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“Exactly.”
“Well, a sexy Jessie-fucker . . .”
“Oh my god, Jade.” She rolls her eyes.
“You love meeee.” I bat my eyelashes at her.
“I’m cursed with you,” she says.
“That’s practically the same thing.”
We finish eating, and I take our plates, loading the dishwasher while Jessie gives the kitchen a quick tidy. She follows me to my room, and while I set up my makeup station and the ring light, she sets up her textbook and notecards so I can quiz her. At this point, we’re a well-oiled machine.
I plug my phone in and clip it on the ring light holder. If I don’t text my mom back, she’ll worry, but I also don’t think her earlier text warrants the energy of a full-ass response, so I send a quick thumbs-up and a heart and set my phone to “do not disturb.”
“Ready?” I ask, and when Jessie nods, I hit record.
I prep my supplies and her face, starting in on quizzing her like we always do. For this video, I’ll just do a time-lapse and a voiceover, so it doesn’t really matter what Jessie and I talk about.
“What will I do without you next year?” I say somewhat offhandedly while pausing to admire my work and Jessie’s patience in letting me practice on her.
“Whatareyou doing next year?” she asks. “I feel like we haven’t talked about this.”
We haven’t. And there’s a reason for that.
An uncomfortable lump forms in my throat. I cough to clear it, but it doesn’t go away. I don’t actually like talking about this, despite my casual comment, but the curse of being a senior is that everyone else wants to talk about it. And if there’s one thing worse than classmates like Dallas asking me, it’s having the question come from my best friend and roommate of the past three years, because whatever the answer is, it doesn’t involve me being roommates with Jessie anymore. And that is a thought that makes me a level of sad that goes beyond the four levels Jessie described.
“Girl, it is way too soon to be talking about postgrad right now,” I say with more indifference than I feel.
Jessie snorts. “I wish that were true. It’s all Mac wants to talk about.”
“You guys are both planning on grad school, right?”
“Yes,” she says, “but he wants to go somewhere far away, like . . . Stanford and UC Berkley, and I’m, like, ‘Okay, Moneybags McGee, how about somewhere that will actually pay for me to go there?’”
I swear the room gets hotter the more she talks about it. I clip my hair off my neck and study her face like I’m weighing my next move in a chess match.
Outside of my grandma, Jessie is the closest thing I’ve had to a stable relationship my whole life. I’ve never been under any illusions that she and I will go to the same place after college, but also, I remind myself there are theaters all over the country, and wherever Jessie does end up, it’s not out of the question that I could go there too. Before she got a boyfriend, I imagined we could make some postgrad plans together, maybe. But now, she has Mac, and she’ll be making that decision with him.
Could the three of us make postgrad plans together? Sure. Will Jessie and Mac want me tagging along for the rest of their lives? Probably not.
I don’t want to be thinking about this right now, especially not hot on the heels of a text from my mom and the ticking time bomb of her relationship. I shove it all out of my brain and let it disappear into the abyss.
“Any school should be paying you for the privilege of having you as their student, and if they don’t, just give me the number to call and the name of someone to yell at. Now, back to . . .”—I check her notecards—“the definition of a somatogenic theory.”
Jessie laughs and spouts off the definition, and I try to enjoy the rest of our evening together despite the ghosts of all the things I pushed off the cliff of my mind.
4
IAN
“I know not by what power I am made bold . . .”Act I, Scene I
If Seth were a cartoon character, his jaw would be on the floor and his eyeballs would be stretched abnormally out of his eye sockets.
“Close your mouth, Seth, and help me,” I say.
Seth blinks a few times and shuts his jaw. “Dude, I’ll be honest, I’d heard the rumors, but I had no idea they were true,” he says.
