Her eyes stretch to their limit, bouncing between me and her invisible phone. “Uhhhh. Sorry, wrong number.”
A unison THC-fueled cackle explodes out of both of us, loud enough that neighbors several doors down would be within their rights to actually call 911. I don’t care. Not right now, not with Kat.
“Oh my God, close it.” She bats a limp wrist at the open window. “We’re so loud. Plus I’m freezing.”
“You’re the one who put on shorts!”
“They’re the best shorts!” she shrieks and slaps her palms against her thighs, standing up and model-twirling to show off the letters on the butt. When she whips back around, there’s an exaggerated amount of sternness on her face. “Murphy, dear,” she says in her best RuPaul head voice, “your collegiate shorts made the grade. Condragulations, you are the winner of this week’s challenge.”
I topple to my side, wheezing out laugh after laugh. I’m stoned. She’s stoned. We’re stoned.
“Okay, seriously, I’m closing this.” She pushes down on the window till it seals shut with a soft, almost squishythunk, hiding our sins. “I’ll go grab snacks, and then you’re filling me in,‘kay?”
“I bet you wish you still had that ice cream now.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she scoffs. “I still wouldn’t share if I did.”
While Kat runs to the kitchen to scrounge up something to curb the munchies, I crawl back into bed, tugging the comforterup to my chin. She returns with a box of fiber cereal tucked under one arm and a container of blueberries in her hand. “I’m remembering why we started smoking at my house.”
She passes me the blueberries, which are without a doubt the better snack, and settles onto the bed. We’ve spent a decade and a half of friendship in nearly this exact spot—me, propped up by too many throw pillows, snuggled beneath the covers; her, lying on her belly, chin propped up in her hands. This is how we were when I came out to her, and when she told me about her first kiss with her only high school boyfriend, the guy she dated almost exclusively so she’d have a date to senior prom. It’s where we first plotted our college experience: two years at community college to get our gen eds out of the way, then U of I, then an apartment in a cool neighborhood on the outskirts of Chicago so we could commute downtown together for work: her at some swanky hotel and me at one of the hundreds of ad agencies in the city. All our most important moments have happened just like this, parallel to each other on my unmade bed, only with varying amounts of acne and bangs and stuffed animals piled next to us.
“So.” She sets aside her box of cereal and claps the crumbs off her hands. Goofy Kat has stepped out, taking her RuPaul impression with her. What’s left is a quieter, gentler Kat with a squint of concern in her eyes. “What’s going on? What happened with Ellie?”
My shoulders deflate. Where do I even begin? The timeline is short, but there are so many points on it, and I want to pause on every single one, to paint each scene with the sort of detail that only Kat would care about. I want to relive every stroke ofEllie’s thumb against my hand, every laugh and uncomfortable dinner table silence. I want to tell her how I started dreaming, the way I never do, about months down the line with Ellie. About next semester. About next year. But I know I have to start with the end.
“She left, Kat,” I mumble, unwilling to even hear myself say it. I tug at a loose bit of comforter stitching and the fabric around it puckers. “Ellie left.”
Kat’s nose scrunches. “What do you meanleft?”
“I swung by her house, but Ellie had gone back to U of I already, and now she’s not picking up or texting me back.”
Kat chews her lip. “Okay, go back. We still haven’t talked through Thanksgiving.”
“Thanksgiving was mostly fine,” I say. “I think Professor Meyers actually likes me now. She invited me back for Christmas.”
“Nice.”
“But Ellie and I got in this big fight after I talked to you on the phone yesterday.” I scrape my pointer finger against the side of my thumb, peeling back a strip of dry skin. Talking about it makes it more real, and I feel a little stupid for being this shaken up by a fight with my fake girlfriend of less than a day, especially after calling Kat’s two-month relationship the equivalent of twelve seconds. She graciously hears me out anyway.
“What was the fight about?” Kat asks.
Whatwasthe fight about? “Priorities, I guess?”
“Okay? Say more.”
I mine my memory for more concrete details. “Well, she was really weird about me and you.”
Kat flinches. “Weird how?”
I place a blueberry between my front teeth, biting it in half as evenly as possible. “She, like, accused me of being in love with you.”
“Oh.” Kat blinks off toward the window for a moment, then cocks her head back toward me. “Are you?”
I lob a pillow at her head, and she doesn’t even try to dodge it.
“I’ll take that as a soft maybe,” she laughs.
“Do you want to talk about this or not?”
