“Ha, look at this,” Carter says, turning his phone to show me and Aeron, even though neither of us lean forward to look. “He’s completely passed out. The coach walked in and the guy was literally snoring in the deep end.”
“How do you fall asleep in a pool?” Aeron asks from his recliner. His voice is quiet but there’s a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Exhaustion, man.” Carter takes a sip of his beer, shaking his head. “They do six a.m. sessions where the coach just screams at them for two hours. I’d fall asleep in a pool too.”
“With someone screaming at you?” I ask.
Carter shrugs. “Sure.”
“You’d fall asleep in a pool because you’re incapable of sitting still for longer than four minutes,” I say. “Your body would shut down out of spite.”
He grins. “Four minutes is generous. I give myself two.”
Aeron laughs, but he looks startled, like he didn’t expect it from himself.
I take another hit and lean my head back against the armrest. The ceiling is close enough that I can count the cracks in the plaster. Three long ones radiating from the light fixture, two shorter ones near the corner where the wall meets the ceiling. Old cracks, like a home should have.
My parents’ house doesn’t have cracks. My parents’ house has a maintenance team that comes quarterly to ensure nothing ever shows its age.
Carter continues scrolling, narrating his feed in fragments. I let the words wash over me without really listening. His voice is good background noise, steady and upbeat.
My mind drifts.
It’s been doing that all day: drifting. Snagging on things I don’t want to think about, then releasing, then snagging again, like fabric catching on an exposed nail.
June.
This morning… what were the chances she’d find her way into my class after the semester already started?
She was close enough that I could smell the sandalwood in her hair, close enough that if I moved my arm two inches we’d be touching. And that’s where she’ll be twice a week for the rest of the semester.
Not good.
I wasn’t prepared for her today. Most days I have my invisible armor on before I leave my dorm room. But this morning, I woke up at four a.m. from a dream I couldn’t shake.
The dream was the same one I’ve been having for as long as I can remember. I was in my parents’ house, but it was bigger, and the hallways stretched longer than they should have. I was calling for someone. My voice was steady at first, then louder. My throat hurt. I walked through every room. The kitchen. The living room. The marble foyer. I opened doors and found more rooms behind them, each one pristine, each one empty. I screamed and the house absorbed the sound, like the walls were designed to swallow noise.
Then, finally, at the end of a hallway, I saw a little boy. I recognized him and I sobbed.
He screamed, he called for my help, and I turned my back on him and ran away.
I’d woken up with my hands clenched so tight my palms had half-moon marks from my fingernails and my wrists ached. My first thought had been to text Carter. My second thought—the one I actually followed—was to put on my gloves to warm my shaking hands and go to class, acting like I hadn’t just spent fifteen minutes sitting on the edge of my bed waiting for my pulse to stop racing.
So when June slid into the seat beside me in Mixed Media, part of me was already exposed and I didn’t know how to hide it. For a few minutes, in a mostly empty classroom with the afternoon light catching in her hair, I’d let myself forget why I keep my distance.
The flyer actually came at the right time, before I did something we’d both regret, like ask her to hang out, just the two of us, after class.
Was I going to ask her on a date like a damn idiot?
I am an idiot.
I suck harder on the joint, and the smoke fills my chest too fast. I hold it, letting the burn sit there.
June’s face on the flyer. Her photo and those words underneath.
The fury comes back, quieter now than it was this afternoon but no less dense. I feel it in my hands. They want to break something. When I’d read that flyer, the anger had been so immediate I’d lost my usual restraint. And June had noticed.
She saw that I care, and that’s a problem.
