The first thing she thought upon waking was that his basketball shorts were way too big on her. Voices and heavy feet drifted up and down the stairs, calling for mimosas, singing the fight song, chanting, “rise and shine” and “rally time” and pounding on doors, but she didn’t recognize any of the voices for certain. She lay there, totally still, and counted. She counted the voices of the people from varying distances around the house, all of them, she was sure, completely ready and willing to smirk and judge her for last night’s clothes.

 

One, two, three, four, five, six… at least six guys running around the house in red and yellow getting morning drunk. Six guys… she had met them all last night, had sat on the floor and laughed with them, but, it wasn’t last night anymore.

 

The body next to her shifted. She concentrated on keeping her eyes shut, but not scrunched. Her breathing deep and even, her own body, still and relaxed. She felt his eyes on her, but did not move. The voices outside of the door got louder.

 

“Grace?” He whispered, too softly to wake up anyone who was actually sleeping. He was much closer to her than she thought. Should she open her eyes? Should she pretend to just be waking up?

 

Before she could make up her mind he was moving, climbing over her legs and off of the bed. Her heartbeat sped up as he heard him walk across the room, heard the old, rickety doorknob twist and him struggle for a moment with the warped wood door. No, she thought, don’t go. I’m awake. She was frozen in her sleep, false as it was.

 

But the door creaked open, and creaked shut, and then there was only her own silence as she lay, still and alone.

 

She opened her eyes to a grey-white cracked ceiling streaked with sunlight. The black sheets were rumpled and the pilled navy blue comforter pushed to the floor.  The whiskey and cider sat quarter-full on the desk across the room. There were empty cardboard boxes in the corner. Nothing on the walls. And there was her. Obviously not belonging in this place where it didn’t seem like anything actually belonged.

 

And she waited. She waited for the doorknob to jangle again, but she heard only pounding footsteps and increasingly loud voices, drifting closer and then farther from the door but never coming in, and never the voice she knew.

 

She reached for her phone to check the time. Dead.

 

She looked for a clock. There was none.

 

And she waited, having no concept of time. No clue how long he was gone. He was taking forever, but he would come back. He wouldn’t just leave her there, no idea where to go. He would check on her, at least. Pop his head in, maybe? She just had to wait it out.

 

Where was she supposed to go? Leave? She didn’t know, she didn’t know the halls, or the stairs, or the people walking around the halls and stairs, and they would stare at her in last night’s clothes with mascara on her face, and it was just a damn house why is the thought of finding the damn kitchen so damn scary?

But she didn’t need to find the kitchen. He would come back.

 

She sat up, ran her fingers through her curls, changed back into her clothes. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran her fingers over the seams of her skirt. She put her shoes back on. She didn’t want to go out there alone, and she didn’t know why she had to.

 

There would be assumptions. There always were. They were unfounded.

 

All of those people downstairs, some of them she met last night. Some she met last weekend. Two of them she’d met three weeks ago when they’d gone out to dinner. Some of them knew who she was, knew her, had asked her in not so secret tones when Ollie wandered away, “so, what are you two, anyway?” She shrugged and never knew the answer; she and Ollie didn’t talk about it. She had never minded before, but now, she buzzed at the thought of going down those stairs and seeing their faces, but—

 

She practically launched herself across the room, grabbing her bag from the floor without stopping and yanking the door open before she had time to stop herself. In the hallway she made a left and walked down the staircase lightly, straightening her shoulders back as she went, lifting her chin up a little higher, and wiping the away the dark smudges beneath her eyes. She flipped her hair back several steps from the bottom, straightened her shirt, and smiled as she rounded the corner to what was, hopefully, the kitchen. And there was Ollie, sitting on the counter with a beer in his hand, talking to two nameless guys she had met last night. She continued to propel herself forward on feet that wanted to run out the front door. His eyes flickered over to her, then back to his friends, then back to her. He met her eyes, and the side of his mouth quirked upwards. Just a little.

 

“There you are,” he said, as if she had been missing. He knew right where he’d left her. He waved out an arm as if to beckon her over, but his face turned away. She went and stood by his side, but he didn’t say anything else, not to her, anyway. His friend— Miles? Michael?—offered her a beer. It was her favorite, but she laughed and shook her head.

 

“Are you heading home, then?” Ollie asked, still not turning his head toward her. So, she turned to him and stared at his face, his face that was pointedly looking anywhere but at her. She let it last for a few seconds. She let the discomfort grow. She let him scrach the side of his head. She doubted it itched. She felt Miles/Michael’s eyes flick between them, and heard him take a long, slurping swig of his drink to fill the silence.

 

“Yeah, I think I am,” she said, looking down at her phone and swiping her thumb across the screen even though the battery was long since dead. “See you around?”

 

“I’ll text you later,”

 

The hug was short, one-armed. She waved a quick goodbye over her shoulder. She practically ran out the front door.

 

She only lived three blocks away. The sun was shining. It was at least fifteen degrees warmer than the day before. He bag hit her hip when she walked. She accidently walked out in front of a car. It honked. She kept going. The key to her apartment building never worked. She jangled it in the lock for two minutes. Someone left the building. She went in.

 

See you around. I’ll text you later. Didn’t those sound like things you say to the kid from your Bio class you always text for the homework assignment and then run into at the bar? Grace shuddered.

 

She stared at the ugly green apartment door for some time before going in. Twisting the doorknob and pushing the door open, she immediately spotted her roommate on the couch, head turned and eyebrows raised to her hairline.

 

“Good night?” Her smirk was annoying.

 

“I don’t know?” Grace answered, turning her back to kick her shoes off. “I thought so, but. I guess we’ll see.” 

