Someone was shaking my shoulder.

I rolled over, pressing my face to the mattress. The words Go away may have left my lips, or maybe I only imagined saying them. After a moment, the shaking stopped. I was blessed with three seconds of peace before the person yanked me upright. "Wake up!"

I opened my eyes and blinked a few times at the girl standing over me, strands of brown hair from her ponytail slipping over her shoulders. "Meg?"

"You need to leave now," she hissed, trying to pull me towards the side of the bed. "My grandma will be home any minute."

Shit. I'd forgotten about her. The woman whose pills Rolph had stolen. I hoped she would be alright without them.

"Come on," Meg insisted, her voice high-pitched. "You're one of the few people that can actually walk out of here, so please just make my life a little easier, please?"

"Fine," I grumbled. "I'm going." I looked behind me, for some reason expecting Michael to be still lying in bed. "Hey, what happened to-"

"Yeah, he did the same thing to me," she muttered. "You'll get used to it."

I narrowed my eyes. "What?"

She sighed loudly and leaned back on the wall, folding her arms. "He was gone when I woke up."

It felt like my brain was in slow-mode. I stared at her for a second, blinking. "Wait... when you woke up?"

"Yeah. Did you not... oh, wow. This is awkward. Um-"

"You guys fucked?" I said, like an eight-year-old just figuring out how their parents made them. "Last night?"

"It was weird," she said. "It's like four in the morning and he comes stumbling down to the couch and starts drinking, like, buckets of alcohol. Of course, I'm there, with all my beauty and charm, and boom. We're talking and talking, and then he's fucking me on the couch."

I felt nauseous just thinking about it. Which I couldn't afford to do, because I was supposed to be hightailing it out of her house. I was very thankful I had made the decision to put some underwear on last night. Being completely naked in front of Meg did not sound like a fun time.

I slowly swung my feet to the ground, one hand on my lower back like an old man without a cane. "Fuck," I mumbled.

"First time?" Meg guessed.

I looked up, my gaze smoldering. "Do you have to be here?"

"Nope." She walked to the door and then turned. "Look, I know you hate me because you think I'm your competition or something, but trust me. I don't care. I'm seeing a guy right now, and he treats me a hell of a lot better than Michael. So if you don't mind, I'd like to just pretend last night ever happened."

I felt hollow inside. "Sure, whatever. I'm seeing someone too, so... let's forget it." It took every bit of strength to mask the hurt and force my tone to be causal. Blasé. She didn't care. I didn't care. Everyone was like this. Everyone got drunk and fucked someone. It meant nothing.

When she was gone, I dressed slowly. I was in pain, and I felt incredibly alone and ashamed of this pain, like there was nobody in the world who would understand, nobody who I could talk to about it. I couldn't blame what happened last night on being drunk - I was fully in control of my actions. And yet I felt like I'd been tricked somehow. Robbed of something.

Downstairs, the bathroom door was ajar. I gave a quick knock after seeing a flash of movement inside. "Yeah?" a female voice asked.

I opened the door to see a girl leaning over the counter, squishing her eyelashes with some metal torture-device-looking instrument. She was wearing a gray hoodie and a bright red thong, the only thing on her lower half.

I waddled my way in and cleared my throat. "I need to pee."

"Okay," she said, then moved over to do whatever she'd been doing to her other eye.

I didn't look at her while I relieved myself, because that was sort of weird, and what if she happened to look at me and we made some super awkward eye contact?

Meg was standing in the hallway when I walked out to the living room, holding her phone in her hand and chewing absent-mindedly on her nail. "My grandma just texted me," she whispered. "Well, sort of. She doesn't really know how to text. She's two minutes away."

"Do you, um..." I paused, scratching the back of my head. "Do you want me to stay and, like, help clean? I could just say I'm your friend that stayed over."

Her eyes widened. "No, no, she'd never believe that. She'd probably make you stay for brunch and talk about the wedding."

