Page 75

My skin feels wrong. I don’t want anyone to touch me. Well, that’s a lie. I want one person to touch me. But I’m not sure he even wants to be friends with me anymore.

“You look like hell iced over,” she says as I slide into the seat across from her.

“I ate breakfast.”

She laughs, but concern clouds her face. “That’s not what I said.”

Lincoln drops into the chair beside me a second later with a sandwich and way too much energy for my liking. “He lives. We were taking bets.”

“I’ve been busy with homework.”

“You’ve had homework since freshman year. You still answered your phone and hung out.”

I unwrap my food so I have something to do with my hands. The paper is very interesting. My throat is already tight, and I haven’t even brought up his name. But I know it will happen. I skipped his last game on Saturday. And I’m sure they noticed.

Sarah and Vee are in class, so it’s only the three of us. Which makes all of this worse. There’s no one else to distract my friends from me. And both of them see way more than I want them to.

Christine watches me pull off the crust of my bread. I crush it together and make a ball out of the excess. “Q.” The single letter has her concern all over it, and I don’t want it, because it makes the growing feeling behind my eyes worse.

“I’m fine.”

“Stop lying, we know you’re not,” Lincoln says. “You’ve been a ghost. If this is about your roommate being a hockey dick⁠—”

“Lincoln.”

“What. It’s a logical conclusion. All hockey players are grade A assholes.”

I stare at the rolled ball of bread between my fingers. The cafe noise quiets. I can feel the words starting to bubble up, and I don’t want them to come out. They do anyway, thin and broken.

“It isn’t going to work.”

Christine goes still. Lincoln’s sarcastic face slips.

“The crush,” I add, because if I don’t put it all out there they might ask questions I can’t survive. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought. But I was wrong. It’s fine. I just needed to say it out loud so I can stop feeling this.” I gesture at myself, like that is going to show them exactly what I’m feeling.

My eyes burn. I blink hard and look at the napkin dispenser. I’m not going to cry in the cafe over a person who doesn’t even want to be my friend. He was probably using me to pass his class. I was probably a joke to him. Crying over him would be mortifying.

Christine’s hand covers mine on the table, and the contact has my gaze flying to hers. “You’re going to be okay, Q. You’ve got me.”

Lincoln leans back, the legs of his chair coming off of the floor. “Hockey players.” It’s flat and slightly angry. “They like to fuck with you, but they don’t follow through. I tried to tell you.”

“Shut up,” Christine says. “He doesn’t need that.”

“And you think empty words about how he’s going to be okay are better? At least what I’m saying⁠—”

“You’re saying the wrong thing. Eat your sandwich.”

Lincoln shuts up. He knocks his knee against mine under the table once, which is his version of sorry, and then he eats his sandwich.

A tear breaks loose anyway. I wipe it with the side of my thumb and force any others back.

“It’s my fault.”

“I highly doubt that,” Lincoln says. Christine shoots him a warning look across the table, and he gives her a look back. “You disagree?”

“No, but⁠—”

“He was teaching me how to…uh…” My face flames as my throat tightens, and I can barely say the rest while looking into either of their eyes. “Um…foreplay. He was teaching me.”