They were supposed to be studying for midterms. Brennan felt like she’d been spending all her spare time studying. Even her private library writing corner had turned into a study space, with no time to write.
Today she felt a little off. Her throat was sore and her head was stuffy. Not up to going somewhere else to study, Brennan had tried to go back to the dorm.
But Ambreen and her friends were all in the dorm room.
“Brennan!” Ambreen greeted her, laughing, as soon as Brennan came in the door. Brennan did her best to offer a small smile. Even though it was nine o’clock at night, all she wanted to do was relax in her room, and she’d just found out that Ambreen and friends were chatting and giggling in said room.
“Hey, Ambreen,” she said, her tone a little off.
“Whatcha doing?” asked Calvin. He was sitting up on her bed. She shot a sideways glare at him, but he either didn’t see or didn’t care, because he didn’t get off.
“I was going to study,” she said. “I’ve got another midterm tomorrow.” She hoped they’d all take the hint. Unfortunately . . .
“Oh, we’re studying too!” Jen laughed from her spot on Ambreen’s bed. “You can study with us.”
“That’s okay,” said Brennan tiredly. She suddenly felt like crying and screaming at them all at once (mainly at Calvin: Get off my bed!). “I’m just picking up a textbook I forgot and then I’m headed back out.”
“Stay warm out there!” said Ambreen. “Are you going back to the MUC?” Student center. The SIUE counterpart to Wash U’s DUC, which Jonas had told Brennan about the other day.
“Yeah,” mumbled Brennan. I guess I am. She wished her brain would give her anxiety permission to go away so she could hang out with them.
She left Prairie Hall behind, going out the back door. Instead of following the path to campus, she climbed one of the small rolling hills, punctuated with little goals for Frisbee golf. During the summer, students came out here all the time, to either play Frisbee golf or sit and relax, chatting.
In the chilly late October air, however, they were nowhere to be found.
Brennan sat down in the browning autumn grass, leaning back and staring at the sky. She didn’t know where to go, exactly. She didn’t feel like going back to campus, and she couldn’t face Ambreen and all of her friends in their dorm room. Ambreen always referred to them like they were Brennan’s friends, too, but Brennan always felt like she was just borrowing them—like they didn’t really belong to her and she was just their surrogate friend, Ambreen’s little tagalong. If they really liked her, they’d try to understand, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t just sit on Brennan’s bed in their street clothes and not care, would they? Brennan pictured the germs: multidrug-resistant organisms—MDROs. Flu. A bad cold. Norovirus.
From here Brennan could see the window to their dorm room. Ambreen had the blinds open and the warm yellow light of every lamp and string of Christmas lights in the room spilled out over the grass.
Brennan knew she shouldn’t be out. It was almost too cold to be out anyway. But she couldn’t go inside. What would she do? Hide in the bathroom?
The worst part was, she wanted to fit in with them—with all the people in her dorm. But there was no happy medium. She would have to change who she was because they wouldn’t change who they were. She didn’t want them to change all that much, just meet her in the middle. Understand. But she figured it would just be like when she tried to explain her anxiety to Ambreen. They’d be sympathetic, but they wouldn’t get it. They wouldn’t leave her alone in the room when she needed it—wouldn’t understand if Brennan needed to have her personal space.
Hot tears stung her eyes. What was she doing? Here she was, off at college, and completely failing as a college student. No new friends, no big college stories to tell, no nothing. Brennan was tethered to home while most everyone else was growing into themselves. She still texted her mom every night, for God’s sake.
Brennan, you’re in college now. How long will this go on? Are you taking your meds?
Her mom, last night.
Yes,
Brennan sent back, lying, trying to force hot tears back into her eyes at her mom’s words. I’d get rid of it if I could! her mind screamed. All I want to do is get rid of it!
Brennan straightened her legs and pressed her body into the cool grass—blank, unmoving. She was stuck, well and truly.
She pulled out her phone, frozen fingers hitting Jonas’s name on her contact list—on purpose this time.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” she said, small and hoarse and sore throated. Her brain was freaking out a bit. You called. You called. What the heck is wrong with you?
“You okay?” he asked immediately. She almost did cry then. Because he knew her, understood her—got that everything wasn’t all right. Unlike stupid Calvin, sitting on her bed, and Ambreen and Jennifer, acting like everything was just peachy. Peachy. Ambreen said that. Brennan thought everything was the opposite of peachy.
“No,” she said. Just that.
“You called. What’s wrong?”
“Just, everything. I feel like I’m the surrogate friend in my hall. The charity project. Like everyone just tolerates me, probably because Ambreen asked them to pretend to like me. They’re all so cheerful. And here I am, feeling sick, wanting to go to the dorm room and study alone, and they’re all there, because they’re good college students. Normal ones, who hang out together, and laugh and have a good time, even when they’re studying. I feel like a loser.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Sitting outside, like a crazy person, because even though I’m half sick, I can’t bring myself to go inside.”
