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“Who cheated?”
“He cheated, obviously.”
“Bishop? On what?”
“Organic chem. He got a perfect score on an impossible test.” Molly ran her hands through her hair, desperately trying to tame a frizz exploding from her braid.
“You get perfect scores on impossible tests all the time.”
“Are you defending him?”
Roy snorted. “No way. I’m just saying.”
“I get perfect scores on impossible tests because I’m brilliant. And I study all the time.”
“Isn’t he right behind you in grade point standings?”
“Again with the defending? He takes easy, GPA-boosting classes!”
“Like organic chem?”
Molly huffed, stopping in front of a student bulletin board, and planted her hands on her hips. “He plays dirty. He’s the reason my junior history thesis is under investigation. I know he cheated.”
She glanced over her shoulder, and with a sound adjacent to a growl, tore down a campaign poster that read “SAY NO TO CRUMMY GRAHAMS IN OFFICE.”
Ad hominem attacks were expressly forbidden from student government campaigns, and yet she kept finding these things tacked up everywhere. It was a lazy slogan and a cheap shot; Molly couldn’t decide if she was more offended by the attack itself, or that he hadn’t tried harder to come up with anything else.
“How did he do it?” Roy asked, gently removing the poster from Molly’s grip. “Are people using the calculator trick again?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t care. That’s for our teacher to figure out when I report him.”
Chapter 11
The Sofa
Life with Aster had a certain push and pull to it. Molly learned this relatively early into her new reality with him. There was compromise, there was progress, and there were a fair few setbacks as well.
And so, winter arrived in more ways than one, a newly chilled détente defining their disagreement over her memory.
The day after Molly’s birthday, Aster’s research magically vanished from their apartment. Silently, they agreed not to discuss whether he still looked for answers. That unspoken thing between them took form, a third person in the room at all times: a constant stranger asking for attention.
In the moments when they successfully avoided their stranger, they could pretend to live a lovely life wherein Aster slept in his own bed again and Molly wore a ring on her left hand.
She could sleep pressed against his chest, warm and solid and reminiscent of a feeling only identifiable as home.
She could begin her days by running her hands through his normally impeccable hair, undone after a night spent against a pillow.
She could greet her nights with soft kisses against his lips and neck, apologies for the conversations they were ignoring, and promises that they would figure it out.
But their intimacy went no further, not since Molly’s birthday.
And Molly could only survive in the in-between for so long.
“Can we go ahead and unlock the spare room?” she asked one morning, sitting on the edge of the bed as Aster dressed for the day.
She’d woken feeling lethargic, a headache already blurring behind her eyes with dull pain and irritating prescience. Aster had stopped noting every time she took a painkiller. At least, he’d stopped doing so obviously. The Post-its on the refrigerator had disappeared with his books.
He stilled.
