Page 48 of Come As You Are

“It’s really not a big deal, Skeevy. She knew I had the ladder, and Ididguess you were PMS’ing earlier, so I’m feeling pretty vindicated right now.”

“Oh, shut up before I knock you off that rope and onto your ass.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“I might.” But I’m lying, because he just climbed out of his room after hours and brought me tampons and now he’s here in front of my window, clinging to a rope ladder, looking surprisingly manly with his biceps glowing in the moonlight. Ever since I found out about Salem and Jenna, I’ve been wondering how exactly he landed her, and right now, for half a second, I get it.

“That’s the cramps talking,” he says with a grin, and once again, I wanna die. “G’night, Skeevy.”

“G’night, Salem. And thanks for… this.”

“I’d say ‘anytime,’ but I wouldn’t mean it.” And then he shimmies up the rope and is gone.

I don’t even have the energy to yell at Sabrina right now, especially since I’d still have nothing without her, so I dragmyself back to the bathroom and thank past me for at least remembering to pack painkillers. As I put myself to bed, wincing against the pain of cramps while I wait for the meds to kick in, I can’t help thinking about the fact that Salem Grayson—Salem fucking Grayson—came to my menstrual rescue.

I am never gonna live this down.

And I have to get the hell out of this dorm.

No one in the housing office displays any semblance of caring for my newest petition to move to a girls’ dorm, with the argument that I’m the only girl on campus without easy access to menstrual products—the girls’ dorms have machines, plus everyone knows you can go to the dorm heads for them.

Even if Mr. Hoffman were the type to keep them on hand for transmasc Rumson residents and visiting girls—which he is absolutely not—I wouldn’t ask him for water if I were dying of thirst.

They do, at least, compromise by giving me a bag of about a thousand tampons from Lockwood, and in my desperation, I accept. I really don’t have any more time to fight, because we have Book Club tonight, and I’m still slogging through the pretentious nightmare that got voted our first pick.

It’s a good excuse to avoid the Beast for lunch, anyway, and every other social activity. At Book Club, I sit with Sabrina, and we squeeze each other’s hands every time someone talks about which scene made them cry or just, like, really madethem want to live their lives to the fullest. On the way out, I tell her I need to avoid everyone possible, and she runs into the Beast and returns with takeout, which we eat picnic-style in my room. Afterward, we do our homework in the nice kind of silence, the one where you’re not acknowledging each other’s presence but you feel it like a hug all the same.

“This feels so much like hanging out with Claire,” I say without thinking, and immediately wish I could take it back. It does, though—we were always doing things side by side, not really together. I would play online poker or give myself terrible pedicures while she beaded bracelets or made little charms out of clay to look like penguins or watermelon slices. It always felt nice, like we were close enough to do that, without it ever striking me as weird how much time we spent in silence or not wanting to do the same thing.

In reality, it probably fell somewhere in the middle, but the silent times only got more frequent the closer Craig and I got, because she made it clear from the get-go she wasn’t interested in hearing about him, and I, admittedly, was way too interested in talking about him. Everything seemed interesting and special with him, and when he did nice things like bring me a soda at lunch without my having to ask for it, or brought over any handouts I missed when I was home sick, I was dying to talk about it with someone who understood how good that all felt. And that wasn’t Claire.

Instead, I hung out more and more in Craig’s basement, not just to watch him play games with his friends but to talk to the other girlfriends and hangers-on, to glow about this special thing or that, none of which were actually that specialin retrospect. (God, imagining Craig bringing me a tampon is too impossible to even contemplate.) And of course, as soon as Craig ditched me for Sierra, those girls ditched me too; Alex Gaboury was the only one who even said she was sorry to hear about it.

So maybe… I was not the best friend either. I mean, not “hiding from my BFF that her boyfriend and sister are hooking up” level of bad, but, you know, not great.

“Have you spoken to her at all?” Sabrina asks, breaking into my thoughts. She’s gotten the gist of the story over the past few weeks.

“Nope.”

“Really?” Sabrina twirls her pen between her fingers at impressive speed. “I would’ve thought she’d have reached out by now. Seems like a pretty obvious thing to apologize for.”

“The fight we had about it was… not great,” I admit. “I yelled at her for being a traitor and she told me it was my fault for being so clueless, and it devolved from there. And I didn’t exactly give her the biggest window to apologize before blocking her number and social media.” It’s also possible that I said some unkind things to her about being maybe a little boring or jealous or both that I didn’t feel like apologizing for, either.

“Do you miss her?”

“Does it make me a jerk that I don’t, really?” I don’t make eye contact for that, concentrating my gaze on the cover of my Spanish notebook instead. “I think we drifted a long time ago but were both sort of afraid to see what else was out there.” I take a deep breath, then admit to Sabrina whatI haven’t said to anyone else. (And who else would I say it to, anyway?) “I looked at her pictures the other day, and she looked so freaking happy. She’s a different person, doing different things, and the only thing that really changed in her life between then and now is that I left. So maybe I was holding her back. Maybe I was the boring loser.”

The words somehow sound even worse coming out of my mouth now than they did then.

“Or maybe you gave her the push she needed,” Sabrina suggests with a shrug. “I mean, yeah, maybe you were a dick about it—”

“I was definitely a dick about it.”

“Okay, but I’m your friend, not hers, so whatever. Point is, maybe this was the best thing for both of you and that’s all there is to it. You’re here for a fresh start, right? So you’re getting yours, and she’s getting hers.”

I’m still stuck on “I’m your friend, not hers,” and how I needed to hear it so badly that I can feel tears pricking my eyes and I have to excuse myself to go to the bathroom so I can breathe my way out of crying in front of Sabrina. But then I think of not just Claire and Craig and Sierra but how I’ll probably lose Salem to his girlfriend, and Heather will eventually turn on me, and I turn on the sink to allow myself one little self-pitying round of sniffles.

And then I stop. Because I’ve made friends. And I have to hold on to them, no matter what it takes.

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