in thirty minutes, and she’s right. We barely have time to shower as it is.
“Take notes for me?” Ellie gives me a tiny salute and walks away. “Sidney notes, not Ellie notes!” I yell at her back. It’s the second week of classes; am I seriously going to skip?
I put my hand out to Ryan. “Room key, please.”
“Sidney, seriously.” He gives me a serious look. “Now’s not the time to give him crap.” The way he says it makes me think Ryan knows a thing or two about me and Asher. “You don’t want to go in there.”
“Key, please.” I wiggle my fingers. “You don’t need it, you said so yourself.”
He pulls his key ring out of his bag and twists a large gold key off, smacking it into my palm. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Asher
I want to die. Maybe it’s the grim reaper knocking on my door, here to drag me off to somewhere my head doesn’t spin and my stomach doesn’t feel like someone is twisting it into a pretzel.
“Asher?”
I groan and it sounds like maybe I am dying. It’s worse than death, or the grim reaper—it’s Sidney. Why now? Why? Mentally, I scream but I say nothing. Maybe if I just pretend I’m not here she’ll go away. She has to go away.
“I’m coming in.”
Wait, what? I lift the bowling ball that is my head off of the pillow to look at the door, then let it crash back down. This isn’t the lake house, she can’t just barge into my room, or stick a hairpin in the door to wiggle it open. But then I hear a key slide into the lock, a twist of metal, and my room is no longer a Sidney-free space. She’s standing just inside the doorway, her face still red from conditioning, her tank top blotched with sweat.
I look her up and down, still trying to process that she’s here.
She looks down at herself then back to me. “Sorry, I just came from the gym. I’m gross.”
I nod. Blink. And then puke.
* * *
“Wow.” Sidney shuts the door behind her and walks over to the bed. “Okay, this is not what I expected.” She sets a plastic grocery bag down on the desk just beyond my bed and drops her backpack to the floor. Ryan and I have our room set up identically on either side. You could slice it down the middle and it would be a perfect mirror image: a bed against each long wall, desk butted up against the far headboard, and a dresser on the far wall, on either side of our one window. Ryan has a poster of a half-naked girl over his bed, but I haven’t gotten around to putting anything on the walls. My dresser, however, is another story.
“What is that?” My upper body is hanging off of the bed, over the plastic trash can I just puked in. I feel too horrible to care that I just puked in front of Sidney.
“I brought you chicken soup from the cafeteria. And some crackers. Ryan didn’t say you were…” She gestures to the trash can. “Don’t eat soup. Please.” She looks around the room and her eyes land back on me. “Do you have a cup?”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just leaves through the little door to her left and disappears into the bathroom. If only our bathroom had two doors like the one she and I used to share, I could hope that she’d just disappear out the other side. But no, she comes back. She’s holding the blue plastic cup I keep my toothbrush in, and crosses the room to my bed.
“Drink a little.” She holds the glass of water out to me. “Just tiny sips.” I take it and pull myself upright enough to take a sip. “Are you good for a few minutes?” She nods at the wastebasket and I nod back.
Without a word, Sid picks it up—wincing just once when she glances down—and disappears into the bathroom again. I hear the slosh of liquid going into the toilet bowl, a flush, and then the shower head turning on. More sloshing and dumping. The whole thing reminds me of listening to her in the bathroom at the lake house, how I could hear her getting ready step by step.
“Do you have dish soap?” Sid’s voice is echoing in the bathroom. “Disinfectant of some kind?”
“Why would I have dish soap in my room?”
She pokes her head out of the