“Where?”
“Outside Prairie. The back, in the grass. I’m sure anyone who wanders by will think I’m nuts.”
“Hang on a few minutes.” Jonas hung up.
Brennan stared at her phone. About twenty long minutes later, it lit up in her hands. She answered. “That was rude of you. Abrupt.”
“Come to the front doors and let me in. It’s freezing out here.”
Extremities frozen, Brennan stumbled up and to the back doors, slipping inside, dragging her backpack after her. She could see him—Jonas—through the front doors. He was hunching his shoulders against the cold, dramatically, and when she opened the doors, he pushed inside in a hurry.
“Wow, it’s cold,” he said into the phone, the words echoing in her own ear through their still connected phone call. She hung up.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him hoarsely.
“I just finished a study session at the MUC with my lab partner from A&P. Rhys wanted to hang out with his friend again, so he drove me.”
Her eyes went to the two heavy blankets he was holding in his right hand, the crutches shoved under his left. “Did you drive over from the MUC? What are you doing with those?”
Jonas avoided looking at her, and she took in the way he shifted his weight off his prosthetic left leg. “I walked. That’s why it took longer than a few minutes. As to these”—he managed to look at her again, now that they weren’t talking about driving—“they’re from the emergency kit my mom put in the back of the car. Just trust me. If you want to stargaze in the cold, this is how you do it.” He glanced around. “Do you have a laundry room around here?”
Brennan pointed dumbly past the desk. “You have to give them a photo ID to get back there,” she said lamely. Jonas took out his driver’s license and handed it to the RA at the counter. Brennan gave them her student ID, and they paired it up with Jonas’s license, marking him as her visitor.
Brennan led the way to the laundry room, and then sat down, hoisting herself onto a table at the back as Jonas found an empty dryer and stuffed the blankets inside. She watched as he dropped quarters into the slot, the clunk-clunk-clink of them rattling around the empty room.
The mechanical sound of their dryer hummed in Brennan’s ears, joining the other running machines in the room. There was a detergent-y smell in the air, and something like citrus coming from an abandoned box of dryer sheets at the other end of the table Brennan was sitting on.
Jonas came and sat next to her. When she was silent, he nudged her knee with his—the good one, she noticed, not the prosthetic one. She wondered if he’d chosen to sit on that side of her on purpose. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said. She felt disheveled—her hair hadn’t been washed since yesterday, and was half-up half-down, pieces of it loose on her forehead, falling into her eyes. The sweater peeking out from her unbuttoned coat was obviously wrinkled, and the T-shirt was a too-big one from her high school (Go Knights!) with a stain on the front (pizza grease that had never come out, circa three years ago) that she normally kept buried in her bottom dresser drawer.
“You’re not the surrogate friend,” he finally said. “There’s plenty of reasons to like you.”
“Name one,” she challenged him, squinting at him.
“You’re smart. You laugh easily, when you let yourself, and you have a nice laugh. You write books. Like, some fifty thousand–odd words come out of your mind.”
“I’ve never actually finished a book, you know.”
“Okay. You write stories that could be books someday.”
“What are you doing here, Jonas?” She turned to look at him, hoping that the heat behind her eyes wasn’t trying to turn into tears.
“You weren’t okay.”
They didn’t say anything for a few minutes after that, listening to the tumble and clink of the washers and dryers currently running. There wasn’t anyone else in the laundry room at the moment, but the other machines going hinted that they’d be back.
“I hate the way I feel sometimes,” she said, her voice tiny. For a moment, she wondered if she’d said it at all.
Jonas moved just enough closer to nudge her with his shoulder, and she leaned her cheek against the sleeve of his jacket, which smelled like spice. He stiffened momentarily, like he hadn’t been expecting it. Because she wasn’t sure what to do, she stayed like that. He eventually relaxed, staring ahead at the laundry tumbling in the dryers.
Eventually, she stopped wondering about how long she should stay like that, because he wasn’t moving, and just gave in to the comfort of it.
They sat there in silence until the buzzer on the dryer went off.
Jonas hopped down and opened it, pulling out the blankets. “Brennan Davis, you’re about to be educated on the Nguyen-Avery method.”
“Who’s—”
“My mom and dad,” he said, simply. “Come on.” She held the blankets and followed him as he crutched out of the laundry room and back outside Prairie. This time, they went farther away from the street-lit path and the glowing windows of Prairie, until it was all stillness and silence and Brennan was conscious of being alone with Jonas.
