WHEN I FINALLY WENT to therapy, we ended up talking a lot about my third year of college. It’s one of those things that you wouldn’t anticipate at first, but it ends up making so much sense you can’t believe you didn’t see it coming. One of therapy’s little treats, I guess: noticing your own stupidity, and its impact throughout your life. It was fall semester when I started replacing lunch with coffee, spring semester when I realized I was doing it.

And I thought I was going to be a doctor.

By the time my thirties started, I had begun to regard forgetting to eat meals as symptomatic of a wide array of clinical disorders, but when I was twenty-one, I considered it a mere side effect: of bad dining hall food that I had been eating for far too long, of having no money to buy my own groceries, of wanting to be skinny but having no free time to exercise, of having a limited mental capacity for things that weren’t related to my major, of being pre-med in general, of the anxiety of knowing that I was three years into school for something I did not truly want to do, and that the only way to get out of said thing was to admit this fact to my parents. One of my biggest accomplishments at the time was that I had made it so far into school without taking Adderall, so I figured my dependence on sugar and caffeine wasn’t so bad.

I had a friend named Lacy who contributed to my addiction. Every once in a while, she would text me about an “emergency” that required me to meet her for coffee. The emergency was usually about a man Lacy had been dating. It was a different man every time, which made it surprising how similar the conversations were. First, she would tell me everything that went wrong, and I would pretend I was as shocked as she was. Then, I would say things that made her feel better. After the first few times, I developed a formula: I would say at least, and then I would bring up an unfavourable characteristic of the man she was upset about. (This had to be chosen carefully, so as not to insult her taste while also making her realize that the men she picked were not exactly winners, and therefore not worth being sad over.) At least he wasn’t very tall, I might start with. Or, at least he sucked at giving gifts. Then rinse and repeat until she felt better. In a bind, I could turn a seemingly positive attribute into something negative. Any individual could easily be too tall, too generous, too intellectual, too friendly, or too honest. Living in a society, I often reminded Lacy, was all about walking a delicate balance, and the men she dated almost always fell off the tightrope in one direction or another.

One particular Wednesday, I was sitting with Lacy, regretting spending five fifty plus tax on a lavender latte that tasted like soap while she relayed the story of her last romantic disappointment. His name was Stephen. He was so . . . something. My brain switched gears as she was talking, first to its doomsday countdown to finals, and then to its favourite topic, which was ANYTHING OTHER THAN FINALS.

Of course, once you decide not to think about something, you’re already thinking about that thing, which meant that I wasn’t thinking about the things I was supposed to be thinking about. (Unless I needed to start thinking about finals now? It was earlier than usual, but it seemed like it got earlier every year, and even then, it was never really enough. How are you supposed to know what you should be thinking about at any given moment, anyway? Do other people know, or are we all just wandering through life, blown about by the winds of our minds?)

While I was exploring this, Lacy finished telling me about her breakup. This should have been the perfect time to apply my formula, except that when I began to look for Stephen’s worst qualities, I realized that despite Lacy telling me all about him (and no doubt more than once), I had no idea who he was.

I took a sip of my ultra-lavender latte and assessed my options. I could tell Lacy the truth: that she had dated so many deeply uninteresting men during college that they had all blended together in my mind, and I could no longer remember who was who. Or I could find some negative qualities that could apply to any man Lacy had dated and pretend they were specific to Stephen.

I began in the abstract world of attractiveness. “Look, it’s not like he’s the hottest guy you’ve ever been with. I mean, you could do better.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You think? I mean, you’ve seen him.”

This was news to me. “Oh, yeah. I mean, I always thought that one guy – the one you dated last year, who used the word cool way too much–”

“James?”

“That’s right, cool guy James. He was way hotter. I mean, he’s not on track to win a Pulitzer or anything, but he was hotter.” With Lacy, it was important to remind her why things hadn’t worked out with previous boyfriends every time they came up in conversation, just to make sure she didn’t repeat her mistakes.

“I guess.”

It hadn’t been enough. “Well, the thing about Stephen,” I inhaled to buy myself time, “was that he was never a great listener. Right?”

