“Sorry, sorry. You’re right.” She pauses, then lets out one last exasperated, “Fuck!”
Again, an aggressiveshhin the background. Louder this time, even.
“Why are you getting shushed?”
“Because I’m at the library,” Kat says.
“Oh my God, then leave the library, we’re being loud.”
“I’m not on the quiet floor!” She sounds defensive, and it’s definitely directed more toward her shusher than toward me. “Can you DM her anywhere?”
“What, from the Sip Instagram account?”
“Right, I keep forgetting that you’re not chronically online like the rest of us. Hang on, let me find her.” Kat does me the favor of muting herself before tapping away at her phone in search of Ellie’s digital footprint. When she comes back, she sounds defeated. “Elbell underscore underscore underscore…her Insta is private. I requested her, but like…we’ll see.”
I collapse back onto the bed with a sigh, letting the pillow swallow my head on either side. Square one is a shitty place to be.
“You could ask Professor Meyers for her number,” Kat suggests, but the upspeak in her voice assures me that we’re on the same page there: I’m definitely not going to do that. “I don’t know, Murph,” Kat says, deflated. “You clearly like this girl. She clearly likes you. You could just wait until she comes home for Christmas?”
“Hate that.”
“What’s the alternative? Sending me to hunt her down on campus?”
I don’t respond.
“Nuh-uh. No chance.” Kat shuts me down before I can even offer a solid argument in favor of Operation: Find Ellie. “Do you know how many people go to this school? I’m not just going to bump into her.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” I whine. “Send a carrier pigeon? Smoke signals?”
“Okay, maybe we keep brainstorming. Singing telegram? Message in a bottle? Snail mail?”
Something lights up inside me. “Wait, what about email?”
“You have her email?”
“No,” I admit, “but I have a best friend who goes to the same school and knows how they format their student emails.”
“First name last name at Illinois dot e-d-u!” She shrieks her answer like it’s the winning response on a game show, and her background shusher comes back full force. Kat doesn’t seem to mind. “Type it in! Type it in!”
I wedge my phone between my ear and my shoulder, opening my laptop. “So Ellie Meyers at…”
“Is that her full name? Ellie?”
My stomach nosedives. “Fuck. Probably not.”
“Yearbook,” Kat snaps. “Check our high school yearbook.”
“Do I still have a yearbook?”
“You have so much shit in that room, there’s no way you don’t have a yearbook.”
“But I might’ve packed it up already,” I point out. “Or thrown it out. I’m throwing out so much.”
“Just look,” Kat says. “It can’t hurt.”
I put my phone on speaker and set it on the edge of the bed, keeping within shouting distance while I search. I’ve already hauled a few bins of books off to Goodwill and tossed a significant amount of junk with a particular emphasis on anything that reeked of High School Murphy. A yearbook would, by definition, be the first to go, but I don’t remember seeing one. I open and close my nearly empty corner cabinet and do a quick scan of my bookshelf. Nothing.
“Try your desk,” Kat suggests.
