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Are we in hell?
Is this some kind of twisted afterlife, and we’re both doomed to repeat this day until some higher power gets bored of us? Is that our eternal torture?
The urge to remain silent is too strong, but finally I just write, Okay. You’re annoying. Then I shut off my phone, collapsing back into bed and staring up at the ceiling, tracing the coastline of my California bruise with a single fingertip.
Miles’s betrayal hurts just as much today as it did today yesterday. Our feelings weren’t quite out in the open at the park, but our desires were. We were about to kiss, and the knowledge that we did it in the past (present?) has tangled up all my wiring. I’m not sure I can trust him. All these weeks we’ve forged a connection, all those times I let him in—and yesterday, when I took him down my darkest corridors—and he’s never been honest with me.
I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.
I should have told you.
Too good to be true.
As though a compliment would make it all less painful. To that I say, bullshit.
Whatever we are moving forward, I won’t make the mistake I almost made last night. The mistake a different Barrett made all those weeks ago.
When the door opens again, Lucie steps inside, and I expect her to launch into a speech about how I’ve ruined her life. Instead, she freezes when she sees me.
“Barrett?” she says, something like empathy in her voice. “Are you okay?”
“I didn’t realize I was that bad at hiding my agony,” I say, trying to make a joke, but she’s not having it. “I was, uh, in a car accident yesterday.” Not entirely a lie. And I might have died. And none of this might be real.
“Should you go to the hospital?” Her eyes widen when she sees the bruise on my leg, and I hurry to cover it up with the sheets. “I can go with you, if you need—”
“No!” I say quickly. “I mean—I went yesterday. They checked me out, said I seemed okay and that I should just take some painkillers.”
Lucie’s expression is still suspicious, but at least she drops it. “So,” she says, waving a hand around the room. “You and me, huh?”
“Someone in resident services has a twisted sense of humor.”
“Seriously.” With some effort, she hops onto her brick of a bed, smoothing a flyaway back into her ponytail. “This room is barely bigger than the journalism supply closet back at Island.”
This is new. She’s not in a rush to let me speak to your manager about it. She’s sitting there like she’s completely okay with the fact that we’re roommates. Not resigned to it—accepting it.
I remember the Lucie who cried in the stairwell. The Lucie who popped one of my lavender balloons when she slammed the door. The Lucie who took me to Elsewhere and spoke dreamily about UW’s modern dance troupe.
I’m not sure where this version of Lucie falls.
“Were you going to room with someone else?” I ask, trying my best to be friendly. I prop myself up on my elbows, fighting a grimace as my left arm snaps with pain.
She shakes her head. “I signed up for a single. Most of my friends went to WSU.” She doesn’t make eye contact as she says this. The friends who forgot about her, she said the other day. The friends who tried to use her for an internship. “What about you?”
“My email said I was with a girl named Christina Dearborn.” I shrug, not hating the serendipity of Christina having found the article that led me to a place where Lucie and I started to understand each other. “Evidently, fate intervened.”
Lucie unzips her designer duffel. “And I’ll make new friends, I know,” she says to her clothes and her electronics and her high-end hair products, as though trying to convince herself. “It’s just… overwhelming, I guess.”
“Don’t I know it,” I say under my breath. “Hey. I know you just got here, but I have to eat breakfast, or else I become even more unbearable than I usually am. What if we go downstairs and get some food?”
“You don’t have class?”
“Not until the afternoon,” I lie.
Lucie considers this for a few moments, toying with the end of her ponytail in this way I’ve noticed she does when she’s anxious. “Maybe that wouldn’t be terrible,” she agrees.
Lucie pokes at her plate with a compostable fork. “So what exactly is the Olmsted Eggstravaganza? Is it an omelet, or a burrito?”
“That’s the beauty of the Eggstravaganza,” I say. “It’s both and neither at the same time.”