Textbook projection, I would learn in therapy. I was the primary bad listener in Lacy’s life; Stephen was, at best, a supporting character in what was probably a long history of being ignored.

Lacy studied her nails, bright blue against the oak table. “He really wasn’t.”

Success.

Lacy and I spent another half hour at the coffee shop, then walked in the direction of our apartments together. She hugged me on the street corner where we had to split up. “You’re a really good friend,” she said. I actually felt her words inside of me, like tiny glass shards surrounding my lungs. I realized I had been totally numb for an indeterminable amount of time before she said that.

I didn’t like the apartment I lived in that year. It was already furnished, and the colour scheme was all beiges and greys. The air conditioning was loud, and would kick on just as you were about to fall asleep. The lock on the front door got stuck at the worst times. I lived with two other girls, and they were both sweet, but small things about them would upset me. One was the type of person who might throw a party and forget to tell you about it, so that when you came home from the library at midnight, you’d be unpleasantly surprised to find that you were now hosting twenty drunk acquaintances in costume. The other one liked to paint. There was nothing strange or troubling about this, but I hated it. It’s not that I wanted to paint, or even that I wished I had some sort of artistic talent. Being pre-med had simply caused me to hate people with creative outlets, especially when those outlets seemed to make them happier. I didn’t mind an artist, but only if they were deeply tortured by their work, and would spend their whole life in an agonizing and ultimately meaningless attempt to improve it.

What bothered me most about my roommates was that they were actually friends, which meant that they had both been able to bond with each other in a way I hadn’t bonded with either of them. I was never one of those people who needed to be close to their roommates, but their closeness seemed like a failure on my part, a signal that I might be one of those people who never forms meaningful relationships the way they’re supposed to.

When I got the lock unstuck, I found Charlie in my living room. “Violet let me in,” he said.

Charlie was a companion that year. It wasn’t suitable to call him a friend, because we often did things friends didn’t do, and he wasn’t as warm as a friend anyway. He wasn’t my boyfriend either. Lacy sometimes asked me why not. We were together often, she argued, he was plenty attractive, and neither of us had anyone else. Here was the distinction: when I came back to my place and found Charlie on the couch, he didn’t even look up at me. Often, when I was with male friends and their girlfriends walked in the room, they would rise to greet them, like suddenly they were in court and the judge had just shown up. I didn’t need that, but if he had looked up from his laptop, that would have said something.

I tried to remedy the confusion of my Charlie situation by not referring to him too often in conversation. When I did, I would never call him by name; instead, I’d call him my man of the month. Other women would laugh when I said it, but sometimes I worried that I sounded bitter and vain and would be better off if I just said the truth: that Charlie was a person who I regularly talked to and also had sex with, but we weren’t dating and I wasn’t in love with him and he didn’t love me either, so why we were together in this way I did not know. But Charlie had been the man of the month for the past four months, and I liked the idea that the friends who didn’t know him were under the impression that he was four separate men, some of whom may have actually wanted to be with me.

The real solution, of course, would have been to either get a new man of the month or cancel my subscription for a while. But even if he didn’t rise to greet me, it was a relief to come home and see Charlie. I found it easy to talk to him about my problems, because he never gave me pity. Instead, he made unhelpful suggestions while staring at his laptop.

I took off my shoes and sat next to him on the couch. “Do you remember your first day of college?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“What was it like?”

“Pretty much like every day after it.”

Charlie knew how to have a conversation, but he was only selectively good at it. This could make you feel as if you were bothering him, until you remembered that he was the one who had invited himself to your apartment.

“I think about this one moment from my first day all the time,” I confessed. “I was in organic chemistry, and at some point the professor asked how many of us were there because we were pre-med. A lot of people raised their hands, and then she looked around and said ‘You’re not all going to make it through med school. In fact, you’re not all even going to make it to med school.’ And I instantly thought, she isn’t talking about me. Like, of course not everyone who says they’re pre-med freshman year is actually going to graduate and become a doctor. But it didn’t occur to me for a long time that everyone else in the room was thinking the exact same thing. And some of those people really won’t finish med school. Some of them have already decided they’re not going.”

