’m neither, actually.”
“Oh, are you our first-year resident? I was going to stop by and introduce myself this afternoon. Good timing, I guess.” The RA leaned a little closer to look her over. Lucy couldn’t help but feel a bit—sized up. “Well, I’m guessing you weren’t lying to your mom about going to the health center. You look, well, very nice—love the dress—but a little gray in the face, there.”
Lucy wasn’t going to be gray for very long if the RA kept leaning in like that. Not a single thing within her at that moment felt particularly up to flirting. But she was ill, not dead.
“So what’s going on?” the RA continued. “Your orientation group hasn’t been trying to scare you off, have they? I promise you do not need a fourth major. You don’t even need two.”
Lucy laughed, though she was aware how flat it sounded. She’d intended to make her excuses and continue on her slow, queasy way. But under the RA’s searching look, something in her crumbled.
“It’s not stress, I don’t think,” she said. “I don’t even know what I want my first major to be. I’m not one of those…genius multitasking poet laureate types they usually let in here.”
It was far more honest an answer than she meant for it to be. But the RA, for her part, looked unruffled. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m not a genius multitasking poet laureate, either. Plenty of us aren’t. I love and cherish every single turbo child prodigy at this school, but we don’t all have to be them, you know? Figuring out what you want is what you’re here for.”
That would have felt nice to hear yesterday. It still felt nice. Even if it wasn’t Lucy’s primary concern right then. “Do you think…” She stopped herself, at first. But the RA’s steady, patient face didn’t waver. It made Lucy want to keep talking.
“Do you think the health center could help?” she said. “If I…don’t know. Took something?”
It felt like a bombshell, but the RA still didn’t look rattled. “Depends, I think,” she said. “What did you take?”
“Hah. That’s the question.” Lucy rubbed at her temples, suddenly unable to meet that unruffled gaze anymore. “I know I should call campus police. I should, but…”
But explaining herself to them would have been only slightly less intolerable than explaining herself to Jillian.
But her skin might crawl right off her body if she had more than one pair of eyes on her right now.
But they’d probably be politely useless at best and actively hostile at worst.
All of the above.
Thankfully, the RA didn’t seem to need her to finish that sentence.
She sat down on the couch beside her then. “If you don’t want campus police called, I’m not going to be the one calling them. Generally, I think the thing you ‘should’ do in any given situation is the thing you feel ready to do.” She took a breath. Lucy could sense the caveat coming. “But before you say anything else, you should know that if someone hurt you, and you tell me about it, I’m obligated to report it to the university.”
“Oh,” Lucy said quickly, automatically. “It’s not that serious, I…”
The RA’s eyebrows rose, just a little, and Lucy wondered if she could hear the uncertainty in her words. Lucy herself had no idea how serious it was, after all. As Natalie had said, there hadn’t been a lot of time for someone to—hurt her. At least, “hurt her” in most of the ways she could conceive of.
