My dad has been sending me a zillion text messages, but I just can’t. If I talk to him, he’ll hear it in my voice. My dad is like a genie. He knows everything. He’ll hear it in my voice and he’ll ask, “Cakey-pie, is everything okay?” and I’ll try to cover but I won’t be able to and then I’ll break down and cry for three hours and he’ll jump in a car and probably not stop driving until he is at the door of my dorm.
I just have to give it a few days. To feel better.
Maybe a week.
Or, like, a hundred years.
I saw Zeb going into the campus center. He stopped and came over to me. I could tell by the look on his face, he’d heard it all.
“She’s gone now, huh?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“And you and Milo broke up.”
“If we were ever really dating to begin with.” I pause. “Wait, who told you that?”
“Milo.”
I sigh. “Right.”
“Listen, Willa. I wanted to tell you. I’m going back to LA next semester. I just really miss it.”
I shake my head. “Of course you are.”
“I just really miss it, you know.”
I shrug. “Yeah, I bet.”
“Well, I just wanted to tell you, before I go back . . .”
He puts his hand on my shoulder and looks into my eyes. It’s almost too kind and too intimate and I almost can’t take it.
“You’re the best person here, Willa.” He nods for emphasis. “Don’t forget it.”
And I could cry now, but we’re in the middle of the campus center, end-of-the-year rush. So I just look up and smile and nod.
“Bye, Zeb. Thanks.”
When he walks off I can’t help but wonder how he got to be the way he is, who raised him and what they must have done. Whoever they were, I wish I could thank them.
And so here I am, in my beautiful room, buried in a veritable mountain of books. Peeking up out of the top like the fox in the snow.
I guess I never did kill myself. I have to give myself an F in suicide.
Thank God.
That’s the funny thing, isn’t it? That Remy brought me back from the abyss. That she brought me back and put my head back on my shoulders and my heart back inside my body. That she stood me up again. And that’s the not-so-funny thing too. That I couldn’t do one thing, not any of those things, to save her. I have to give myself an F in friend-saving.
Maybe in the end she just didn’t want to be saved. And maybe, somewhere deep inside, somewhere below all my dumb jokes and snark and pretending I never care about anything, maybe somewhere deep beneath my fortress of never caring, I was desperate to be saved. To be loved. To be cared for. To be accepted for all of the things wrong with me instead of constantly not living up to should.
Remy put an end to the era of should.
That’s how Remy saved me.
And that’s why I get to be here now. With an F in suicide.
But this. This here. Welp, this is the only thing I’m good at. Throwing myself into my books. If I can just drown myself in my tests and my papers, none of this gets to matter anymore. It gets to evaporate in a poof of superfluous gunk, and I never, ever have to care again.
Of course, it comes up.
If I stop.
Or if I have a break where I’m supposed to eat or, I don’t know, use the bathroom or something.
So, I’m avoiding those things.
Eating. Not for me.
Resting. Not for me.
An occasional walk to relax the mind. No way.
That’s the danger time—when Remy or Milo come flying into my brain and all of a sudden I get lost in a sea of questions and annoyances and frustration that I was stupid enough to fall for any of it.
Nope.
Instead, work. Work, work, work. Study. Write a paper. Study. Write another paper. Study. Cram for the calculus final. Read. Write another paper.
I’m even doing extra credit.
In every class.
Anything and everything a student here at Pembroke can do, I am doing. I am even visiting the teachers during office hours to ask pithy and insightful questions in order to write even better papers.
In short, I am a robot.
An academic robot.
With no heart. No soft places where I can get hurt.
There is a ten-minute shower allowed in my daily regimen, which doesn’t even get to last that long because my thoughts begin to wander and I jump out, soaking wet, hustle down the hall in my towel, and throw myself into the required and not-so-required reading.
At one point I do text my dad. I tell him “it’s crunch time” and “will call soon.” But, honestly, it hasn’t helped. It hasn’t staunched the flow of communication. He really has been texting a lot. Maybe he’s lonely . . .
I make up my mind to send him something. With a nice card. Maybe cupcakes. I go down the rabbit hole of the interbot finding the best cupcakes to deliver to him, and that takes me two hours, which is good, because that’s two hours I don’t have to think.
Except for one problem. There is a problem in my plan. Despite the fact that I have become a machine who has spent the last two weeks with blinders on and a focus on only the greatest, most impeccable achievement, grade point average and academic prose . . . there . . . somehow between my blinders, is someone standing in my doorway, someone standing right there, distracting me from my true purpose, and of course that person is the one person I am dying not to think about, and of course that person is Remy.