This last part should have been a comfort to me, but I got a sinking feeling every time I talked to someone who had successfully changed tracks. I felt like everyone I knew was looking through windows into the next room of their lives, while I was staring at a wall.

“Why does it matter?” Charlie asked. “Them not going to med school doesn’t mean you won’t.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He had been typing, but in a rare and profound gesture of affection, he turned his head and looked at me. “Sorry, what are you afraid of?”

“Going to med school.”

His gaze fell back to the screen, casting his face in a bluish glow. “I’m sure you’ll feel better once you get there.”

“Since when has being in med school ever made anyone feel better about anything?” I asked.

“Hm. Fair point. But you did choose it.”

“Yeah, when I was seventeen. Am I really supposed to spend the next five decades of my life doing something I picked eight years before my brain finished developing?”

“Not if you change tracks.”

“Yes, but . . .” I found myself staring at one of Violet’s paintings, a watercolour piece that I still remember. It was a blue-green bouquet of flowers hung against the beige wall. I couldn’t have told you if it was a good painting or not, but right then, looking at it made me want to cry.

“But what?” Charlie asked, oblivious to my moment with the painting. It was unusual, because I couldn’t remember the last time I cried without getting drunk first.

“I just have too much invested in pre-med, that’s all.”

“So thirty years from now, when someone asks you why you wanted to become a doctor, instead of being like the other doctors and saying you wanted to save lives or whatever, you’re going to say that after two and a half years of school, you had too much invested to change your mind?”

“Three years.” I was trying not to think too hard about the painting.

“What?”

“We’ve been in college for almost three years. Therefore, I have three years invested in pre-med.”

“And you have twenty-one years invested in making your life harder than it needs to be, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop. You just choose not to.” Every once in a while, Charlie would say something completely honest, and every time he did, I wanted to slap him. Unaware of the danger he was in, he kept going. “Changing your major isn’t that big of a deal. People do it all the time.”

That was true, but I still thought it was unfair coming from Charlie. Sometimes, I could see his whole life in front of me like a movie: he would have moderate satisfaction with a job he got paid a moderate salary to do, and he would come home every day in a moderately expensive tie to a moderately sized house and a moderately happy marriage.

“Honestly, Alyssa, it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t know why you haven’t done it already.”

And God help the woman he was married to. She would be the kind of person who eternally settles for the mediocre because it was the first thing that came along. And because of that, she would not only end up stuck with Charlie, but she would have a job she hated, a house with beige walls, and friends she half-ignored while drinking overpriced coffee.

She would be exactly like me.

The realization made me nauseous. I couldn’t see my own life as clearly as I could see Charlie’s, but I could see a long string of discontentment, begun somewhere in the distant past, leading all the way up into the haze of that forbidden pier we jump off of when we die. And it might follow me even then, because it was as much a part of me as my own body. For a moment, I wished there was a way for me to be separate from myself, for me to rip out the weeds of my own personhood and see what was left. Then it passed, and I just wished that Charlie would leave, so I lied and said I was having people over to study.

After he left, I went to my bedroom and lay on my purple comforter, staring at the popcorn ceiling. I had gone with my mother to pick out that comforter the summer after freshman year, before I moved into my first apartment. After, we went to a coffee shop. I felt unsteady whenever I thought about med school that summer, although I decided it was just because I wasn’t ready for it yet. (I don’t know when I thought I would be – late junior year?) The strange thing was, while we were having coffee, I almost told my mom about the unsteady feeling. There was no reason not to, and yet I let every silence slip away into one of my mother’s stories about the friends she had most recently seen, and their divorces, and how problematic their kids were. “Other people’s families are not like ours,” she said. “We’re very blessed.”

There was no reason not to tell her, because it was just a feeling, a feeling of unreadiness for something that was three years away anyway. But I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t even that she was happy I wanted to go to med school. It was that she wasn’t surprised. It was that of course I wasn’t a disappointment like Tiffany’s oldest daughter (who was pregnant again and still not married, not that it mattered, it was her life). It was that she had expected me to exceed expectations, and if she thought I had, who was I to take that away, even a little bit?

