He discusses the morning after, how we parted ways with a kiss, and spends what are definitely too many words on my morning breath. In the story, I come across as almost desperate, asking for assurance that he’ll text me. He swiftly decides not to text me.
Then it morphs into almost a horror story. A week later, Garrett shows up in Valery’s class—a studio art course, not creative writing, because the surface-level changes include making Valery an artist, not a writer, and Garrett pre-med, not pre-law.
Afterward, she accosts him in the hallway and assures him that she didn’t know he was in the class. He’s disturbed by the sentiment because that thought hadn’t even crossed his mind until she mentioned it. Now Valery begins to wonder—is she stalking him?
He isn’t sure what to believe, and he’s forced to confront the reality of his ego, because if sheisstalking him, he’s at least a little bit flattered by it.
She always stared at him in class, though Valery was self-aware enough to know that the only reason he knew she was looking at him was because he was looking back.
And the story ends. It fucking ends on that sentence.
I can’t think. I mean, I can think, but every thought is coated in a thick layer of molten-hot anger. Before I know it, I’m standing in front of a dorm—and it’s not Alex’s.
I haven’t been here in over a decade. Did Ellie and Patrick live in room 345 or 543? I know it was something sequential, easy to remember. And yet I seem to have forgotten.
I slip into the building as two students exit, get in the elevator, and go with my gut, hitting the third-floor button. When the doors open, muscle memory takes over, and I find myself at Ellie’s door.
Am I really doing this?
Ellie thinks I’m pathetic and obsessed with him. Showing up at his dorm unannounced plays directly into those perceptions.
But if I don’t tell him how I feel right now, I probably never will. I’ll have to sit in class, mortified, unable to say anything about it without making it obvious to everyone that the story is about me. If it isn’t already obvious.
I pound on the door. The next few seconds are excruciating. As I stand there listening to the ambient college-dorm sounds—students laughing, TVs playing, the faint hum of music—I have that sinking, panicky feeling I always got at work after I sent an email I had proofread only twice, wishing I could go back just two seconds and unsend it, clicking over to my outbox to reread it more carefully despite the fact that if I found something, it was far too late to fix it.
It’s too late to go back now.
Time stretches on, and I have a fleeting sense of hope. Maybe Ellie isn’t home. Maybe I get to have my brave stick-it-to-him moment without having to actually, well, stick it to him.
I hear shuffling inside. The murmur of voices.
The urge to flee overwhelms me, but before I can act on it, the door swings open.
Ellie frowns, adopting what I’m sure is supposed to be a casual stance. He glances back inside, then steps out into the hall and closes the door behind him.
“Joey,” he says, surprised. He stumbles on my name as if he’s nearly forgotten it.
As if he’s been thinking of me as fucking Garrett.
“What are you doing here?” he asks after a long pause.
I shove my phone in his face and demand, “What the hell is this?”
He squints at the screen. “That’s… is that my short story?”
“What the hell is this shit?”
“You came to my room because you didn’t like mystory? I’m kind of busy—”
He tries to brush me off, but I don’t let him.
“This is me. This is us. You wrote about me—and then yousent it to our class?”
“Look, I’m sorry, Joey—”
Once again, he stumbles on my name. I want to laugh. I want to cry. I want to scream.
“But that’s just a story. It’s fiction. I don’t know why you think—”
