My feet are on the dashboard again. Dad pushes them down. I wait till he removes his hands and then Put them back up. Two years ago he would've swatted my ankle and gone on a whole rant about what shoes do to leather, and Mom would've taken my side from the backseat just to watch his face, and it would've turned into one of those arguments that wasn't really an argument. He'd be loud and she'd be louder and I'd sit there with my feet exactly where I wanted them, grinning, while they went back and forth about nothing.
He just drives now.
The basketball keychain on the rearview has been there since sixth grade. I gave it to him after his company league won some weekend tournament that nobody cared about except him. It used to be orange. Now it's this pale, cracked thing that looks like it could snap off any day, and every time I tell him I can get him a new one he acts like he didn't hear me.
"You eat this morning?"
"Yeah."
I didn't and he probably knows.
The GPS tells us we've arrived and the building is red brick and tall and looks like every college dorm I've ever seen on TV, which is both comforting and disappointing at the same time. I'm carrying a box up the stairs, taking two steps at a time because Dad's behind me with the heavy stuff and I don't want him to have to wait, and my foot misses the top step entirely. My knee hits concrete. The box splits open and three shirts slide out across the hallway floor followed by a bottle of lotion that rolls all the way to the wall with this slow, embarrassing determination.
A guy walking past picks up one of my shirts, holds it out. I can see him deciding whether to laugh. "Thanks," I say, grabbing it from him, stuffing everything back into the box while it falls apart in my hands. Dad bends down behind me, picks up the lotion, drops it on top of my pile. Doesn't say a word. I love him for that.
Room 4B. Door's already open.
The girl by the window is painting her toenails, cross-legged, dark hair pushed behind her ears, eyeliner sharp enough that I feel like she did it on purpose before we got here so the first impression would land right. The other one is lying with her head in the first girl's lap, phone held above her face, thumbs moving fast.
Their side of the room looks like it's been lived in for weeks. Photos of the two of them pinned to the wall — prom, a beach somewhere, one where they're both mid-laugh with their faces pressed together. String lights. A shared blanket across one of the beds. Seems like they have knows each other for a long time.
My side is a bare mattress and white walls and a box with a crack down the middle leaking lotion.
"You must be Bella," says the one with the nail polish.
"That's me."
"Nadia." She points the brush at the girl in her lap. "Kira."
Kira waves without looking away from her phone, catches something in Nadia's expression, and waves again with actual effort this time. "Sorry. Hi. I swear I have manners, I'm just mid-conversation with someone who's wrong about everything."
"She's always in a conversation with someone who's wrong about everything," Nadia says. "That someone is usually me."
Dad sets down the last of my stuff and starts doing his thing. Window lock — he jiggles it twice. Closet door — opens it, closes it, opens it again like something might change between the first and second time. He steps into the hallway and looks both ways and I can practically see him counting the steps to the stairwell.
"Is there security at night?" he asks Nadia, and the way she says "yes sir" is so careful and polite that I know she's holding back something and when I look at Kira she's biting the inside of her cheek so hard her jaw is shaking.
He runs out of things to check. I watch it happen — his eyes moving around the room one more time, landing on the boxes, the mattress, me, trying to find one more lock to test or one more question to ask, and there's nothing left. He puts his hands in his pockets. Takes them out. Puts them back.
"Alright," he says.
"Alright."
"Your mama found this school," he says, and his voice does something different on *mama*, it gets lower, like the word weighs more than the rest of the sentence. "Some college brochure. You were in seventh grade and she circled it in red pen and put it on the fridge,I'm glad you made it here "
I nod because if I open my mouth right now the wrong thing is going to come out of it.
He pulls me in with one arm. Squeezes the back of my head the way he always does ,the grip that says everything his face won't — and then he's walking down the hall and I'm standing in the doorway listening to his shoes on the tile until the sound folds into nothing.
I close the door.
Nadia's looking at me with that soft careful expression people get when they want to ask something they think might make you cry, and I turn toward my boxes before she gets there.
"So what's good to eat around here? I'm starving."
She shifts gears with me, easy. "There's a wing spot on the corner. Kira's unhealthy relationship with their lemon pepper is the reason we picked this dorm."