My room began slipping into the fast darkness of a winter sunset. I looked out the window, where the clouds were fading from pink to purple.

The best sunset I ever saw was on the night of my high school graduation. It came after nearly two hours in a packed auditorium, shifting in a poorly altered blue gown, waiting for my life to start. When it was time to go, I hugged a few close friends goodbye and made a quick exit with my family. I wouldn’t see most of the people I went to high school with again, and I knew it didn’t matter. I thought that made me mature. I thought it made me ready.

And then I walked out the doors of my high school for the last time, into the parking lot, and there was that sunset. It was early June, and it was late but the sky was still deep blue, changing to bright pink and orange along the horizon. The air was warm and lit by the first signs of fireflies. I felt newly alive, on the edge of everything. I fit perfectly between what had passed and what was to come.

We wanted to go out to eat, but all the restaurants were crowded, so we just went home. As it neared midnight, after my brother had gone to sleep, my dad came to my door with the keys to his Lexus in his hand. “Do you want to get ice cream?” he asked.

I said yes, and he tossed me his keys. They landed on the floor next to my bed, and I didn’t even reach to pick them up. I wasn’t allowed to drive the Lexus.

“You’re an adult now, aren’t you?” he said.

So that night, I drove his Lexus for the first time.

We ate in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen at aging red tables, my dad’s car parked on the faded asphalt. As we laughed about memories from when he coached my soccer team, I forgot things that I would remember in therapy. Like how he had faded in and out of my childhood, his presence defined by sudden bursts of energy, while my mom loomed over me like a giant. That was my life that summer, forgetting the past while looking into the future. It felt like all the stars in the world were out that night.

The light slipped away from the window in my apartment. I lay on my comforter in the darkness, thinking of Dairy Queens and Lexuses, then of finals and Charlie.

I wished I were free.

---

ON THURSDAY NIGHT, Charlie and I had dinner at our usual place. I hated that we had a usual place, like a married couple, but it was the only place he ever wanted to go, because it was the cheapest burger place in town that sold alcohol. Charlie didn’t usually get drunk, but he always wanted to be drinking. I knew that wasn’t healthy, but I couldn’t blame him for wanting a drink to get through a meal with me. I usually wanted one, too.

That night, we sat at a table by the window, looking out onto the rained-soaked street. It was a slow night inside the restaurant, and the quiet was making me uncomfortable. Charlie watched me salt my fries.

“You know there’s already salt on those, right?”

“I know, I just want more.” I put the salt shaker back on the table.

“You’re going to have high cholesterol someday.”

I swear, he must have tried to pick something different to be insufferable about every time we went out. “I’m pre-med. My cholesterol’s probably through the roof already.”

“Pretty ironic, if you think about it.”

I already had.

He took a drink. I was staring at the ring of water his glass left on the table until he set it back down. “Why don’t you have a new major yet?” he asked.

There was no point in lying. “My parents.”

“You know what you should do?”

I watched the condensation from his glass turn to water and run onto the wood of the table. “What?”

“Isolate them. Convince one of them it’s a good idea for you to change majors when you’re alone, and then they’ll help you bring the other one to your side.”

This was an idea with merit. I didn’t like it.

My mother’s job was only forty-five minutes away from my school, and every once in a while, she would drive over after work and meet me for coffee. I could picture the inevitable agony of trying to bring her to my side: we would stand in line, and the whole time I would study the menu, trying to pick something she would deem acceptable. When we got to the counter, I would just order what she ordered, and then I would offer to pay this time. She would get offended, somehow, and then we’d spend fifteen minutes arguing over whether or not it should be socially acceptable to buy the person who birthed and raised you a five dollar cup of coffee. I’d lose.

I’d lose, and she would have paid already, and it would be impossible for me to get the upper hand. It was like that with my mother; you would try to get her on your side, but by the time it was over, you would somehow be on her side, even though her side was against you. It was her superpower. I think it’s why she worked in pharmaceutical sales. If she wasn’t my mother, she would probably be selling me overpriced medication that I didn’t need, and I’d be thanking her for it.