 

The air had shifted. There was some terrible, unreachable weight pressing down on her. Light but insidious, like a wrecking ball hanging above her body, skimming the top of her skin, waiting to drop. Waiting to crush her. Grace felt like she had done something wrong. Like she was alone now because she didn’t do something that she should have. That she was supposed to, even. Like she was wrong for not wanting to.

 

She was so, so sorry. She was sorry for all the things I said no to, and sorry for the things that she didn’t explain, and sorry for being a coward. She was sorry that this was happening again, and she’d made all of the same mistakes. Only this time, he was decent. This time, it felt like more of her fault. And she hated it so deeply she could have erupted, and hopefully that eruption would cause an unprecedented tear in the space-time continuum, and she could turn the clock back 9 hours and be a little braver. She was sorry that she felt sorry, because she didn’t want to. She shouldn’t feel sorry, because she hadn’t wanted to do the things she said no to, so didn’t she do what was right? What was she supposed to do? What she had always been told to do?

 

“How do you not know?”

 

They had met three months ago, in intro to sociology. She hated it, he hated everything besides football, 80s music, and Captain Morgan, and they got on well enough. She and Ollie had been together for three months. Well, not together, but. Whatever it was they were, they were for three months. She didn’t even know his first name, not really. He’d always just been Ollie. She’d assumed Oliver, but she’d never asked and he never said anything.

 

“I dunno, it was weird.”

 

“Did you—”

 

“No,”

 

“My, my, you sure do like that word then, don’t you? Ever since—”

 

“Ah! He who must not be named!”

 

“Right,” She rolled her eyes, “Ever since Voldemort, it’s ‘been weird,’”

 

“Whatever.”

 

She didn’t text him that day. Not until much later that night, when they were all going out to celebrate that afternoon’s football victory, she shot him a simple text inviting him along.

 

She checked her phone too much for the next few hours, but eventually she stopped looking.

 

Two days later she told her herself that it didn’t matter. She told her friends every cliché in the book why they weren’t talking anymore, though she wished they would stop asking. They all liked him. In her fog of anger at being ignored, Grace wasn’t so sure she ever had.

 

They had been something. Despite being…nothing…they had to have been something, right? She don’t know what. He introduced her to all of his friends, held her hand on the walk to the party, put his arm around her sitting on the porch. What did you call that girl? Apparently, you just call her unworthy of even a “hey, sorry, but I’m not just not into it anymore” text. You ignore her. Grace is that girl that you ignore. She didn’t know what twisted the knife deeper; that it was so easy or that is was so fast.

 

It took her seven hours to somehow negate three months, and most of those seven hours was asleep.

 

She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking what happened, so she stayed silent.

 

Their shared sociology class was big enough to avoid anyone in, but she was bound to see him sooner or later. Still, she sat in the front row every time so she wouldn’t see anyone unless they sat down right next to her, and she knew that he wouldn’t. Until, one day, of course, he did. 

 

Grace didn’t even look up from where she was scribbling in the margins of her notebook, waiting for the lecture to start, when a person filled the seat on her left. She could feel eyes watching her though, darting away and back again.

 

“Hey,” her heart stopped beating, she swears it did. Ollie didn’t smile or catch her eye as he went about getting something from his backpack. She didn’t know whether to stare at him or the blank blue lecture screen in front of her. She settled for a casual “hey” of her own, she hoped it only sounded slightly in shock.

 

“What’s up?” He asked, finally looking at her with a notebook and pen settled on the desk in front of him.

 

Besides the completely obvious? Like being in class? Stupid.

 

Grace smiled and twisted her hair into a ponytail, answered vaguely and noncommittally as that question always warrants, and asked how he was doing. They made awkward small talk, it was nothing overly unusual, and it began to settle out of awkwardness after a few minutes. The professor had chosen a dreadful day to be running late, Grace thought, the longer they chatted and the more completely normal it became. After a bit, he started to make snarky jokes and smirk at her when she laughed as if he hadn’t been ignoring her for weeks. Weeks.

 

As Grace smiled at him she didn’t know why she was doing it. She didn’t know why she was acting like she fine with him, because his presence next to her in those terrible tennis shoes she absolutely hated that should have been abandoned in the eighth grade was making her eye twitch with the stress of it all. She wanted him to know that he had done wrong, had been cruel. But, in all honesty she wasn’t sure that he had done wrong. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to feel wronged. What were the rules of this game? She couldn’t keep up. Was she supposed to play it cool? Or should she give him the cold shoulder? Grace knew it was too late, anyway. She was playing it cool, she was committed to not caring. She had to smile and try to look pretty and act like he hadn’t sent her into crazy paranoid girl mode. She’d been dreading this encounter, knowing it would happen eventually, knowing she would be terribly awkward, but she wasn’t, and it wasn’t.

 

Is this what we’re going to do? She thought. Not acknowledge anything? She couldn’t decide if that thought made her relieved or angry. She couldn’t decide how she felt about anything, with him sitting next to her, wearing that stupid ugly grey zip-up and making a joke about a movie he knew she hadn’t seen but would recognize because he’d made the same joke before.

 

She laughed through the desire to strangle him.

 

He whispered comments at her all throughout the lecture, and said, “See you around,” and ran off the moment the professor had said, “have a good weekend.”

How utterly fitting that their “nothing” had amounted to nothing. He hadn’t cared at all.

 

Grace ran into Miles/Michael outside of English the next Tuesday. He nudged his friend, she’d never met that one, raised his eyebrows in her direction (several times), and they laughed. It bothered her that that stranger probably knew her name, but she didn’t know his. It bothered her that he’d laughed, and she didn’t know what he’d laughed at. She was glad she had straightened her hair that day.