The Girls in Apartment 3

            There are no dreams here, not this deep. This deep there is only silence. For a moment, I lose track of where I am; of who and what I am. I can hear my heart beating so I must be alive. The silence becomes peaceful and I float along on it until I start to fall. My head drops first, leaving my neck and torso far, far behind. I don’t remember needing to breathe, but suddenly I need to. I gasp for air that won’t fill my lungs and the panic begins to set in. There will never be another moment but this one, and suddenly I know it’s true.

            My eyes snap open and the warm darkness floods around me. I’m not off in the ether somewhere; I’m in my old dorm room. My roommate sleeps five feet away, draped gracefully across her bed. A shock of blonde hair peaks out among the folds of her fluffy black comforter. The presence of another human being soothes me, and I relax back into sleep.

~

            The bouncers don’t know who they have, but a smile helps me evade the “No Sandals” rule. My roommate glides past, asking them their names and repeating them as though she has known them for years. I hear them, but forget them instantly. She holds out a manicured hand and two of the men reach for it. She steps inside, turns around, and says, “We’ll be back soon.”

            “We will?” I say. “I thought we were here to dance.”

            She laughs. “But it’s so early! We can dance later.”

            We descend into the underground bar and she walks more confidently than I do, even though I’m the one who has been here before. I stumble over ordering my drink, but feel better once the whiskey burns into my stomach.

            “Come on,” she says.

            “What? Where are we going?” I say.

            “Back upstairs.” She turns and marches across the room, drink in hand. She glances back over her shoulder and I hurry to catch up.

            It’s a slow night at the bar and the bouncers seem glad for the company.

            “What are y’all doing back up here?” one says.

            “We’re here to hang out with you guys,” she says. “What did you think we were doing, Chris?”

            The man is taken aback by her recall of his name. A smile takes over his face. She tries to step out into the night air.

            “Hold on, ladies,” one of the other bouncers says, “we can’t let you come outside with those glasses.”
            “Alright,” she says, and leans against the doorframe, “then we’ll stay here.”

            I take another sip of whiskey. Then I start to laugh.

            “What’s so funny?” the third bouncer says.

            “You,” I say, “all of you. Why do all of you need to be here? There are, like, three people inside.”

            The second bouncer stiffens and says, “Just wait until 10 or 10:30. It’ll get crazy then.”

            She looks at me. “Oh, we’ll be long gone. That’s way past our bedtime.”

            I fall into conversation with the third bouncer and insist that I could do his job. He looks at the empty line and laughs, offering me the stool he sits on. I prop myself up on it and cross my legs. The first bouncer ogles my breasts.

            “If we had ladies like you out front, we might get a few more customers,” he says.

            She brushes past him. “No jokes, Chris, this is serious,” she says. A couple passes the line, clearly uninterested in coming inside. “IDs?” she yells after them.

~

            The first time I see my college roommate she is the picture of tiny blonde frustration. I walk into the room that we both have already moved into, passing each other by a few hours, and see her hunched over her bed. Her right hand is wrapped around a remote control and she is staring at the television sitting two feet away.

            “It’s still not working!” she says to her father, who is full of energy mixed with mild irritation. Both he and our housemate see me come into the room.

            “Hi!” he says. “It’s so nice to meet you!”

            I shake his hand. “Um, you too,” I say. I look up at her expectantly.

            “I don’t know what else to do at this point,” she says, “I think we’re going to have to call CSC.”

            “Hi,” I say, stepping forward, “I’m your roommate. It’s nice to meet you!”
            Her eyes flicker from my enthusiastic smile to my awkward demeanor. “You too,” she says, and quickly shakes my hand. She mashes a few more buttons on the remote and says, “I just don’t know what to do!”

~

            It’s only Tuesday night and I’m already on the verge of tears. I walk into our room and can’t stifle the feelings that are crawling up from my skin.

            “Hey, how was—whoa, what happened to you?” she says.

            I throw my bag on the ground. “I don’t know what I did,” I say. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

            “Um, weren’t you at—I mean, didn’t you just come from bible study?” she says. I nod. “What happened?”

            I shake my head and cross my arms over my chest. “It’s not me.”

            “What’s not you?”

            “He said it would be me, but it’s not . . . it’s her.” She waits for me to complete my thought. “He chose someone else to lead this time . . . I couldn’t . . . I don’t know what I did . . .”
            She sits there on her bed and contemplates the shape of my brow. This is a role reversal for us. “Do you think you could ask him?”

            “What?”

            “Do you think you could ask him if there was something you could change? If you did something wrong?”

            I shrug and feel my bottom lip tremble. “I don’t know . . . Maybe. I just . . .”

            She takes a deep breath. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

            I wipe the tears from my eyes. “I don’t know,” I say. A few moments pass. Then I say, “I’m going to take a shower.”