On my way out, I paused by the couch and picked up the red Solo cup Michael had drank from. "I'll throw this out."

She narrowed her eyes. "Is that a peace offering?"

I shrugged.

"I'll probably see you again," she told me as she fidgeted on her feet. "If you hang out with Michael a lot. He's over here all the time." She chewed on her lip a little. "And just so you know, the whole threesome thing, I'm really not into that."

"Yeah, me either," I said. "Hey, I hope it works out with your grandma."

"Thanks."

The sun was bright outside, in the middle of the sky, so I guessed it must be close to noon. I instinctually moved my hand to my back pocket for my phone, then remembered I'd lost it.

I decided to go to the park. I had no clue if Rhoda would be there, but even if she wasn't, I could always sit and take a break and stare at clouds for a while.

I hiked uphill until I reached the grassy field and smiled as I spotted a familiar feminine shape sitting alone, a black Sharpie in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I walked up to her silently, her eyes flicking up to mine as I sat down.

"Hey. Hope I'm not intruding. I had some time to kill before class."

She didn't react at all, just kept looking down at the open notebook she had beside her, making the tips of her wavy hair touch my cheek. "How are you?"

"Horrible." I choked out a laugh, hoping it would soften the abject misery in my voice.

"You should start smoking," she said after a drag of her cigarette. "Smoking helps everything. It also gives you cancer, but who cares. I'm fucking addicted."

I laughed again, more genuinely this time, then gratefully complied when she gestured for me to sit. Her pastel pink skirt ruffled gently in the breeze and circled around the white sneakers she wore. My own sense of fashion consisted of three alternating t-shirts I wore, depending on which was clean, and a few pairs of the same light-wash baggy jeans. Maybe because of this, I was impressed with her outfit choices every time I saw her, always a slightly different look but embodying a concise personal style.

"So what are you doing?" I asked.

"Well, I was trying to study," she muttered around the cigarette. "But I suck at school. The only thing I'm good at is geometry and that's just because in eleventh grade my geometry teacher was hot and I used to fail everything on purpose so I could stay and get extra help."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. I could probably be a kick-ass architect or something. Can I draw on you?"

She gestured with the Sharpie and took my hand before I could reply. A wide, crooked heart appeared on my wrist above a scribble where she signed her name. I took the opportunity to study her. Brown eyes almost amber in the light, framed by thick eyeliner and dark lashes curling up from half-closed lids.

"Do you always draw out here?" I asked, eyes drifting to the notebook of doodles, some half-erased, overlapping one another.

"I draw. I listen to music. Have a smoke. Pretend I'm the pretentious main character in an art film." She let go of my hand. "It gets boring, though. I could use the company."

I lay back, shielding my eyes from the sun. "Yeah, I wouldn't mind company myself." I had meant to sound casual, as I meant everything to sound, but my voice wobbled and suddenly I felt moments away from breaking down.

She sensed this. "What's wrong? You said things were horrible?"

I shook my head. "It's nothing. I'll be fine." But even as I said this, I was tempted to tell her, just tell someone, to get this off my chest.

"Well, I'm in school to be a therapist," Rhoda said. "I've been told I don't have the right personality to be one. I'm too blunt and off-putting. So maybe you can tell me your problems and this will be my practice."

Despite feeling vaguely like Charlie Brown consulting Lucy, I started rambling. "I guess I'm feeling out of place. I know that's normal at college, but everyone here is so weird, or maybe I'm the weird one. But everyone seems the same. And I think I'm, like... falling in love with someone... I couldn't tell you why, I don't understand it..."

"Does she feel the same way?" Rhoda asked.

"I don't think so. I don't know. I just don't think we'll ever be together."

She leaned back a little, and the sun made a glare on her glasses. "Why don't you ask?"

I sniffed. "'Cuz I don't wanna make it seem like I caught feelings when he- she- fuck. Fuck."

"Hey," she whispered, placing her hand over mine softly. "It's okay." I stared at her, trying to force away the tears welling up in my eyes. "Can I give you a hug?" she asked. "You look like you need a hug."

