Page 12 of Night Shift

I shrug. “I had a busy shift.”

For a moment, I worry Nina is going to press me and I’ll have to choose between lying to her (something I hate doing) and telling her what, exactly, made this shift so special. But then Harper finds glitter on her palm and asks if her eye shadow is smudged, and Nina cackles and informs her that her eye shadow has been all over her face for the better part of the night.

I decide not to tell them about my little rendezvous with Vincent.

If I don’t talk about what happened, then it’s mine. Mine to turn over in my head late at night and analyze. I don’t want Harper and Nina’s input to distort things, especially if one of them tells me something that’ll completely rot the memory—like that Vincent Knight always wanders around campus looking for quiet corners to seduce naive girls, and that what happened between us was nothing more than a routine seduction for him.

It probably was.

But I don’t want to know. I’d prefer not to ruin the story in my head.

• • •

All week long, I do my best to forget Vincent Knight—and all week long, I fail miserably.

I’m haunted by thoughts of dark eyes and love sonnets. There’s no escape. Not when I’m brushing my teeth. Not when I’m sitting in the middle of a crowded lecture hall and frantically scribbling notes before the professor clicks to the next slide. Not when I’m scrolling through Instagram. Not when I’m snuggled under my covers at night, listening to podcasts about meditation or true crime. Not even when I’m at the grocery store with Harper and Nina, all three of us in our sweats and flip-flops as we congregate in the candy aisle to select our movie night snacks.

And definitely not when, instead of our agreed-upon movie, Harper turns on basketball.

“Hey!” I protest. “We agreed on a Tom Hanks movie.”

“I just want to check the score, you big baby.”

Clement’s playing our first game of the season. It’s only the end of the first quarter, but we’re already up by twelve. I watch the players run up and down the court and tell myself that I’m not looking for floppy dark hair, devilishly intelligent brown eyes, and the mouth that kissed me senseless. But he’s not out there. He must still be recovering.

I’m still recovering too. And that’s a nice thought. That eventually I might be healed from this, and I won’t have to try so hard not to think about being kissed by a boy who doesn’t even know my last name.

Nina clears her throat. For a moment, I think she’s on to me, but then she says, “Jabari looks good out there.”

Harper chucks one of our decorative pillows at her. Nina cackles as it hits her square in the chest and knocks her backward in the armchair.

I laugh, too, but the camera angle shifts, and I almost choke on a peanut M&M—because there’s Vincent Knight. On our television screen. In my apartment. Where I live. He’s standing just behind Clement’s bench in a suit jacket and a crisp white shirt with the top two buttons undone. The sling is gone, but he’s still wearing the bulky black brace around his wrist.

He looks like a fucking prince. Beautiful, regal, and completely untouchable.

“Can we please change the channel now?” I snap, my heart hammering.

My roommates are too busy launching pillows back and forth—Nina has started making kissing noises; Harper is threatening to strangle her with her bare hands—so I’m the one who has to grab the remote.

I’ve never been so grumpy during a Tom Hanks movie.

Six

I blame stress for the fact that I wake up on Friday morning drenched in sweat and completely incapable of breathing through my nose.

I’ve had my flu shot. I’m up-to-date on all my vaccines. And I never get sick—not even freshman year when a nasty strain of strep swept through our dorm. So, I shower, even though there are black spots in my vision when I move my head too quickly, and I put on jeans, even though my bones ache and I want nothing more than to curl up in sweatpants, and I force myself to sit at my laptop reading an essay on feminist literature while my temples throb and my eyes burn.

Denial City, population one.

It isn’t until my trash can is full of tissues and my head feels like it’s splitting open that I finally admit to myself that there’s no way I can make it to any of my afternoon classes, much less my night shift at the library. I text Harper and Nina, shoot Margie an apologetic email, and then turn to the student portal to find a replacement.

Within minutes, a girl offers to cover for me if I’ll take her Wednesday-morning shift. Nobody else is about to sacrifice their Friday night for a sick girl, so I have no choice but to agree to the switch.

I chuck off my jeans—horrible, uncomfortable, cursed denim—and pull on the sweatpants I’ve been dreaming of, then drag my traitorous corporeal form into bed.

My head feels like it’s full of helium. My throat’s so raw it’s like I’ve gargled rocks.

“But you were fine last night,” Harper says from the doorway as she tosses me bottles of Gatorade like a zookeeper lobbing fish to a sea lion. “You said you had a headache, but I didn’t expect you’d be, like, on your fucking deathbed today.”

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