“It couldn’t be my mom,” I told Charlie.

“So talk to your dad.”

This was less intimidating, although it was logistically more difficult than talking to my mother. “How?”

“I don’t know. Just call him and explain it.”

That wasn’t how my dad and I were with each other, though. I only talked to him when I was already on the phone with my mom, and lately, I only answered my mom’s calls when I had to. So it had been a while since I’d spoken to my dad. For better or worse, mothers are the source of everything.

To Charlie, I just said, “I don’t know if a phone call is the best way to tell him.”

“So text him. Are you finished with your fries?”

“No. And it would be kind of jarring for him to learn I’m changing my career plan from a text.”

He rolled his eyes. “Use your preferred method of communication, then. You haven’t touched your fries in ten minutes.”

I picked up a fry and dropped it right back into my basket. “Now I have.” He leaned back in his chair, waiting. We both knew I would give him my fries eventually. “I think my dad’s office still has a fax machine. Maybe I could send him a fax.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re going to send your dad a fax? Do you even know how to do that?”

“No. Do you?”

“Why would I know how to send a fax?”

“Because you were raised by your grandma. She probably remembers when it was exciting to be able to send a fax.”

“You want me to ask her?”

“It couldn’t hurt.” I slid my basket of fries across the table.

“Okay. I’ll send her a letter about it as soon as I can find a carrier pigeon.”

I wanted to take my fries back. Maybe for Charlie everything was equally easy to say. If his mother walked in the door, he could probably tell her to go to hell in the same tone he asked me to pass the ketchup.

I stood up. “I have to call Lacy.”

“Is she breaking up with that guy we met at Andrew’s place? The one who talked about hockey a lot? Name was Sam or Sean or . . .”

“Stephen.” Of course, the hockey guy. He really wasn’t the most attractive guy she ever dated, although now that I remembered, I could have thought of worse things to say about him. “No, they broke up. This is about a new guy.”

“Oh. Well, you can agree to go to their wedding, but maybe don’t buy a dress just yet.”

“How do you know it’s not going to work out? Maybe she and this guy will be perfect for each other. Maybe they’ll be one of the great love stories of our time, like those people from The Notebook or something.” I didn’t think that was true, but complaining about Lacy’s relationships was an activity I deserved to monopolize.

“You definitely haven’t seen The Notebook.”

“And you have?”

“Yeah. Freshman year, I dated a girl who made me watch it. It’s a terrible movie.”

I didn’t have an opinion on The Notebook before, but the fact that Charlie hated it was enough to tell me it was a cinematic masterpiece. “Pretty sure it’s a classic, but whatever. I actually have to call Lacy now.”

“Okay. Now, can you contact her a normal way, or do you need to borrow change for the pay phone or something?”

“As if I would borrow money from you. You would probably charge me fifty percent interest.”

He smiled. “Hey, fifty percent for pretty girls, seventy-five for everyone else. You’re getting a good deal.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re ridiculous.” Then I turned and left to call Lacy, smiling the whole way. He called me pretty.

---

I CALLED LACY IN THE HALLWAY by the bathrooms. She answered on the first ring.

“It was incredible,” she said. “He was so nice. And it wasn’t just for show or anything. He’s, like, a real gentleman. I mean, he pulled out my chair for me. Who does that?”

“I don’t know. Who?” I was thinking that, the way Lacy’s relationships were, he probably pulled out the chair for himself, and she sat in it before he could.

“Did I not tell you? Andrew Patterson. I was thinking,” Lacy began, like she was about to make a big announcement, “I was thinking, after we talked last week, that I need to start dating more mature guys. I mean, Stephen was fun, but he wasn’t exactly very deep. And that’s not what I should really be pursuing now, right?”

She wasn’t wrong, but Lacy had a realization like this after almost every breakup. Also, the difference between Andrew’s maturity level and Stephen’s was like the difference between off-white and cream.

“That’s great, Lacy, but aren’t Andrew and Stephen friends?”

