Chase:Be there in an hour.
I stare at the message until the screen dims. It’s like he knew I was talking about him.
Hayworth is still talking. Pens are still scratching. The girl two rows in front of me has highlighted an entire paragraph of her notes in pink, and I have written nothing. I’m the only person in this room who is not currently absorbing any information about research methods, and the midterm is on Thursday. I cannot fail my midterm at my dream school. I can’t mess this up.
Me:Should I not go?
Mila:Why not?
Me:Hockey players.
Mila:Ohhhhh.
Me:Yeah.
Mila:Well, now I’m definitely coming because someone has to make sure you don’t stare at him all night.
Me:I shouldn’t go. I’m canceling.
Mila:No, let’s go.
Mila:It’s going to be fun.
I lock my phone and put it down on the desk. I force myself to open my notebook to a clean page, and I write the wordsresearch methodsat the top, and I underline it twice. I need to focus and take notes.
The apartment is quiet when I get back.
I stand in the doorway with my key in my hand for a long minute, just looking. It’s so beautiful in here. It will not stopbeing beautiful, no matter how many times I walk through the door. The light has shifted since the morning — it’s coming in through the west-facing windows now, low and gold, and it’s pooling on the floor in two long rectangles across the rug. A bird is making a noise outside. I can hear my own breathing, so I inhale because this is my dream. I refuse to sabotage it.
I know exactly what I’ll do. I’ll stress-clean. I want to take a sponge to every surface and put my hands on something I can scrub. But I walk around and find that there’s nothing to clean. Penelope is, as I am quickly learning, a person who does not generate mess. She wipes down the counter every time she uses it. She rinses her mug. She folds the throw blanket every morning before she leaves for class.
I walk to my bedroom and clean my room that is already clean.
It takes me five minutes.
The bed is made. The desk is wiped. I dust the fake rose on the windowsill. I sit down at the white curved desk and open my Research Methods textbook to chapter four, and I read the first few pages.
My phone lights up on the desk.
Chase:Here.
I close the book.
I check myself in the mirror, and my whole face is a problem. My hair could use a dye job, or a trim, or, honestly, just a deep condition. My face could use makeup, real makeup, the kind Penelope wears that you can’t see but that changes everything about her bone structure. I think about Penelope’s perfect, rosy cheeks, her perfectly lined lips, and her perfectly thin coat of mascara. I look at my own face, and I do not understand what anyone has ever seen in me. I’m a girl with light blue eyes and naturally tan skin, and that’s the entire bio. I’m not interesting. I’m not styled. I’m not put-together.
Chase is walking on the sidewalk when I step outside.
“There she is,” he says, his face splitting into a smile.
I smile back. “Hi.”
He pulls me into a hug.
He holds me for a long moment. He drove ninety minutes for this — for me, for this hug, for whatever he’s hoping happens between now and tomorrow morning. His arms stay around me, and I can smell his deodorant, the inside of his truck, and the gas station coffee he stopped for somewhere along the way. I’m supposed to be a girl who melts into her boyfriend after a week apart. I’m not melting. What is wrong with me?
Chase is good to me. He has always been good to me. He texts me good morning every morning, even on the mornings when he’s working an early shift, even on the mornings when I forget to text him back. He has been the most consistent person in my life since I was eighteen years old, and the one thing — the one thing I have ever asked of him that he didn’t want to give me — was for him to let me go to the school I wanted to go to, and he did it. He didn’t like it, but he stopped fighting with me about it. And he’s still showing up. He’s hugging me like I’m his entire world, and I’m standing like a piece of crap girlfriend who’s overthinking about a guy who literally never cared about her.
I’m the problem.
