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Lucie points to where I haphazardly tossed my backpack on my desk chair. “Rough day?”
I let out a grumble-sigh in response. “What about you?” I ask, trying to draw out this peace between us. I wasn’t as obnoxious to her this morning—it tracks for Lucie to be less combative too.
“Oh, it was fine.” She says it dismissively, like it’s not on-brand for Lucie Lamont to have anything less than a good day. She’s dressed for one: black mock-neck sweater, short denim skirt, sleek auburn hair pinned back on one side. “I’m actually going to rush a sorority, so…”
“So our days are numbered.”
“Yep.” Lucie searches her sweater for wrinkles, flicking aside a speck of lint. A silence elapses between us, one that makes it too easy for me to stumble into a memory.
As freshmen, we stayed late at school to copyedit the paper, which meant a crash course in the AP Stylebook. No one else had wanted the job, and we spent hours quizzing each other on obscure grammar and punctuation rules. “Our school’s paper, comma, the Navigator, comma,” I’d say, “because we only have one school paper. So you can get rid of what’s inside the commas and the sentence still makes sense.”
“My friend no comma Barrett no comma, because I have more than one friend,” Lucie said.
My friend, comma, Lucie, comma, I thought, but didn’t say. For the rest of the week we said “comma” when we spoke to each other. I’d never had an inside joke with anyone but my mom.
In some alternate timeline, maybe Lucie Lamont and I could have remained friends.
“This is strange,” she says now. “I’m not used to seeing you this…”
“Pathetic?”
“I was going to go with sad, but sure.”
In spite of everything, I let out a laugh as I roll to my side, readjusting my skirt and reaching for the glasses I abandoned on my desk. “I guess college isn’t… quite what I imagined, so far.”
And that’s the truth, isn’t it? Sure, it’s only the beginning of the quarter, and it’s not that I thought people would be clamoring to befriend me, but I didn’t think it would feel like this. Somewhere between the tennis exposé and now, I lost the ability to connect with other people. My confidence plummeted, and the only thing to do has been pretend I’ve always had plenty of it. If I am Too Much, at least I can say I have an excess of something.
“I might regret this,” Lucie says as she drops to her knees, fumbling with a power strip to plug in her curling iron, “but I’m going to a party at Zeta Kappa tonight. That big frat on Fiftieth, the one with the massive husky statues outside? You could come. If you want.”
I just blink at her. I had planned to lock myself in this concrete box for the rest of the night. If today is really happening, it only makes sense that I should, you know, not set a building on fire my second time around. Maybe that’s the reason I’m here: I’m supposed to save Zeta Kappa, though even in my head, it sounds like a bit of a stretch.
The last thing I expected was for Lucie to invite me.
“I don’t know if I can.”
Lucie lifts a single eyebrow, and I’m so jealous she has this mastered. My whole life, I’ve wanted to be able to do that. “Wild Wednesday-night plans?”
“Not exactly, but…”
Lucie turns to her half of the closet, searching for what I know is an oversize white shirt. “We’re in college,” she says. “This is what we’re supposed to do, Barrett. No parents. No curfew. It’s freedom.”
“Sounds fake.”
I can’t count the number of times I wished for this kind of invitation in high school. First when Lucie stopped talking to me, stopped responding to my texts. I’d see her with her friends at lunch and wish I knew what they were laughing about—except when their gazes flicked over to me, and I knew exactly what they were laughing about. Or when Lucie as editor in chief assigned me the articles no one else wanted to write, and I did the best I could with them anyway.
I spent so much time telling myself I was fine with the way things were. Fine with the occasional shove I’d get in the hallway, so deep in a sea of students that I could almost convince myself I’d imagined it. Fine with the single red roses that showed up on my desk in homeroom every day after prom. Pretending I didn’t feel physically ill with each new post with that hashtag. Our administrators were monsters, really, for scheduling prom a whole month before graduation.
And here is an opportunity to become someone else, to belong, and I’m turning it down.
“Weren’t you just saying college isn’t what you imagined so far?” Lucie looks like she doesn’t quite believe she’s putting in this much effort for someone she’s spent so much energy disliking. “I mean, I’m not going to beg you. It’s up to you. You can be someone new in college, or you can be…” Her eyes scan me, head to toe. But she doesn’t finish the sentence.
You can be… nothing. A blank.
Just like that, she’s got me.
“Should I change into something else?” I ask, and though I’m gesturing to my outfit, I wonder if I might really be asking a different question entirely.
By nine, Lucie’s dressed in the same thing she wore yesterday, and I’ve swapped my T-shirt for a fresh once since I sweated through it during my Washingtonian interview, something Lucie doesn’t need to know. I can almost forget the gnawing sense of déjà vu as we walk north through campus. I’ve got to say, it’s better than going alone.
