vomit. My eyes burn with tears.
“Do you want to switch seats?” the lady beside me asks.
“No, thank you,” I tell her with a large smile. And I close my eyes and pretend to sleep. For the entire four hours back to school.
He lied.
TWENTY-TWO
WHEN I WALK INTO OUR room, Alice is lying on her back on her bed, legs up against the wall. She’s writing in her Moleskine notebook with a pencil.
“That can’t be very comfortable,” I say, surprised that the words even come out. I haven’t spoken since I rejected the woman on the bus’s offer to switch seats. I ignored Zeke even though every part of my body wanted to listen, wanted to lean into his words. Words that he eventually stopped using. Eventually, he closed his eyes too. I know because I peeked.
“You know, I heard that some country or other wanted to develop a special pen that can write in zero gravity during the space race, and spent like a gazillion dollars on it and then the other country just used a pencil. I guess one of the countries was probably the United States. And the other was Russia?”
As much as every part of me is hollowed out until I am only a dry husk, I laugh. “For a writer, I can’t help but be unimpressed by your storytelling skills.”
I drop my bag on my bed, wishing I could have pitched it with the bagels and postcards and the rose. The effing rose.
“I could Google the story if you want?” Alice offers, her pencil still traveling at a rapid pace across the paper.
“No need.” I sigh. “The story is that the Americans spent millions and the Russians used a pencil. But the story’s an urban legend.”
An urban legend. Basically a lie. A story that gets told so often you begin to believe it. The story of the supercute athlete who loved to speak French, who held my hand like it mattered, who took care of me when I was hungover, who spent last night with his body wrapped around mine. Who never took things a step further than I was comfortable with. The boy I told all my secrets to, and I thought he did the same. Only he didn’t.
And what’s worse is that I knew something was off; I knew there was more to the story than simple physio. I knew it, and I didn’t ask the questions. Not about the odd phone calls or the texts that angered him. I didn’t ask him why there were still so many secrets.
Except, what would I have done if he’d told me that secret?
If I’d Googled him, if I’d tried to force him to talk? I’d have walked away, no doubt. If that first day, he’d told me he was on his way to becoming a professional baseball player, I never would have given him a chance.
If Alice notices my edge, she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she slides her feet down the wall until her legs are bent to each side, like two angle brackets. It makes her previous position seem almost comfortable.
“Was Montreal in the summer as romantic as Paris in the spring?” she asks, closing her notebook and attempting to toss it onto her desk. It lands in her wastebasket. “Merde.” She sighs.
“Don’t.” I can’t help it. No French. “It was crappy. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
Because even though I should have asked, even though I could read the signs, he was still lying. Deliberately lying.
“Okay.” Alice rolls to her side, her long braid trailing behind her. Except instead of the mousy brown color that should match mine, there are all sorts of colors in there. Reds and blues and oranges and a gorgeous dark purple. Holy aubergine. I mean, eggplant.
Merde.
Stop.
“What did you do to your hair?”
Alice puts her hand back as though she needs the reminder. “Oh right. Yesterday, I dyed it.”
“Like, permanently?” Zeke and Montreal and the lies all disappear.
“Yup. Turns out that Jackie down the hall is great with this stuff. I just bought the dyes and she did it for me. We turned the common room into a salon, and I figured what the hell? Only live once, right?”
“I want to do it.” The words shock me. I want this. I want something unexpected and big; I want everything to be different.
“Um, okay?” Alice lifts up until she’s on her hands and knees. She arches her back down and then back up, cat pose to cow pose, again and