I blame stress for the fact that I wake up on Friday morning drenched in sweat and completely incapable of breathing through my nose.
I’ve had my flu shot. I’m up-to-date on all my vaccines. And I never get sick—not even freshman year when a nasty strain of strep swept through our dorm. So, I shower, even though there are black spots in my vision when I move my head too quickly, and I put on jeans, even though my bones ache and I want nothing more than to curl up in sweatpants, and I force myself to sit at my laptop reading an essay on feminist literature while my temples throb and my eyes burn.
Denial City, population one.
It isn’t until my trash can is full of tissues and my head feels like it’s splitting open that I finally admit to myself that there’s no way I can make it to any of my afternoon classes, much less my night shift at the library. I text Harper and Nina, shoot Margie an apologetic email, and then turn to the student portal to find a replacement.
Within minutes, a girl offers to cover for me if I’ll take her Wednesday-morning shift. Nobody else is about to sacrifice their Friday night for a sick girl, so I have no choice but to agree to the switch.
I chuck off my jeans—horrible, uncomfortable, cursed denim—and pull on the sweatpants I’ve been dreaming of, then drag my traitorous corporeal form into bed.
My head feels like it’s full of helium. My throat’s so raw it’s like I’ve gargled rocks.
“But you were fine last night,” Harper says from the doorway as she tosses me bottles of Gatorade like a zookeeper lobbing fish to a sea lion. “You said you had a headache, but I didn’t expect you’d be, like, on your fucking deathbed today.”
“Neither did I,” I croak. “Oh my God. Can you overdose on Advil? Is that a thing?”
“I’m making you chicken noodle soup!” Nina shouts from the kitchen.
Both insist on staying home with me for the night, even though I know the new going-out shirt Nina ordered two weeks ago finally arrived and she’s dying to give it a test run. I prop myself up in bed and watch as they rearrange the furniture in the living room so I can see the TV through my open doorway.
“It’s not too late for you to ditch me,” I call.
“Shut up,” Harper says. “What do you want to watch?”
“You guys should pick. I’m just going to fall asleep thirty minutes in.”
Harper puts on Pride & Prejudice, which she knows is my all-time favorite and she can’t stand. I’m about to thank her when she says, “I’m only watching this sappy shit for you, Kenny. As soon as you pass out, we’re putting on something else.”
“This movie is a masterpiece,” Nina mutters.
“How the fuck am I friends with you guys?” Harper asks.
Because we love each other. The thought brings tears to my eyes. I didn’t have this in middle school or high school. I got along well enough with people in my classes, but I was never anyone’s first-choice friend—the one you invited to a movie and sleepover, the one you ran to with your secrets, the one you asked for advice. Which is fine. It was my own fault for being so reserved, and I probably saved myself a world of stress and heartbreak from all the messy politics of high school friendship.
But Nina and Harper are worth all the mess in the world.
I don’t know how I got so lucky, to have found two people who still want to spend time with me when I’m at my absolute worst. As I watch Matthew Macfadyen’s Darcy put his foot in his mouth and find I’m daydreaming of Vincent Knight’s brown eyes, I realize that I’ve been keeping a secret from the two people whom I most want to confide in.
“I have to tell you guys something,” I call out, “but you’re not allowed to make fun of me.”
“Oh, God, are you going to throw up?”
“No. No, it’s just—it’s sort of embarrassing.”
Harper’s head pokes around my door frame. “How embarrassing, on a scale of me sleeping through my sociology final to Nina getting kicked out of the art club’s Bob Ross party?”
Nina gasps in outrage. “That was one time.”
“Because they banned you for life.”
“It’s not my fault the only chaser they had was boxed wine—”
“I made out with Vincent Knight,” I blurt.
For a moment, silence. And then both of my roommates appear in my doorway, scrambling over each other in their haste to see if I’m joking or if the fever has made me delirious.
“I’m sorry, you what?”
“Like, on-the-basketball-team Vincent?”
“When did you—and where did you—just, what?”
I wait until they’ve stopped blabbering to say, very calmly, “He came into the library during my shift last Friday needing help finding some poetry. We went up to the second floor, and one thing led to another, and we made out.”
