Begin Again(3)

“Transfer student. Yes,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. He runs a hand through his dark curls. “Shit. Is it Monday?”

His voice sounds familiar to me, enough that I’m about to ask if he went to a school near Little Fells. But I’m immediately distracted by his room, which is littered with coffee mugs, the majority centered around a tiny, single-serve Keurig placed dead center in the room like a shrine.

“Yup,” I inform him. “You okay there, Milo?”

“Peachy,” he mutters, moving his hand to rub his thumb and pointer finger over his eyes like he’s trying to rub his face back to life. “Cool, okay. I got this. You’re with Shay.”

Now this is the one part of the whole Blue Ridge State experience I’ve actually been looking forward to—having a roommate. Especially considering my only past roommates, bless their hearts, both qualify for social security and spend most of their nights arguing over the division between the tomatoes and strawberries in the backyard garden. I squashed the hope my kid self had for siblings a long time ago, but I can feel the glimmer of it now—someone my age. Someone who doesn’t think that watching The Proposal eighteen times a month is a personality trait. An actual, legitimate peer.

Milo leads me down the hall on legs so long that I half jog to keep up, then knocks on 4A. There’s no answer.

“Shay’s probably in the shower,” he says, pointing vaguely down the hall. “So, uh—bathrooms are down there on the left. Just past them is a study room. End of the hall is the rec room.”

“Got it.”

“Rules. Uh . . . quiet hours start at nine. If you’re going to drink, please don’t do it in front of me, I don’t have the time or the will to write you up. This is your key,” he says, pulling it out of the back pocket of his jeans and pressing it into my hand. His own is warm in that way of someone who’s recently been asleep. “Don’t lose it, they’re expensive to replace.”

I close my fist around the key like a talisman. “Anything else?”

He takes an exaggeratedly long breath. “Probably. Sorry. Long night. Do you have any questions?”

“No, thanks.” I read through the student handbook so thoroughly that I probably know more about the rules than he does. I don’t do anything halfway.

“Good, because I’m not alive enough for them yet.” He gestures at the closed door. “You lucked out. Shay is my favorite person on this floor.”

“Why’s that?” I ask, eager to hear more about her. The only information I’ve been able to glean about Shay Gibbins is from the Bookstagram she runs, where you can scroll into an endless abyss of beautifully pastel-filtered books on bedspreads and shelves paired with coffee and knickknacks and cozy socks. I only know what she looks like because I managed to find pictures her sister and friends tagged of her—she has this close-lipped, conspiratorial kind of smile and full cheeks and a seemingly endless collection of knit sweaters that would make Gammy Nell proud.

Milo leans down to meet me at my level. He’s just awake enough now that I can see the celery green of his eyes, and the absolute resolution in them. “She respects quiet hours. Quiet hours are very, very sacred to me. Understood?”

I laugh. Milo does not.

“Understood,” I say, saluting him.

He straightens himself back up to his overly tall self, so I have to crane my neck to look at him. “Good,” he says. “And, uh . . . godspeed with the whole midyear transfer thing.”

“Thanks?”

“Anytime,” he says, and then stops himself. “Except during quiet hours.”

There’s a pink-robed, flip-flop-clad Black girl walking down the hallway that I instantly recognize as Shay. She and Milo high-five each other without breaking their strides, then Milo disappears back into his room, and Shay pulls her key out of her robe pocket.

“You must be Andie,” she says, her smile just as warm as it is in pictures.

I hold myself up straight, trying to project the same warmth even as my stomach does a quick backflip. “And you’re Shay.”

“For better or worse,” she says, twisting the key in the lock and opening the door. “Sorry in advance—my side of the room is kind of, uh . . .”

“Whoa.”

I have no idea how she meant to end that sentence, but I’m so swept up by the aesthetic that I probably wouldn’t have heard it anyway. Her half of the room is littered from wall to floor with candles and books and pillows, with glossy Blue Ridge State stickers from the school’s literary club and Campus Pride, with framed and hanging pictures of herself with friends and her parents and sister. Everything is so personal and cozy that I don’t even want to cast my eyes at my bare side of the room and wreck it. I make a mental note to head to the craft store down the road and see if I can curate anything half as cute as her setup.

That is, if I have any money left over after the school’s work-study program comes to collect. Tuition does not come cheap.

“Yeah. Well. You’re welcome to the bookshelf anytime,” says Shay.

“Holy guacamole,” I say, peering closer to look at the titles. It’s a mix of everything—romance, young adult, historical accounts, sci-fi, fantasy, horror. I only look away because there’s a zombie skull on the binding of one of them that rattles me. “You must read like, an entire book a day.”