            She nods.

            I take the longest shower of my life. The hot water scalds my skin but doesn’t let me forget the things that passed only a few hours before. I feel the betrayal like something has started eating at my intestines. I get out of the shower and towel off my body. Wrapping my hair up onto my head, I walk back into our bedroom to get my pajamas.

            My roommate’s blue eyes are wide and filled with tears. She’s clutching her phone to her ear. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I understand.” She nods her as though the person on the other end can see her. “Love you, too,” she whispers, and hangs up.

            “What—what was that?” I say.

            “It’s nothing, it’s not important,” she says, and shakes her head. Tears start rolling down her cheeks. “It’s just . . . I don’t know—it’s something with my boyfriend’s frat . . . I can’t . . .”
            I cross the space between us and hug her. We are not the hugging kind, but this moment feels important. We pull away and look at each other. Then she reaches for the handle of tequila we have left over from a night of partying.

            “If you take a pull, I’ll take a pull,” she says.

            I smile, grab the bottle, and put it to my lips.

~

            I’m back home for spring break and a Snapchat from my roommate pops up on my phone. I open it to see a low quality video of our housemate’s off-key singing. The video was shot around the door to our living room and our housemate has no idea. Ten seconds pass and then the video disappears from beneath my thumb. Then it only exists between us.

~

            It’s Halloween night and I have nowhere to go. Truthfully, I’m too sick to be out anywhere for more than an hour or two, so it doesn’t matter. But my roommate has an invitation and is trying to decide what to do. I know she wants an excuse to stay in, so we start talking about ways she could refuse. She picks up the scraps of poster we have left over from a doomed art project.

            “I can’t . . .” she writes in big block letters, “I’m busy.”

            Suddenly the stakes have been raised so I run to our room and grab a neon green trucker hat, a long brown wig, and some sunglasses. It takes us four tries to film her riding in on our housemate’s longboard, holding the sign and wearing the props, but we finally get it. I send the clip off to her friend.

            We then sit down at our kitchen table and spend the next two hours filming ourselves lip-synching to songs we have long outgrown. We never share the results with anyone, but it is one of the funnest nights of the year.

~

            I pull out of the parking garage and turn on my blinker. I have just left a particularly unsettling therapy session and I’m having trouble following my thoughts as they collapse into one another. My phone starts to ring. It’s my roommate. I slide my finger along the answer button and put it on speaker.

            “Hello?” I say, my voice tired and strained.

            “Hi!” the cheerful voice on the other end says. “Did you just get done with therapy?”

            “Yeah. I should be back soon.”

            “Do you want to maybe come home and go get frozen yogurt with me?” she says.

            I laugh and relief floods through my body. “Obviously,” I say. “When has the answer to that question ever been ‘no’?”

She laughs, too. “Good,” she says. “I’ll see you soon.”

~

            I’m sitting on my bed, staring at my computer and trying to distract myself from the feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know it yet, but in a month I’ll have my heart broken in this very spot by someone living 400 miles away. I hear the front door open and feel the shake of the apartment as it closes. I know from the pace of her steps that it is my roommate, just returned from class. I subconsciously track her movement as she makes her way upstairs to our room.

            “Hey,” I say when she appears, “how was your day?”

            “It was good,” she says. “Although I had a little thing with one of the other students in my class. This guy thinks he can correct me every time—“ She stops. “What’s wrong?” she says suddenly.

            “What?” I say. “What do you mean?”

            “You’ve been crying,” she says.

            “What? How do you know?” I say. “That was like two hours ago.”

            She shakes her head as if this is a silly question. She sits down on my bed. “Of course I know,” she says. “You’re one of my best friends. What’s wrong?”

            I shake my head. “Just thinking,” I say.

            “About . . .?” she says, and we both fill in the gap.

            I nod. “I don’t know why,” I say. “I don’t know why.”

            But she looks at me knowingly. “Because you think, maybe, things could have been different if you had met at another time.” It’s not a question. “It’s hard when you obviously have strong feelings for each other, and it still isn’t right. And then you have to leave. Of course you’re sad about that.”

            I nod. “I wish I wasn’t,” I say.

            “Me too,” she says. “It hurts my heart to see you sad. It makes me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

            I smile and say, “The bonded pair.”

            The light behind her eyes is joking, but her mouth is set in a serious line. “Libby, it’s real,” she says.

~

            I always thought I wanted to live alone, but I know better now. The difference is subtle and significant. It’s as though something in my DNA says it’s safer to live among numbers. I don’t notice this until my roommate leaves for the night and the emptiness becomes so palpable I have trouble sleeping. Humans weren’t meant to be so far apart; we cover our ears with our hands and call out to one another across the void.