After my detailed recap, Harper and Nina obviously have some follow-up questions. How big are his hands? Did he moan, because it’s so hot when guys—wait, I’m sorry, he lifted you? I thought you said he only had one good arm! Did he get a boner? He did. Oh my God, Kendall, you seduced him!
The two of them are giddy at the revelation that I’ve hooked up with one of Clement’s star basketball players. They roll around on my floor and give commentary on my storytelling until I’m red-faced with mortification and laughing, even though my throat is killing me. Slowly but steadily, I feel the weight on my shoulders ease. It feels real now. Not like some weird fever dream. Vincent and I made out in a dark corner of the library, and it was insane and spontaneous and, in retrospect, a great story.
Maybe I’ll be okay. Maybe having the story will be enough.
• • •
By Wednesday, my voice is practically gone and I’m still a bit shaky, but I feel human enough to crawl out of bed and climb onto my bike before dawn.
I take deep breaths of crisp morning air as I bike to campus. It feels weird to head to the library at the same hour I usually get off my shift—like the world has been flipped upside down, or like I’ve pulled a Harper and slept through my sociology final after accidentally switching the time zone on my phone. There’s a knot in my stomach as I lock my bike up and head inside, but when I shoulder through the doors, the library feels perfectly unchanged.
I don’t know why I was worried that coming back here would feel like returning to a crime scene. This is still my happy place.
The night shift kid—a tired-eyed boy with clunky headphones around his neck—looks at me like I’m his savior when I march up to the circulation desk and tell him I’m here to relieve him. While he’s packing up his stuff, Margie comes out of the elevator with a book cart piled high with enormous science textbooks.
“Kendall!” she says when she spots me. “How are you feeling, kiddo?”
“I’m better,” I croak, than laugh. “Obviously, I don’t sound like it, but the student health center says I’m not contagious.”
The doctor I saw there agreed with me—stress, not a viral infection, was the most likely cause of my weekend malaise. She’s seen hundreds of Clement students with similar symptoms that happened to line up with final exams, group projects, and other major deadlines.
Margie nods sympathetically. “There’s a fresh box of herbal tea and an electric kettle in the back office. Help yourself.”
“Thank you,” I say, exhaling heavily.
I stow my backpack under the desk, pull out my plastic baggie of cough drops, and start toward the office door.
“Oh—before I forget,” Margie says, stopping me. “A boy came in on Friday and asked for you.”
Everything goes still. I think there’s a ringing in my ears.
“What boy?” I ask, even though I think I already know the answer.
“I don’t remember his name. Tall son of a bitch. Very handsome. He checked out two different books of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems and an autobiography on some famous college basketball coach.”
Vincent. He came back.
“I explained you were out sick,” Margie adds.
I die a little inside, even though Vincent couldn’t possibly have known how snotty and sweaty and miserable I was this weekend. Fuck. I can’t believe I missed him.
He asked for you.
I’m not sure how to interpret that. Maybe he wanted to check in and figure out why I’d disappeared after we made out. Maybe he wanted a repeat of the last Friday night. Or maybe he just wanted to make it clear that what happened between us was a onetime thing and that he’d prefer it if I didn’t run my mouth about it.
“Did he say why he was looking for me?” It’s a loaded question, but I have to know.
“He said he needed an English tutor, but he left a note for you. Hold on—I put it on my desk in the back—”
Margie ducks into the office and reappears a moment later with a little scrap of torn paper in her hand. My first thought when she passes it to me is that Vincent’s handwriting is surprisingly neat—two little lines of perfectly even block letters. He does his As the same way I do mine.
still suck at poetry. please have mercy. [email protected].
I turn it over, hoping for some more insight, but the other side is blank.
“Should I have told him to screw off?” Margie asks.
I croak out a laugh. “No, I can handle him. Thanks, Margie.”
After tucking Vincent’s note into the back pocket of my jeans, I get to work. There’s much to be done before the morning crowd arrives to print homework and essays before classes. As the sun rises, light streams into the atrium like liquid gold and casts the whole library in a warm glow. I stock shelves and process returns and help a group of chemistry students game our e-book checkout system so they don’t have to pay two hundred bucks for a textbook.
And the whole time, the scrap of paper burns in my pocket.
Because it can only mean one thing: the story isn’t over.
