“Theyare moving to Florida,” I correct her. “I’m moving…somewhere else.”
“Around here? Or around Champaign? Or are you gonna just jump straight to Chicago?”
“Try option D: not yet known,” I say. “I’m focused on the test and not regressing back to third-grade Murphy while living in this eight-year-old’s room.”
“It could be worse,” she says. “They could’ve staged it with bunk beds.”
“That would’ve been fine,” I say, “because I’d have dibs on top bunk.”
Ellie sits on the edge of the bed, and I’m a little fonder of the unfamiliar comforter just by its proximity to her. “Green. Gender neutral. Love it.” She pinches and flicks one of the pom-poms in a way that probably isn’t supposed to be sexual. Probably. Every bone in my body is begging me to sit down next to her and pick up where we left off in her father’s garage. The days of buildup between then and now make having her here—in my bed—feel all the more intense. I want to know how it feels to lie beside her—on a real bed, not an air mattress—without liquor or second-guessing in the way. But as bizarrely turned on as I am by the way she’s rolling that pom-pom between her fingers, I’m equally turned off by the thought of failing this class two semesters in a row. I shake my head to clear it and focus my energy on organizing my flash cards. “Are you down to quiz me?”
Ellie’s brows pinch together momentarily before settling into a look of sheer disbelief. “Oh, we’re actually going to study?” she asks. “I thought that was like…code.”
I swallow. “For?”
“You know.” She smirks and flicks a pom-pom again. Of course I know, and she’s not helping me shake the thought.
“Tempting,” I admit, “but my parents are downstairs.”
“We can be quiet.”
I canfeelmyself go red. “Ibelieveyour end of the deal was to help me pass this class.” I shuffle my note cards like a classic fifty-two-card deck. They snap and thwack against one another in that satisfying way that as a kid I practiced forever to achieve.
“Buzzkill,” Ellie grumbles.
“I’m no happier about this than you are. Now pick your poison: flash cards or study guide?”
I join her on the edge of the bed, keeping a healthy distance for both of our sakes, but I can still feel my heartbeat in the arches of my feet. I run her through all of my study methods—mind mapping, online quizzes, the audio recording on my phone. Each has brought me varying levels of success. “You’re working really hard on this, huh?” Ellie says, sounding impressed. “Did you do all this stuff last semester?”
I shake my head. “None of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I would’ve needed over a hundred on the final to pass,” I explain. “There was no point.”
“You could’ve done it and asked for extra credit,” she points out.
“Which is what Kat did,” I remind her. “But as you may remember, your mother plays favorites, and she isn’t a fan of mine.”
“Wasn’ta fan of yours,” she corrects me, scooting farther back on the bed and lying down so she’s ear to ear with the teddy bear.
“Right.” I scoot up next to her, simultaneously wishing for more and less space between us. I pass off the stack of note cards. “I actually think she might’ve bumped my grade.”
“Yeah?” Ellie lifts a brow. “Why do you think that?”
“I thought I needed a ninety-eight on the final, but then I talked to her and she said I needed an eighty-nine. So either she likes me and she changed it, or I miscalculated and I’m bad at math.”
“The second one,” Ellie says flatly. “You’re definitely bad at math.”
I’d push her off the bed if it wouldn’t mean cleaning up all my note cards. At least it’d be an excuse to touch her. My fingertips go hot, begging me to thread them into her hair and pull her close. But I shouldn’t. “I’m still not sure I’ll pass,” I say, clearing the stubborn, needy feeling from the base of my throat. “Eighty-nine is still tough.”
“But you can do it,” Ellie waves the stack of note cards in the air like a cheerleader rooting for Team Murphy. “You’re going to pass, and everything’s going to be fine.”
“No, everything’s not going to be fine,” I argue. “Even if I pass, I can’t transfer till next fall, remember?”
Ellie rolls onto her side, propping her head up in her hand. It’s veryDraw me like one of your French girls, and it’s not helping my focus. “So you transfer next fall,” she says plainly. “You’ll still get a whole year with Kat. That’s good, right?”
“Well, yeah.” I chomp down on my thumb, getting a good taste of hangnail. “But I’m not going to have a home in a month or two, so long as tomorrow’s showings go according to plan, and I’ll be staring down the barrel of a twelve-month lease here in Geneva that I’ll have to buy my way out of just to transfer to U of I.” The words pour out like water, a river of worry flowing between us. I thought I knew how much anxiety was bottled inside me, but now that it’s spilled out, I feel like I might drown in it. Quietly and with as much steadiness as I can muster, I tack on one additional thought. “Plus you won’t be there next year. Which sucks.”