“Well, I thought they were. But then Andrew and I started talking, and he said he’s never really been that close with Stephen anyway. So it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Of course he’d said that. Dating in college was like writing a resume – anyone would say anything, because the words you used weren’t really supposed to have meaning. If you could speak the language for long enough, you got what you wanted, and then you could let people find out who you actually were.

“I hope it’s not,” I began. “But did you think about why he might have said that?”

“Alyssa, it’s not a big deal. I mean, Stephen and I weren’t together that long anyway.”

Now she had perspective on Stephen. “I know you weren’t, but just be careful, okay? Not everyone has good intentions all the time.”

“I know that.” Her voice was hollow, like she wasn’t really listening. “I just want something like what you have.”

And what could that have been? A caffeine addiction? A pile of flashcards that weighed down her bag, full of terms she didn’t know? The promise of student debt for an education she wasn’t even sure she wanted anymore? This frozen feeling, an inability to express herself, with words or otherwise, even when she knew that something was wrong, maybe with the world, but also maybe just with her?

“Sorry, what do I have?”

“What you have with Charlie. I mean, I know you guys aren’t romantic or anything, but there’s something between you that looks so . . . easy. I want that.”

I had one of the moments, then, where you remember that the world doesn’t just exist from your point of view. That all this time, Lacy was out there viewing my relationship under a microscope the same way I was viewing hers. It made me question my own perception; maybe I had judged her love life too harshly, and she really did have something deeper with the guys she dated than I gave her credit for. Maybe she was just a hopeless romantic, lost in a world of hook-ups where the morning came all too fast and the lover you thought you had was just another boy who vanished when the initial thrill died.

In my thirties, I would pay two hundred dollars a month to learn to see the world this way. But at twenty-one, I let the moment end, and decided I was right again. Lacy was the type of person who thinks that they’re analyzing a hair under a microscope when it’s really just a crack in the lens.

“You shouldn’t be jealous of me and Charlie.” It felt wrong to try and explain it, something that should have been so obvious. Like if you’re asked to define a common word, and suddenly you can’t think of a way to describe it, you just know what it is. “Charlie and I . . .”

“Listen, I know he acts like he has commitment issues, but I really don’t think he does. I think he’s super committed to you, he just doesn’t want to say it.”

That would be Charlie, holding out in the simplest way, refusing to ever have less power than the other person. Business majors are always clinging to leverage like they’re on a sinking ship and it’s the last life vest, damning everyone who wasn’t shrewd enough to beat them to it. And that could’ve been the issue, only I didn’t know how to explain to Lacy that that was less than one-tenth the issue, and that most of the issues were divided in various increments between us, such that no one was to blame but our own twisted natures, and the fact that we had both chosen to further tangle them by getting involved with each other.

“But that’s the opposite of commitment. Commitment is saying that you want to be with someone.”

“I don’t know,” Lacy said. “I always thought love was more what you did than what you said. Like how Andrew pulled out my chair for me.”

I was leaning up against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. Wishing, as I often did back then, that I was somewhere else.

Lacy was still talking. “You can’t deny that you and Charlie have something.”

It was true, we did have something. But that didn’t mean I should have been with him. As unsexy as this sounds, I felt the same way about biology. I did choose it, I did halfway enjoy it on the good days, but that didn’t mean it was where the rest of my life was supposed to be. And I knew that, but it was hard to walk away.

I walked to the end of the hallway. Charlie was still at our table, my basket of fries lying empty in front of him. I knew he would be there until I said it was time to leave. He would complain about the length of the phone call, about my friendship with Lacy in general, probably about twenty other things on the way home, but he would be there.

I said what I rarely said to Lacy. “You’re right.”

“I’m not gonna do this forever, you know. Like, go on so many dates. One day I’ll find someone and I’ll never have another breakup, I swear. Or I won’t, and then I’ll figure out how to invest in the stock market so I can get rich and travel through Europe by myself. I know it feels like we’re never going to be out of school sometimes, but we will. And one day we’ll look back on all of this and it will make sense.”

