I sip my coffee and don’t answer. I don’t let my mind go any further into this. I don’t need to feed myself false hope. I shake my head at her, pushing the thoughts out. I need it to be as far away from me as possible because I cannot fall into that loop again.
Instead, I run through the list of things I should worry about. I have my research methods midterm next Thursday and an APA quiz on Monday. I have laundry to do, and then there’s that email from my advisor I haven’t opened. I run the chapters of my study guide through my head.
“I bet,” Mila says, slowly, like a girl laying a card on the table, “he never thought he’d see the day you’d have a boyfriend who wasn’t him.”
I close my eyes. I don’t trust my face. I keep my voice deliberately, defiantly even. “Blue would never be my boyfriend, Mila. Not in a million years. He had every opportunity, and he didn’t want it. Those years are over.”
I drain my coffee and look at the bottom of the mug.
“Do you want to study for midterms?” I ask, not wanting to talk about Blue anymore.
Mila looks at me like she is going to say something else, and then, mercifully, she lets it go. She nods and blows out a long breath.
“Yeah. I’ve got so much to do. I just don’t know if I’ll ever recover from this hangover.”
“Me either.”
I get out of bed at half-past nine and pull on a pair of black joggers, a sports bra, and the only long-sleeved t-shirt I can find.When I pad down the hall to the living room, I stop in my tracks because Penelope is in the living room, and she is — there is no other word for it — radiant. She’s in matching activewear. Soft, dove-gray. Cropped tank, high-waisted leggings, the seams running clean along her body. Her dark hair is twisted into a low, elegant knot at the nape of her neck. Her yoga mat is unrolled in the patch of sunlight between the couch and the window. There’s a candle burning on the coffee table, and there is a glass of lemon water sweating gently on the floor by her foot, with an actual lemon slice floating in it, like she’s a wellness influencer who has stumbled into our living room. A pair of small pink dumbbells sits at the edge of her mat. She’s standing in a tree pose, palms pressed together at her chest, eyes half-closed, breathing.
She looks up when she hears me. Her smile is slow and easy. “Good morning.”
“Pen.” I can hear my own voice, thick and gravelly and full of the previous night. “Hi.” I am, I realize, gawking.
Behind me, Mila appears in the hallway in her own version of regretful glamour — my borrowed t-shirt sliding off one shoulder, her own pajama shorts, her empty mug clutched in both hands like a torch, her hair piled on top of her head in a knot.
“I’m doing a forty-minute workout,” Penelope announces, like she’s offering us a slice of cake. “You guys want in?”
“Yes,” Mila says, instantly.
“I’m hungover,” I murmur.
Mila turns to me. Her eyes glitter with a manic, hangover-fueled determination that I recognize from the trenches of high school. “Today is a reset.”
“You said,” I whisper at her, jabbing a thumb back toward my bedroom, “five minutes ago. That you wouldnever recover.”
“That was five minutes ago.”
“It might’ve been two.”
“I want to do it anyway. Come on.”
Penelope is already moving down the hall. She returns with two more rolled mats tucked under her arm, another pair of small pink weights, and an extra little bottle of lemon water for each of us. She lays it all out, and I’m outvoted.
We place our mugs near the sink and then set ourselves on the mats in a row. Penelope on the left, in her patch of sunlight. Me in the middle, and Mila on the right.
Penelope cues up a video on the TV. The instructor is a thin, ageless woman with a voice that sounds like a scented candle — low, warm, slightly hypnotic. She has us close our eyes. She tells us to set an intention.
I set the intention of not dying.
The workout begins.
Within ninety seconds, the workout reveals — gently, but with the slow inevitability of a tide coming in — that I am not, in fact, in the shape I had been telling myself I was in. My arms start shaking somewhere around minute four. My vision swims in little floating rays of pale light every time I bend forward and come back up. My quads are sending up smoke signals.
Mila, to my right, is grunting through a plank like a woman in early labor. Her hair has come undone. She makes a small, agonized noise on every exhale, and once, I’m almost certain, she whispers,take me, Jesus.
Penelope flows from one pose to the next like she’s made of water. It’s genuinely upsetting. At minute fourteen, I glance sideways at Mila. She glances back. We have shared a look like this exactly a thousand hundred times — across cafeteria tables and dressing rooms and the backseats of our parents’ cars — and this look says,we are dying, we are actually, genuinely dying, and only one of us is going to survive this.
Mila mouths, “Help me.”
