Page 19 of Blueline Baby

I’m the guy who forgets. I forgot a whole night. I already can’t picture the face of the other girl. I’m the party. Fun while it’s happening, gone by morning, nobody worse off, because there’s always another one. That has been the best thing about me my entire life. I’m sitting on a hallway floor realizing it might be the only thing about me.

She’s the smartest person who’s ever bothered talking to me. She’s so far out of my league it’s almost funny. The part that actually gets me is that for a little while last night, right before I torched it, she looked at me like maybe I wasn’t a waste of her time.

I sit there long enough that a neighbor steps over my legs to get to the elevator and decides not to ask. I keep waiting for my brain to do what it always does—find the angle, find the way back in.

It never shows up.

There’s no move here. I could camp outside this door for a week and there’s nothing I could say through it that touches the actual problem. Because the actual problem isn’t last night. It’s me. I’m like this every day, party or not.

Which means the only thing that fixes it—if it’s even fixable, which it’s probably not—isn’t something I can say. It’s something I’d have to become. Not for a weekend. Not to win a game. For this girl specifically.

She’s heard all my best material. It turns out it’s garbage. Words were never going to be the thing with her anyway.

I go home and I pour every bottle in the apartment down the sink. It’s the least fun thing I’ve ever done, and there’s nobody around to watch me do it.

That’s kind of the point.

10

CHLOE

FUCK THIS. FUCK BEING SCARED. AND FUCK YOU A LITTLE BIT TOO.

The pens show up first.

A four-pack of the expensive, glittery gel ones, the exact kind I never buy myself because four dollars for a single pen is objectively insane. They’re sitting outside my door in a little bag with no note.

I know exactly who they’re from. I told myself to throw them out. Then I took notes with one, and it glided across the paper with zero friction. It was, unfortunately, a very good pen.

Then the pack of neon highlighters arrives, all mini and matching and cute. Then a pack of the heavy-weight index cards I like. Then, last week, a little clip-on book light—the precise kind I’ve been meaning to buy so I could study at night without keeping my room too bright.

None of it is over the top or obnoxiously expensive. It’s all just highly practical stuff to make my life easier, which is so much worse. I can easily throw away something like flowers. Flowers die. A clip-on book light solves a functional problem. It’s a targeted attack on my logistics.

Britt knows exactly where it’s coming from, because Britt is the leak.

“He asked me what kinds of things you like,” she says one night, painting her nails on my bed, delighted with herself. “I told him. Is that bad? It feels a little bad.”

“You think?”

“Don’t fall for it, though.” She blows on her nails. “They find one nice thing and they use it until you drop your pants. Hockey players don’t do serious. I would know. I’ve done a lot of them.”

“Then why are you helping him?”

“Because it’s entertaining watching him sweat.” She points the brush at me. “Do not go out with him. He will wreck you and forget your name.”

Which, coming from the girl who is basically living at Smitty’s apartment, I decide to let it slide.

He finds me in the library on Monday.

I’m at my usual table on the third floor, headphones in, exactly three days out from a huge test. I feel him before I see him because there’s a physical shift in the room, and people start looking up.

He pulls out the chair across from me, dropping all of his massive body into it, and he starts talking at a normal outdoor volume in a room where you can usually hear people breathe.

“Hey. I know you’re studying. I just need two minutes, because I’ve been trying to figure out how to⁠—”

“Shh.” I’m already up, grabbing my jacket off the back of my chair. “Shut up. You’re in a library. Go outside. Now, you moron, before they kick us both out.”

Outside it’s cold and gray, and I round on him the second we hit the bottom of the concrete steps.