Page 15
She slides open her top drawer and takes out a small zippered case, and when she pops it open, there are bandages, alcohol wipes, painkillers, tweezers, a tiny pair of scissors, and moleskin cut into neat squares.
I look at her. “You keep a first-aid kit in your desk?”
“It isn’t a first-aid kit.”
“That’s a first-aid kit.”
“It’s a travel kit.”
“What are you traveling into, combat?”
She doesn’t answer that. She tears open an alcohol wipe and holds it out, then a square of moleskin instead of a Band-Aid. “This first. A Band-Aid will just slide off in those shoes.”
I take both. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
This is how we’ve been living, five to ten sentences at a time. She takes my bad attitude like it’s weather, which I guess it is. It’s a little unsettling that she never bites back. I’ve known girls like her, the quiet ones who let it build until one day it all comes out at once. But maybe I’m wrong, because she’s also careful in a way that doesn’t feel like holding anything back. She asks before she opens the window. Her alarm goes off at seven sharp, one tone, and she’s up before it plays twice. She knows I’ll use her scissors if she leaves them out. We’ve mostly stopped apologizing every time we both need the mirror.
I sit on the edge of my bed and pick at the backing on the moleskin. Tessa’s eyes flick to my backpack, then back to her screen. My phone has been on Do Not Disturb since before class, sitting in there holding whatever it’s holding.
“Do you want to ask me?” I say.
She turns back to her laptop. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Now I know you’re thinking something and being polite about it.”
She looks at me and doesn’t deny it.
I point at her. “See?”
The corner of her mouth twitches.
I press the moleskin over my heel and smooth the edges down with my thumb, slower than I need to. After a minute, she says, “Did you talk to him?”
“No.”
It’s true, mostly. Yesterday afternoon, on the floor with my back against the bed frame, I typed and deleted a message five times before I sent one.
Me: I saw you kiss someone else. I’m not listening to explanations right now. Stop calling me.
My hands were shaking so badly I had to hit send twice. He wrote back six paragraphs, and I read them until the words stopped looking like words, and I didn’t answer. Now I don’t know what we are. I haven’t said we’re done, and he hasn’t said we aren’t, so we’re both just not talking about it, and I hate that more than I’d hate either answer.
She doesn’t ask anything else, so I wait, and she catches on without my saying a word.
“You said you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“That was Thursday.”
“You seem like you still don’t want to talk about it.”
I laugh. It comes out so suddenly it catches in my throat, and for one awful second my eyes sting, hot and fast, right behind the lids. I look down at the wrapper in my hand and fold it in half, then in half again, then again, until it’s a tiny hard square that won’t fold anymore. Tessa keeps her eyes on her screen and her fingers on her keyboard, and she doesn’t say a single word while I swallow until my throat unlocks.
“I need to do laundry,” I announce, to fill the silence.
“Okay,” she says.
The laundry room in Corvin Hall is in the basement, with twelve washers, ten dryers, and absolutely no reason to be this hot. The air is thick and damp and smells like dryer sheets with something metallic underneath. Three of the washers are out of order. One has an index card taped over the controls with a single word in Sharpie: DON’T. Not broken, not out of service. Just don’t. I respect the urgency.
