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“Hi,” he says.
“Good to finally meet you,” she tells him. He looks like he wants to bolt. Relatable.
“Yeah.”
“Night off?”
“Uh-huh.”
August has never met someone worse at first impressions than her, until now.
“Okay, well,” August says. “I’m going to bed.” She glances at the herbs smoldering on the counter. “Should I put that out?”
Wes returns to what he was doing—fiddling with the hinge on August’s bedroom door, apparently. “I had my ex over. Niko said the place was full of ‘frat energy.’ It’ll go out on its own. Niko’s stuff always does.”
“Of course,” she says. “Um, what are you… doing?”
He doesn’t say anything, just turns the knob and wiggles the door. Silence. It was creaky when August moved in. He fixed the hinge for her.
Wes scoops Noodles up in one arm and his toolbag in the other and vanishes down the hall.
“Thanks,” August calls after him. His shoulders scrunch up to his ears, as if nothing could displease him more than being thanked for an act of kindness.
“Cool knife,” he grunts as he shuts his bedroom door behind him.
Friday morning finds August shivering, one hand in the shower, begging it to warm up. It’s twenty-eight degrees outside. If she has to get in a cold shower, her soul will vacate the premises.
She checks her phone—twenty-five minutes before she has to be on the platform to catch her train for class. No time to reply to her mom’s texts about annoying library coworkers. She punches out some sympathetic emojis instead.
What did Myla say? Twenty minutes to get the hot water going, but ten if you’re nice? It’s been twelve.
“Please,” August says to the shower. “I am very cold and very tired, and I smell like the mayor of Hashbrown Town.”
The shower appears unmoved. Fuck it. She shuts off the faucet and resigns herself to another all-day aromatic experience.
Out in the hallway, Myla and Wes are on their hands and knees, sticking lines of masking tape down on the floor.
“Do I even want to ask?” August says as she steps over them.
“It’s for Rolly Bangs,” Myla calls over her shoulder.
August pulls on a sweater and sticks her head back out of her door. “Do you realize you just say words in any random order like they’re supposed to mean something?”
“Pointing this out has never stopped her,” says Wes, who looks and sounds like he stumbled in from a night shift. August wonders what Myla bribed him with to get his help before he retreated to his cave. “Rolly Bangs is a game we invented.”
“You start by the door in a rolling chair, and someone pushes you down the incline of the kitchen floor,” Myla explains. Of course she’s figured out a way to use a building code violation for entertainment. “That’s the Rolly part.”
“I’m scared to find out what the Bangs are,” August says.
“The Bang is when you hit that threshold right there,” Wes says. He points to the wooden lip where the hallway meets the kitchen. “Basically catapults you out of the chair.”
“The lines,” Myla says, ripping off the last piece of tape, “are to measure how far you fly before you hit the floor.”
August steps over them again, heading toward the door. Noodles circles her ankles, snuffling excitedly. “I can’t decide if I’m impressed or horrified.”
“My favorite emotional place,” Myla says. “That’s where horny lives.”
“I’m going to bed.” Wes throws his tape at Myla. “Good night.”