He transferred his weight to his good leg and dropped the crutches before laying out one of the blankets and sitting down, patting the spot on his right. She sat down, hesitation pricking at the edges of her thoughts, and he covered them both with the other blanket. The remaining dryer heat pocketed between the blankets and around Brennan’s skin. Jonas lay down and she followed his lead.
They were shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. She stared at the sky, at stars that seemed to blink because she wasn’t. She looked for the only constellations she knew—the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Orion. The cold, empty air kissed Brennan’s cheeks and her nose, but every other part of her was warm, wrapped in the trapped heat and the closeness of Jonas.
“I admit,” she breathed, “that the Nguyen-Avery Method is superior to the Brennan Davis Method. And thank you, Gus—and your mom, I guess—for providing us with these lovely blankets.”
She didn’t look at Jonas because she couldn’t look away from the inky black of the sky, but she heard him laugh softly.
All she could think about was how distractingly close he was to her. Close enough that she was imagining just how small the amount of space was between them—so small it was just invisible-to-the-human-eye atoms at this point; the amount of space that exists between all objects. Then she was thinking of atoms, her atoms and Jonas’s atoms, and how she knew this line of thought was crazy, but he made her crazy.
The stars looked like paint randomly flicked across a canvas. This was dizzying, spinning—a beautiful out of control. Which was crazy because Brennan hated being out of control. But this—she liked this. How was it fair that Jonas had this power over her?
“You’re my friend,” Jonas said suddenly. “Not my surrogate friend, and probably the best one I’ve got. And here we are, hanging out together, having—at least, I like to think—having a good time.” Brennan looked at him then. “So,” he said. He was looking at her now.
“So?” she whispered.
“So you aren’t failing as a college student.” He grinned. “That’s gotta be at least a C. And you know what they say: Cs—”
“Get degrees!” She was laughing then, and the knot completely untied. It felt loose and nice and everything. Everything at once. Intoxicating. “I like this,” she said.
“Me too,” said Jonas.
“This is one of those moments where I think, if time were to just stop and this was all we had, I might be happy.”
“That’s another nice thing about you—you have thoughts like that.”
Brennan stared at the sky again because she didn’t want Jonas to catch her staring at him.
He was staring at the sky too. “Does it ever make you feel small? Like, we go about our lives, and there’s a certain space that we feel we occupy—in school, jobs, with our friends—but then you go outside on a night like tonight and when you stare at the sky, it all just starts to seem tiny, and you realize you’re smaller than you thought.” She wondered if his voice really did sound smaller—more unsure—than normal.
“M-hmm,” she hummed. It felt like the tiny distance between them shrank a little more. “But I think it feels nice.”
“Like all the things that trouble us are smaller too?”
“Exactly. I like knowing there’s something bigger than everything that scares me.”
“What scares you, Brennan?”
Being out of control. Being known. Not being enough. Being known, and having people find out she wasn’t enough, wasn’t what they thought she was. Letting herself be known, and still ending up alone, with no friends, no one to love her. No one. “Everything.” She forced the word past her heart, which was working its way into her throat. “My own mind.” She closed her eyes, swallowed her heart back down. “What are you afraid of?”
Brennan looked at him. He had closed his eyes. “I think—” He took a shaky breath and Brennan wondered if he was cold or nervous. “I think, sometimes, that I’m afraid of being happy.”
“What do you mean?”
Jonas was silent for a few moments. She moved her hand under the blanket and flinched when she accidentally brushed his. But when she went to move away, he grabbed her fingers. Held on tight. His hand was warm and it made her feel melty.
“It’s just, after the accident—” It seemed like he was forcing the words out, the same way she always felt like she was forcing words out. “I’ve always sort of been afraid to let myself feel happy—to be alive—because what if I can never be as happy as I was before?”
Brennan thought for a moment, which was hard with his hand holding hers like that. “I think,” she finally said, “that you’re alive, and being alive is all that’s required to be happy.” She thought of herself. Was she alive, avoiding all the things she avoided? Wasn’t living breaking and rebuilding and loving and losing and everything all at once? Everything she blocked off and tried to prevent, and it happened to her anyway. She still lost, in the end. Let go, she told herself. Let go. But her mind stepped in then: Don’t let go; don’t lose control. This is what protects you. It might block everyone out, but it keeps the bad out too.
Brennan closed her eyes. Who am I without my anxiety? Take it away, and am I even the same person?
“What are you thinking about?” Jonas whispered. His words floated on white clouds of breath in the bracing fall air. “I can almost hear the gears in your head turning away.”
“Nothing,” she breathed. “Everything, actually, but I want to think about nothing.”
“Shut up, brain,” he said. “Right?”
She closed her eyes, her lips turning into a tiny smile. Tiny, but there. “Speak for yourself.” She felt some of the tension go out of the shoulder that was pressed against hers.