"It's a healthy relationship. We're very happy together."
By evening the room feels less foreign. Nadia plays music while I unpack. Kira reorganizes my shelf without asking, which should bother me but doesn't because she does it better than I would have. We talk about nothing — which dining hall has the best food, which professor to avoid, whether campus security actually does anything at night. I keep waiting for it to get awkward and it doesn't.
We go after after we are done setting up my stuff , by now the sun drops. Campus is still loud with move-in energy — cars double-parked, parents hugging their kids too long in parking lots, someone playing music from a window three floors up that echoes off the buildings and makes everything feel like an opening scene. Nadia walks between us and talks with her hands so much I have to dodge twice, and Kira keeps pace half a step behind her, watching her the way you watch someone when you've already memorized everything about them but you're not bored of it yet.
We grab food from the wing place and already heading back to our dorms.
We're cutting through the quad on the way back, bags in hand, Nadia in the middle of a story about a professor she stalked on social media and already hates, when my legs stop.
Ethan.
On the grass, by the fountain, leaning back on his hands with his whole body open and easy like he's been here for days. Four people around him. Maybe five. A girl sitting close enough that her knee is touching his thigh, her hand on his forearm, saying something I can't hear. And he's laughing. Head back, mouth wide, the laugh that comes from somewhere low in his chest that I have spent three years trying to earn every single time,my phone has been sitting in my pocket all day with nothing from him. No I'm here. No where you at. No come through. I told him yesterday I was coming today. He said same. And then he got here and unpacked and found his people and not once — not one single time between then and now — did he think to text me.
"Bella." Nadia's a few steps ahead. "You good?"
"Yeah. Coming."
The walk back is mostly Nadia talking and me responding at the right times. They don't seem to notice my change of mood.
The food is good. We eat on our beds with the door open and music playing from Nadia's speaker,at some point someone down the hall yells for us to turn it down which only made Nadia turn it up.
"Do you have a boyfriend"Nadia asks while wiping hot sauce off her chin.
I say no too fast and she raises an eyebrow.
"leave her alone, we just met her"
"exactly, this is when you get the real answers, before they learn to lie to you."
"No boyfriend," I say. "No prospects. No situation. Nothing."
"Damn," Nadia says. "Not even a nothing-nothing? A texting thing? A he's-not-my-man-but-don't-touch-him thing?"
Kira throws a napkin at her.
My phone stays quiet the whole night. I check it between bites. While Nadia's in the bathroom. While Kira's picking the playlist. I check it like I'm waiting for something specific and every time the screen shows me nothing I put it back down and pretend I wasn't looking.
The room goes dark around eleven. Kira says goodnight from her bed and I say it back and Nadia hums something low as she climbs in next to Kira and the room settles.
I'm halfway to sleep when Kira's breath hitches.
My eyes open.
Nadia's whispering. I can't catch the words but I don't need to — it's the tone, low and deliberate, the kind of voice you only use with your mouth pressed against someone's skin. Kira tries to stay quiet. She does a terrible job. A muffled sound leaks out, then another, then the mattress finds a rhythm and I'm grabbing my earphones off the nightstand so fast I knock my phone to the floor.
I shove them in. Scroll. Press play on the first thing that comes up. Volume all the way up until the bass drowns out everything on the other side of the room.
I pull up Ethan's chat. His last message stares back at me.
ETHAN:let's link when we settle in
Twelve hours. He's been on this campus for at least twelve hours and that is the last thing he said to me. I start typing something. Delete it. Start again. Delete it. Lock the screen. Unlock it. Stare at the chat like the messages might rearrange themselves,so the jealousy I was feeling would leave.
I go to his voice notes instead. Scroll past the recent ones to one from a few weeks ago. Him in his kitchen, late, half-asleep, rambling about a show he started watching. He loses his train of thought twice and finds it both times and the second time he laughs at himself for forgetting and starts over from the beginning and I can hear him opening the fridge in the background while he talks.
I press play. Pull the blanket up to my chin. Close my eyes. His voice fills my earphones, warm and close and completely unaware of what it does sitting in my chest like this, and somewhere between his second ramble and the sound of his fridge closing I finally fall asleep.