Page 133 of On His Mind

Mara starts coming over to my apartment, and she’s the thing that keeps me alive for weeks.

She’s louder than Ivory ever was, which I didn’t think was possible. She lets herself in now. She’ll do a workout with me and not complain unless she’s hungover, in which case she gives me never-ending compliments about my strength, my style, and my personality.

One night she shows up with takeout from two places because she couldn’t decide, and we eat on the floor with a bad horror movie on, and she’s telling me a story about a guy from her lab who tried to explain her own research back to her, doing all the voices, and I laugh, the first time since August, and it startles me. It actually stops me for a second. Mara sees it.

“I knew you had a sense of humor,” she says, handing me a spring roll, and keeps going with the story.

I don’t explain that I’m not always this closed off. I don’t think it would make a difference. She hangs out with me either way.

“Gianna and Lucy are going through a fallout,” she says. “I won’t get into details, but Lucy might need somewhere to live.”

“Oh,” I say, understanding. “I have an open room.”

“I wish I could take it,” she says, but it’s too expensive. “It might be too much for Lucy too, but I don’t know, maybe you can talk to her.”

I nod, feeling my heart squeeze. “Yeah.”

I turn back to the food, unable to swallow the fact that Percy is never going to reach out to me.

I take Lucy to lunch in the last week of September and ask her to move in.

It’s a real ask, and Lucy considers it, but I can tell before she answers that it’s not going to happen. She’s quiet the way I’m quiet, so it takes the whole lunch to get it out of her — that she’s been tutoring Benson Reeve, that it turned into something neither of them planned, and that Gianna found out and didn’t take it well. She’s not looking for a new apartment. She’s looking for a way back to her best friend.

I’m ashamed of the relief that floods me when I understand she won’t be moving in.

Hope is a scary thing, I realize.

I leave the lunch with Lucy because Gianna texted her to come home, and I know she won’t be moving in with me. That’s a done deal. Everything is going to be okay with the girls.

By the end of September, I’m cracking. Not just a slip in character, I mean the whole thing is crumbling into a million pieces. Mara is my favorite person because the girl knows how to have a good time. We’ve been trying our best to stay out of the drama with Gianna and Lucy, and I think it’s finally dying down.

I’m out with the girls — me, Gianna, Mara, and a few other girls that I just met. Everything is going fine. We’re having agood time, and then somebody at the table says something about the Hawthorne House, some party, some plan, and hearing it –– four drinks in –– makes my hands start to shake. I have to go stand in the hallway by the bathrooms because I can’t stand to hear them talk about how hot the hockey players are. I’ve never been boy crazy, nor have I ever been crazy over one boy. It’s all new emotions that I have no idea how to sit with.

I look at his name in my phone. I haven’t deleted it. I’ve thought about deleting it a thousand times and I haven’t. Maybe I should reach out to him. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve reached out to him.

I open our text messages. Our last messages are from August when he was at work, and I was waiting for him at Hawthorne. I stare at his messages for a moment, and then I can’t take it anymore. My heart pounds as I start to type a message to him.

Me: My apartment is empty.

I look at it. It makes no sense, but I send it anyway.

And then I stand in the loud hallway, feeling lightheaded as I stare at my screen, waiting for him to reply.

The ache and the awful relief hits me at the same time — because I did it. After a whole month of holding my own hand behind my back, I finally messaged him first. Now it’s out there, and there’s no taking it back.

Chapter 46

Percy

I’matmydesk,an essay half-written on the screen, when my phone buzzes against the laptop and my stomach drops through the floor.

It’s late. That’s the first thing I clock — the time in the corner of the screen, later than any good text ever comes. Then the ceiling creaks over my head, Stanley moving around up in his room, and I hear his phone go off a beat after mine, and I understand. The group chat. It’s only Stanley, running his mouth into the group chat the way he does when he can’t sleep.

The tension in me lets go, and what’s left behind it is flat. Disappointment’s a strange thing. You don’t know you were hoping until the hope’s already gone.

I finish the paragraph I’m on. I make myself do that much. Then I need a break, and I pick up the phone to see what dumb thing Stanley’s said this time.

Her name is on the screen instead.