AllFreeNovel
Share Us
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 DAY ONE
Chapter 1
“THIS HAS TO BE A mistake.”
I pull the extra-long twin sheets up over my ears and mash my face into the pillow. It’s too early for voices. Much too early for an accusation.
As my mind unfuzzes, the reality hits me: there’s someone in my room.
When I fell asleep last night after testing the limits of my dorm’s all-you-can-eat pasta bar, which involved a stealth mission to sneak some bowls upstairs that were forbidden from leaving the dining hall, I was alone. And questioning my life choices. All those lectures about campus safety, the little red canister of pepper spray my mom made me get, and now there is a stranger in my room. Before seven a.m. On the first day of classes.
“It’s not a mistake,” says another voice, a bit quieter than the first, I imagine out of respect for the blanket lump that is me. “We underestimated our capacity this year, and we had to make a few last-minute changes. Most freshmen are in triples.”
“And you didn’t think it would be helpful for me to know that before moving in?”
That voice, the first voice—it no longer sounds like a stranger. It’s familiar. Posh. Entitled. Except… it can’t possibly belong to her. It’s a voice I thought I left back in high school, along with all the teachers who heaved sighs of relief when the principal handed me my diploma. Thank god we’re done with her, my newspaper advisor probably said at a celebratory happy hour, clinking his champagne glass with my math teacher’s. I’ve never been more ready to retire.
“Let’s talk out in the hall,” the second person says. A moment later, the door slams, sending something crashing to the carpet.
I roll over and crack one wary eye. The whiteboard I hung on Sunday, back when I was still dreaming about the notes and doodles my future roommate and I would scribble back and forth to each other, is on the floor. A designer duffel bag has claimed the other bed. I fight a shiver—half panic, half cold. The tree blocking the window promises a lack of both heat and natural light.
Olmsted Hall is a freshmen-only dorm and the oldest on campus, scheduled for demolition next summer. “You’re so lucky,” the ninth-floor RA, Paige, told me when I moved in. “You’re in the last group of students to ever live here.” That luck oozes, sometimes even literally, from the greige walls, wobbly bookshelves, and eerie communal shower with flickering light bulbs and suspicious puddles everywhere. Home sweet concrete prison.
I was the first one here, and when two, three, four days passed without an appearance from Christina Dearborn of Lincoln, Nebraska, the roommate I’d been assigned, I worried there’d been a mix-up and I’d been given a single. My mom and her college roommate are still friends, and I’ve always hoped the same thing would happen for me. A single would be another stroke of bad luck after several years of misfortune, though a tiny part of me wondered if maybe it was for the best. Maybe that was what the RA had meant.
The door opens, and Paige reenters with the girl who made high school hell for me.
Several thousand freshmen, and I’m going to be sleeping five feet from my sworn nemesis. The school’s so huge I assumed we’d never run into each other. It’s not just bad luck—it has to be some kind of cosmic joke.
“Hi, roomie,” I say, forcing a smile as I sit up in bed, shoving my Big Jewish Hair out of my face and hoping it’s less chaotic than it tends to be in the mornings.
Lucie Lamont, former editor in chief of the Island High School Navigator, levels me with an icy glare. She’s pretentious and petite and terrifying, and I fully believe she could kill a man with her bare hands. “Barrett Bloom.” Then she collects herself, softening her glare, as though worried how much of that conversation I overheard. “This is… definitely a surprise.”
It’s one of the nicer things people have said about me lately.
I should be wearing something other than owl-patterned pajama shorts and the overpriced University of Washington T-shirt I bought from the campus bookstore. Medieval chain mail, maybe. An orchestra should be playing something epic and foreboding.
“Aw, Luce, I’ve missed you, too. It’s been, what, three months?”
With one hand she tightens her grip on her matching designer suitcase, and with the other she white-knuckles her purse. Her auburn ponytail is coming loose—I can’t imagine the stress my appearance has caused her, poor thing. “Three months,” she echoes. “And now we’re here. Together.”
“Well. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted!” Paige chirps. “Or—reacquainted.” With that, she gives us an exaggerated wave and escapes outside. If there’s anything you need, day or night, just come knock on my door! she said the first night when she tricked us into playing icebreaker games by making us microwaved s’mores. College is a web of lies.
I hook a thumb toward the door. “So she’s great. Amazing mediation skills.” I hope it’ll make Lucie laugh. It does not.
“This is unreal.” She gazes around the room, seeming about as impressed with it as I was when I moved in. Her eyes linger on the stack of magazines I shoved onto the shelf above my laptop. It’s possible I didn’t need to bring all of them, but I wanted my favorite articles close by. For inspiration. “I was supposed to have a single in Lamphere Hall,” she says. “They totally sprung this on me. I’m going to talk to the RD later and try to sort this out.”
“You might have had better luck if you moved in this weekend, when everyone was supposed to.”
“I was in St. Croix. There was a tropical storm, and we couldn’t get a flight back.” It’s wild that Lucie Lamont, heir to her parents’ media company, can get away with saying these things, and yet I was the pariah of the Navigator.
Also wild: the fact that for two years, she and I were something like friends.
She sets her purse down on her desk, nearly knocking over one of my pasta bowls. Spinach ravioli, from the look of it.
“There’s an all-you-can-eat pasta bar.” I get up to collect the bowls and stack them on my side of the room. “I thought they would cut me off after five bowls, but nope, when they say ‘all you can eat,’ they aren’t messing around.”
“It smells like an Olive Garden.”
