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“Nothing. Why?”
“Do you want to come to a thing? It’s not a party,” she adds fast, heading me off. “It’s my friend Theo and his roommate and like four people. We play games and eat, and everybody leaves by ten. Last time we played Scrabble for two hours, and Theo tried to put down a word that doesn’t exist, and Sam almost fought him.”
“Do we only know boys who fight?” I joke.
She laughs behind her hand. “That’s you and Paige. Not me. My friends aren’t fighting like that.”
“So they’re not arrogant, cocky assholes?”
“No,” she laughs.
I’m pleased to have her as a friend. I didn’t know there were college kids who’d get together on a Thursday and play Scrabble instead of partying every second they got. “What time?”
“Six. And bring food. It’s a bring-something thing. Theo does drinks, somebody always brings chips, and one time Bianca brought an entire lasagna, which was insane.”
“I don’t have a kitchen, Kenzie.”
“There’s a kitchen on your floor.” She shrugs. “All I know is that you should bring something.”
And that is how I end up in the third-floor kitchen at five making forty tiny sandwiches. Okay, not forty. Sixteen. It feels like forty. I bought everything at the campus store: bread, turkey, cheese, mustard, and a tomato I regret immediately, because it’s somehow hard and mushy at the same time.
Tessa comes in ten minutes into it with her mug and stops in the doorway. “You’re making food?”
“Sandwiches.”
“For?”
“A game night with Kenzie.” I shoot her a sideways look. “Do you want to come?”
She doesn’t answer. She sets her mug down, washes her hands, and stands next to me, and without asking, she starts cutting them diagonally.
“Why diagonally?”
“Because it’s better.”
We cut sixteen sandwiches in half, side by side. She lines them up on the tray in two neat rows, points all facing the same direction, and then fixes two of mine. At the end, she takes one, puts it on a paper towel, and carries it back to our room with her tea.
“Come with me,” I try again from the doorway, tray in my hands.
She smiles. “Have fun, Kylie.”
“I’d have more fun if you came. I think you’d sit there all night judging everyone, which is my kind of friend.”
That makes her smile wider.
“You can’t hide in here forever,” I say.
“I can,” she teases. “Go. Have fun. I’ll hear all about it when you get back.”
Theo lives in a suite in Halloran with three other guys, which means there’s an actual living room with two couches, one of them orange. There are six of us. Theo is tall and talks with his hands and hugs me when I walk in, even though we’ve never met. His roommate Brandon barely says anything. Sam has a shaved head and about nine face piercings. Bianca is here, and so are Kenzie and me. The sandwiches are gone in fifteen minutes.
“These are good,” Theo says with his mouth full. “Who made these?”
“Kylie.”
He looks at me. “Kylie, these are good.”
“They’re sandwiches,” I say.