I knew what she meant; our problems were so temporary back then. She was talking about her life, but I felt like she was saying it to make me feel better, and maybe to thank me for always listening to her talk about her breakups. If I had been a better friend, I would have told her I appreciated that. Instead, I said, “You don’t invest in the stock market.”

“Whatever. Like I said, I’ll figure it out later, if I end up single.”

Lacy didn’t end up single, by the way. I was in her wedding party, still single myself at that point, watching her say her vows from the sidelines. At the reception, she wanted to open the first bottle of champagne, only she didn’t know how to use a corkscrew. Her husband did, and we all waited while he tried to explain it to her. In the end, she got it. I don’t think he ever even touched the bottle.

---

AFTER DINNER, I went to Charlie’s apartment.

Charlie and I always had the best conversations after we slept together. It was as if whenever we were with each other, there was something unspoken between us, and after having sex, we had addressed it somehow, and we could finally just be two people talking.

I got dressed right after it was over. I never slept naked back then – it made me self-conscious. Charlie didn’t care as much, but I threw his clothes at him and he rolled his eyes at me before pulling on his shirt. It felt like a ceremonial gesture back then, one of our little routines that made being with him comfortable. Now I can see it as one of those signs that I wasn’t supposed to be with him.

When we were both dressed I climbed back under the covers. Charlie turned to me. “I used to think you would stop doing that one day. Before I knew how weird you are.”

I hit him with a pillow, which he tossed back to me. It fell from the bed and landed on the floor. “I’m sure other girls do it too. You just wouldn’t know.”

“I would, and they don’t.”

This didn’t surprise me. Anyone who knew Charlie knew he wasn’t boyfriend material. He’d been in casual relationships with plenty of other girls. I thought that this lowered the stakes of our relationship. When you trust someone, when you have expectations for them, it’s easy to be disappointed. Charlie couldn’t disappoint.

“What are the other girls you go out with like?”

He shook his head. “Alyssa . . .”

“What? I’m just curious. Like, do you have a type?”

There was a pause. “I don’t know.”

“Just tell me, like, if I went to a support group for girls who had dated you, would all the girls there be really similar?” I asked.

“This is psychotic.”

“It’s natural to be curious about your peers, actually.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Just tell me about the last girl you were with before we met. What was she like?”

He stared at the ceiling for a minute, like he was trying to find the perfect way to describe her. Finally, he said, “She was blonde.”

“That’s it? She didn’t have a personality or anything?”

“Yes, she had a personality. And she was actually nothing like you. I guess that means I don’t have a type.”

This didn’t bother me; I didn’t feel any particular way about it, which was another one of those little things. Those signs about our relationship disguised as something comfortable. It’s a lot more bearable to be with someone when you don’t hate the thought of them in love with someone else. It makes you feel less vulnerable, and I liked that at the time. I liked being in a relationship that didn’t ask anything of either person, even though that meant that it produced nothing except our little games, our cynical exchanges. My empty basket after he finished my fries. By my late twenties, I would want to be with someone who I could make a life with. But back then, I just wanted to escape the life I had.

I tried to picture a girl who was my opposite. “Was she emotionally stable or something?” I asked.

I was joking, but Charlie said, “Yeah. She really was.”

“Wait, seriously? What did you guys have in common?”

“Not much. I guess that’s why we broke up.”

I sat up now, intrigued. Charlie was still on his back, staring at the ceiling. “But what did you do with her? While you were together?”

“I don’t know, normal stuff. Went to movies. Had lunch together. That kind of thing.”

By then, I couldn’t remember the last time I had lunch at all, let alone with another person. “Wow. That’s, like, couple stuff.”

He turned to me then. “How?”

“Think about it. People get dinner on first dates, when they’re getting to know each other, because dinner is sexy. But lunch is just a meal. I mean, you don’t eat lunch with somebody unless you really like them.”

“Dinner is just a meal, too.”

“Not on dates, it’s not. Dinner is a means to an end. Asking to get lunch with someone, though . . . That’s practically begging to hang out with them.”

“It’s not that serious. Sometimes I would just go over to her apartment, and we’d have lunch while I was there. She made really good spinach wraps.”

