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She puts six dumplings on a paper plate in front of me, makes her own plate, and we eat. It’s the first thing I’ve had since breakfast, and I didn’t realize how hungry I was until the first one. I eat all six fast, burning my tongue on the second and not caring. Tessa watches me without saying anything. When I’m done, she takes my plate, puts four more on it, and sets it back down.

“I’m not—”

“Eat.”

I eat.

Outside the window over the sink, it’s fully dark, and the lamps along the walkway have come on. I remember the moment I decided to come to Woodbury, and the first day I moved into Corvin, and it all feels so far away now. Nothing was wrong. I put the milkshake down.

Tessa is washing the pan. She rinses it, sets it upside down on the drying rack, dries her hands, folds the towel in thirds, and hangs it over the oven handle exactly in the middle. I don’t understand her at all. But she made me dinner, and a milkshake with Oreos in it, and she stood in a kitchen for thirty minutes without saying one thing that would have made me feel worse, and I don’t know how to thank her for that without making it strange.

“Thanks,” I say, finally.

She smiles softly. “You’re welcome.”

She picks up her milkshake and looks down the hall once more, both directions, before she steps out.

Back in our room, Tessa gets into bed with a book and puts her headphones on, and I sit on my bed with my phone. No new messages from Evan. I open our thread anyway.

The last message is from tonight: I’m here. Lobby. Above it is everything else, the apologies and explanations and my short, cold replies. Above that is August. A picture of a hardware store sign that says WE HAVE NUTS. A screenshot of a sushi place. Call me when you’re done. Love you.

I scroll until my thumb hurts, and then I stop, because I know we’re done. He stood a full step back from me. He told me it was just two weeks, and I liked that she liked me, and worst of all, nothing was wrong. If nothing was wrong, there’s nothing to fix, and there’s nothing I can do with that.

The screen goes dark in my hand. I unlock it again, close our messages, open my contacts, and start scrolling for somebody to call, and there isn’t anybody.

There’s my mom, but she loves Evan, and she’s going to cry when she finds out, and then I’ll have to take care of her too, and I can’t do that tonight. There’s my cousin Brianna, who I see at Thanksgiving. There’s a group chat called SENIOR SQUAD that I muted in June and never unmuted. Six girls, and when I scroll into it, the last message is from July, somebody asking if anyone wanted to go to the lake. Nobody answered. I didn’t go. I was at Evan’s that weekend. I was at Evan’s most weekends.

There’s Hailey, who was my best friend in eighth grade. We had sleepovers every Friday. Then I started dating Evan the summer before sophomore year, and every Friday turned into every other Friday, then Saturdays, and then we stopped. She’s at a school in Ohio now; I know that from her Instagram. The last thing I sent her was a cake emoji on her birthday in March. I open a new message and type hey, and I look at it for a long time before I delete it.

I lie back and stare at the ceiling. I spent three years building my whole life around one person and never noticed, because the person was always there. Every Friday, every lake weekend, every call me when you’re done. Now he isn’t, and the people I could call don’t know anything about my life anymore, and none of that is their fault. My eyes burn, and I let the tears soak into my pillow.

My phone buzzes against my stomach. It isn’t Evan. It’s a group chat I forgot I was in, from the first week, Corvin 4 + Kylie, the girls from the fourth floor I walked to the party with on Thursday. I have none of their numbers saved.

Maybe-Kenzie: Emergency bachelor watch party 412 in 10 min.

Maybe-Kenzie: Paige’s making the good popcorn.

Maybe-Paige: It’s kettle corn. It’s elite.

Maybe-Kenzie: Kylie, you in??

Kenzie. Mackenzie, the girl from the beer pong table, the one I’ve been calling Maybe-Morgan in my head because I was too embarrassed to ask. It wasn’t Maddie, or Mia, or Morgan. It was Mackenzie the whole time. I wipe my face and sit up.

Across the room, Tessa slides one headphone off and looks at me.

“Some girls from the fourth floor are watching The Bachelor,” I say. “Do you want to come?”

Tessa looks at me like I’ve asked her to go skydiving. “No.”

“Okay.”

“Have fun,” she says, and puts her headphone back on.

Me: Coming.

Room 412 is Kenzie and Paige’s, exactly as big as ours, and there are three girls in it. It smells like a vanilla candle that’s losing a fight with something else. Kenzie opens the door before I finish knocking. She’s in pajama pants covered in tiny cherries, and she takes one look at my face and doesn’t say anything about it. She grabs my wrist, pulls me in, and points at the bed.

“Sit there. That’s the good spot.” Then, over her shoulder, “Paige, I swear to God, crack the window. She just walked in.”