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“Lucie?”
Her shoulders go rigid when she sees me, and she swipes a hand across her face. At first I’m convinced she’s been on the phone with someone in resident services and she’s just learned she’s stuck with me. Except these are not my roommate is chaos personified tears.
“Hey,” she says in this voice I’ve never heard from her before, and I have had a lot of Lucie Lamont voices directed at me. The tentative voice when we started becoming friends on the middle school paper. The smooth, confident voice when we collaborated on stories. And the dismissive voice when my tennis-team article went out, replaced by an authoritarian voice once she became editor in chief.
This one sounds… broken.
Lucie’s gaze won’t meet mine, ice-blue eyes fixed on the ground. I’ve never seen Lucie cry, either, not when my article was published, not when she and Blaine broke up shortly after. “Sorry, I was just—”
“No, no, you don’t have to apologize.” Now my voice is morphing too. A soft, careful kind of voice, one I’m not sure I knew I was capable of until right now. “Is everything… okay?”
“Yep. I’m getting out of this hellhole—why wouldn’t it be?” With a final sniff, she pushes to her feet, shoulders back, confidence restored. “Have a good freshman year, Barrett.”
Her suede ankle boots carry her the rest of the way to the ninth floor, and when a heavy door slams above me, an idea takes root in my mind.
DAY TWELVE
Chapter 16
“THIS HAS TO BE A mistake,” Lucie Lamont says, and I hide a grin against my pillow.
I told Miles I wanted to try things my way, and I meant it. And while I’ve already made some of my own attempts, what I think I’ve missed is that in movies, the way out of a time loop often ends up being personal. Whether it’s true love, like I joked about with Miles, or repairing a relationship with your family, or righting the wrongs of your past, it has to mean something to whoever’s trapped. Nothing I’ve done has held any kind of meaning for me, aside from my deep personal investment in not getting arrested for burning down Zeta Kappa.
True love is off the table. If I’ve had this much trouble making friends, I can’t imagine trying to lock down a soul mate. That leaves Lucie.
Once I’ve showered and dressed, I take the stairs down to Miles’s Disneyfied floor. His door is decorated with pictures of Buzz Lightyear and Woody, along with the names MILES and ANKIT.
“Hi,” I say when a South Asian guy in a gray T-shirt answers the door, realizing I didn’t know the name of Miles’s roommate until now. “Ankit? I’m looking for Miles.”
He steps back and there’s Miles, in his usual rigid Miles stance, bent over a book at his desk. The room is a carbon copy of mine, except for the fact that it looks like two people who don’t hate each other live here.
“Ankit, this is Barrett,” Miles says, and we exchange polite hellos. “We have physics together. Barrett, this is my roommate.”
“Are you ready?” I ask Miles. “To do some more… studying?” By complete accident, I manage to say it in the most suggestive way possible. I might as well have fluttered my lashes and shimmied in here wearing only a feather boa.
Ankit tries his best to muffle his laughter and fails. “Physics, huh?” He glances between us with a lift of his eyebrows. “Are you sure you don’t mean chemistry?”
The tips of Miles’s ears flash a brilliant red as he grabs his backpack, shoving his feet into his green Adidas. “Let’s go.”
“Oh—before you leave,” Ankit says. “Have you seen my UW T-shirt? I did laundry yesterday but can’t find it.”
“The laundry ate one of my favorite socks, too,” I say. “Olmsted should come with an insurance policy.”
Miles shakes his head. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Have a good time!” Ankit gives him a pointed look that seems to fall somewhere between Really? Her? and Nicely done.
For a few moments, I savor this questionable ego boost, despite the fact that there is no universe in which Miles views me as a romantic prospect. And vice versa. There simply isn’t room in my heart for anything but annoyance and a small amount of curiosity.
Miles follows me out into the hall, head tucked at a near ninety-degree angle, shoulders stiff. True to his word, he doesn’t complain about the mission, but he still has plenty of questions.
“You two had a fight in high school?” he asks as we approach the bus stop in front of Olmsted. “You and your roommate?”
“I’m not sure I would call it a fight.” I check my phone—eight minutes until the next bus. After eleven days, I should have had enough foresight to memorize the schedule. “I’m not exactly her favorite person.”
“And you don’t like her, either?”
I don’t answer him right away—because, truthfully, I’m not sure. I’ve been so focused on how much she dislikes me that I haven’t paused to consider my feelings toward her. Complicated—that’s what they are.
