I start running again as I shake my head, but last only until I catch sight of my dorm, when I slow to a walk. I tuck my phone into the band of my sweatpants and retie my ponytail. Now that the horrid run is over, I admit that I actually feel good. Although my muscles hurt, and I am overall embarrassingly fatigued, I am alert in a way that I love. In fact, as I near the steps to Reber Hall, I wish that I’d sucked it up and kept going for the full forty-five minutes.

The door opens before I reach it, and a stocky blond guy in shorts and a fitted shirt holds open the door for me. “Good day for a run, huh?”

“What?”

“Couldn’t ask for better weather.” He adjusts the armband that holds his small music player and smiles. “Cool, but not cold. I hate how the cold tightens you up when you run, you know?”

He thinks that I’m a runner, like he is, and I feel false even as I embrace the lie. “Oh. Yeah, I hate that. It’s really gorgeous out today.” I step through the threshold. “You’ll have a good run.”

“Sweet. Catch you later.”

Armband boy makes his way down the steps while he rolls his shoulders in circles.

I roll my own shoulders as I make my way up the wide staircase to my floor. Shoulder rolls. I should have thought of doing those before, but at least I’m doing them now. In fact, I’m going to do more than this. I unlock my door, grab a towel from the top shelf of my closet, fold it in half, and set it on the hard floor. I get on my hands and knees and shift my weight forward. Twenty push-ups can’t be that hard. But even modified push-ups (I refuse to think of them as “girl” push-ups) leave my arms shaking by the seventh one. Ten will have to do for today. Now crunches. Twenty to the center, ten to each side. I may barf. I stand for lunges—fifteen forward, fifteen back. They are clumsy, shaky lunges, but they are mine.

It is a start. More physical activity than I have even considered in a long time. Not that I have ever been much of an athlete at all, but I’ve done a number of classes with my friends at the gym back home. Before. James is the real athlete of the family. Or he used to be. He is obviously never going to forgive me for ruining that, and I can’t blame him. I deserve his hatred.

Stop, stop, stop, I order myself.

My e-mail chimes, and I groan as I roll over to check it. I am probably being alerted of an impending disaster that will require the transfer of my bank funds to an exotically named prince. Instead it’s from my aunt Lisa, who James and I have lived with for the past four years. Her place has been our home base because the house we grew up in was too full of painful memories of our parents after they died. When were unwilling to sell it, Lisa rented it out to strangers.

I skim the e-mail in disbelief; it is cluttered with falsely cheerful exclamation points. I ignore the bullshit pleasantries. The e-mail informs me that since James and I are now both in college, we are technically adults, so we “get to move back” into our parents’ house. Apparently, the renters’ lease is up, and Lisa sees the chance to get us out of her hair; that much is clear by the way her e-mail also explains that she’s shipped all of our things to our old address. The icing on the cake is that she’s going to New Orleans with friends for Thanksgiving and leaving us out of it. So that’s that.

I want my mother right now. I want her so desperately that I physically ache to have her hold me, and it’s absolutely bullshit that I have no one. In the past, I’d tried to trick myself into thinking that I could connect with Lisa and that she would fill that maternal void. But Lisa never made much of an effort to conceal her lack of interest in housing her niece and nephew. Maybe James and I were too much of a reminder of her sister, or maybe it was just that Lisa is in her early thirties, single, and with no desire to domesticate her independent life.

Still, our “home” is—or was—Lisa’s house. It’s where both James and I have rooms. Guest rooms. It is by no means a place we love, but it’s what we’ve had.

My legs burn as I walk out of the room. My aunt is a bitch. I have made so many excuses for her near-total indifference to us, but I refuse to do that anymore. Her grief, her loss, also belongs to James and me.

I clomp loudly down the dorm stairwell in the midst of a mental tirade. I’m so sick of Lisa and her craptastically awful attitude. Not that I’m one to be complaining about someone’s attitude necessarily, but if my sister had died, I’d be a lot damn nicer to her children. I’d cling to them and smother them with too much love. Instead, Lisa has done the bare minimum. I hit the landing and continue to the basement of the dorm while I fume. It’s not like we’ve been a financial burden to her.

I enter the lowest floor of the dorm and turn left. If the basement numbers correspond to the ones on my floor, his room is directly below mine a few floors down.

Selfish. She’s inexcusably selfish. Fuck that. Fuck her.

Without hesitating, I knock on the door. I need help.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It’s Just Pain

“Hey, neighbor.” Chris smiles up at me. He’s sitting at his desk with a book in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“Hi.” Of course, now that I’m here, I feel like an asshole, hit with the clear understanding that my showing up in this frazzled state is totally inappropriate. Yet I do not turn and run. The fact that he is using a pencil distracts me for second, because I find it totally adorable that in this technological age, he is still a pencil kind of a guy. “Sorry, you’re obviously studying. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. It’s just …” I struggle to catch my breath, partially from taking the stairs so fast and partially from my emotion. I put my hands on my hips and look down.

“What is it?” he asks softly. His voice is calm and patient.

“I tried to go running, and my playlist sucks, and it didn’t go well. Every song felt wrong and stupid. I felt wrong and stupid. And my aunt is just horrible. And …” I look straight into those intoxicating green eyes. “And why can’t I get over everything? My parents died four years ago, not a month ago, but it infiltrates my entire life. I can’t make it stop. I can’t be happy. I didn’t used to be like this. I used to be vivacious and fun. I used to be me. Your mother died, so you know what it’s like, yet you manage to have a life. I want a life, too. How do you have that? And … and … and my playlist sucks.”

He waves me into his room. “Sit.” Chris points at the bed, so I sit and watch as he gets up from his desk smoothly, despite the cramped quarters of his single room, and moves his chair so he can face me. “Give me your phone.”

“What?”

“Give me your phone. Let’s see this ineffective playlist of yours.”

“Oh. Okay.” I pass it over. The back of my hand brushes against his as I slide my phone to him. Some people describe certain physical connections as being like electricity. Sparks flying. When Chris and I touch, it’s different. I think of the feel of water. The way it is when you wade into the ocean and a small wave cascades against you, swirling sand over you and awakening every pore.

Slow motion, I think decidedly. He can make things happen in slow motion. The rest of the room grows blurry while Chris stays sharply in focus, and I watch him silently as he taps the screen. He has beautiful hands. Strong, deft, exacting.

Suddenly I notice that he’s been talking. “… impossible to run to this shit. You need an entirely different tone.”

“Hair metal? Oldies? Orchestral?” I suggest with a smile.

“Funny, funny. You’re trying to run at the same pace as these songs, I bet.”

“Well, yeah.”

“You’re competing. Don’t compete. The music has its own pace, and you have to make yours. Be in charge. Find a zone. A holding space.”