Three meals a day, vegetables, apartments in the daytime. That sounded like real life, a life I didn’t have. I ate leftover fries over the sink at two in the morning, then regretted it, then wished that I didn’t. I never texted Charlie first before ten p.m. Yet there I was, in his bed, and this girl, who had no doubt been there before, was gone. “You ate spinach wraps with her?” I asked, replacing my shock with a forced kind of judgment. “That’s on a different level than what we were talking about before. That’s the kind of thing married couples do.”

“Why does everything have to mean something else with you? I don’t see why two people can’t eat spinach wraps together–”

“Are you listening to yourself?”

“–without there having to be some sort of label on it. A relationship isn’t made more or less significant by the number of random lunches people have together.”

“That’s exactly what makes a relationship significant.”

I had annoyed him now, my one specialty in our relationship. “I don’t know why girls are always saying stuff like that. If I had proposed to her or something, that would be significant. What we ate together–”

“You may as well have proposed, at that rate.”

He sat up then. “I swear, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who talks and talks without ever comprehending what they’re saying. If you did, you would have changed majors already. Instead, you say, I’m unhappy because I hate my major and do nothing about it. If you ever thought about–”

“Did you love her?”

It was quiet then, except for the hum of the radiator. “I don’t know,” Charlie said.

“Is that why she broke up with you?” I asked. I hoped my voice was gentle.

“I never said she broke up with me.”

“But is that what happened?”

“Yeah. More or less.”

Everything in the room felt very still then. We were both lying down again, about a foot apart. “If you love her,” I said, “or if you think you love her . . . then maybe you should go.”

He turned to me. “Alyssa,” he said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear him. “This is my apartment.”

We both laughed, a little longer than was necessary. When it passed I was staring at the ceiling. “Maybe I should go.”

“Yeah, if you want to.” I started to get up, and he got up, too. “I mean, you know I . . .”

I didn’t know, actually, but I let it pass. “It’s okay. I just don’t want to get in the way of whatever else might happen. And I have my own stuff. We all do.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And, you know, you’ll . . . you’ll work it out.”

I don’t know if Charlie went back to that girl or not. I don’t actually know anything about Charlie anymore. Sometimes I look back on that year and I see him, across a table from me, or parallel to me in bed, and then I see myself, walking on the cobbled sidewalk outside his apartment, away from him.

---

THE WALK HOME felt longer than usual. It was early spring, and the air had warmed enough for me to open my coat. I could hear little things around me, like the rustle of squirrels in trees or the sound of my footsteps on the sidewalk, that weren’t audible in the daytime. The glow of the streetlights washed out the stars, but wasn’t bright enough to erase them. I got to my apartment and pulled the key out of my bag. The lock didn’t stick this time.

One of my roommates was taking popcorn out of the microwave when I walked in. “Do you want to watch Mamma Mia?” she asked. I remember thinking that I had work to do for my classes, that I generally disliked musicals, that it was getting late. But that night felt like the death of something, something between me and Charlie, but also in myself. I didn’t want to be alone, so I watched Mamma Mia with my roommates. They made small jokes throughout the movie. I felt calm inside, if a little bit distant.

After, I went to my room and cried. I don’t remember thinking about anything in particular before it happened. I just sat down, on my purple comforter, and the tears came to me almost from nowhere. I felt that way when I had my daughter, this sense of everything coming out of nothing. That night at the bar felt suddenly like another lifetime, severed from me. I struggled to remember the last thing Charlie had said to me before I left his place. Something like, you’ll be okay. Go home, you’ll be okay.

---

THE NEXT MORNING I got in my car and drove.

It was an hour and a half. Once I got away from school it was a good drive, with big trees lining the highway. Winter had just ended, and the earth was waking up.

I was half hoping they wouldn’t be there, but they were. I think I knew they would be. I pulled up to our little brick house. Their two cars in the driveway. The oak front door closed between them and I, like the last line of defense. I knocked.

My mother answered, her face surprised, then smiling. “Come in. I was just about to make lunch.”

---