I nodded pitifully and stayed still, so she got up and crawled over until we were close enough that I could wrap my arms around her and press my cheek to her hair.

"Talk to him," Rhoda said. "Anyone would be seriously lucky to have you."

I looked up. "Really?"

"Yeah," she said, almost shyly. She brushed her hand slowly through my hair, which felt really nice with her long nails. "I mean, I would totally date you. But I take it this means you don't want to."

I closed my eyes for a second. "I wish I did."

We were silent for a while, me looking up at the clouds and her out at the grass. I reached over and picked a tiny flower that was next to me, identical to the one she'd been playing with the day we first came here.

I looked down and then lifted it, offering it to her. She smiled.

"Flowers aren't really my thing," I said. "But Michael gives them to girls when he's trying to win them over."

"Michael? Isn't that the guy you punched in the parking lot?"

"Yeah," I muttered. "He's also the guy I like."

She widened her eyes. "Wait. Did you like him before or after the fistfight?"

"Before," I admitted quietly.

"So you liked him when we-"

"Rhoda, look," I interrupted, sitting back up. "It's not that I don't like you. I had sex with a girl last night and I'm never even gonna talk to her again. Sex is irrelevant. You're one of the only people I like to hang out with. And I just sort of... told you my biggest secret in the whole world."

"Okay." She said this calmly, her brow furrowed in slow understanding. "Okay. I'm not jealous. I'm just trying to get the full picture here." She took a drag of her cigarette like a detective in an old movie. "So, you like me as a friend, and him romantically. And the sexual stuff is an entirely different category."

Romantically. What was romantic? Candlelit dinners and holding hands in a park sounded romantic. Kissing in the backseat at a drive-in theater sounded romantic. Nothing Michael and I had done sounded romantic. I wondered if I was capable of romance.

"Sure," I offered weakly.

"Okay. I can work with that." After a pause of thoughtful silence, she pulled up her phone and started typing something, brows still pinched. "Do you consider yourself gay? Bisexual? Pansexual? Maybe you're homoromantic. Have you done a sexuality test? Wouldn't recommend - they're terrible and very outdated."

"No-" The onslaught of words left me confused and frustrated. "No, I've never done a sexuality test."

"My brother's gay," she said. "My whole family always figured, but no one said anything until he finally came out. I mean, he wanted to go as Madonna for Halloween when we were, like, nine. Anyway, it was this unspoken thing for a while. There were times I wanted to go up to him and say, bro, just say it already, no one's gonna care, but... I realized it wasn't really about that."

"What was it about?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Him, I guess, not us. Him being comfortable enough with himself and everyone else to talk about it."

"So it's noticeable? Like, you can tell when someone's..." I trailed off. "Do you think I look gay?"

"I don't know. I try not to assume. Maybe you swing both ways. I'm kind of like that. I don't really put a label on it. Not anymore, I mean. I cycled through a few of them over the years. Bi, pan. I couldn't really decide. So I just. Am. I guess."

"Wait so, you'd hook up with a girl?" I asked.

"I mean... yeah. Why not?" She smiled playfully. "But honestly, it's not something I think about every day. I guess that's how me and Milo are different. Like, for him, being gay is a huge part of who he is. Because it really affected his life growing up. But for me, it's always felt pretty normal. Besides, he did all the work for me, coming out to our parents. Then when I did, they were just like, oh, our other kid's gay too. So I had it easier."

I sat in silence, taking in her words. The way Rhoda described it, maybe liking Michael wasn't the insane, life-altering event I'd thought it was.

"What I'm trying to say is, everyone's different." She picked another flower and placed it on my open palm. It felt like a gift, this new perspective I'd never heard.

"I think I'm more like you," I decided. "Or at least... I want to be like you."

"Hell yeah. Be like me. I'm awesome." That made me laugh. She leaned over and knocked my shoulder. "I'm gonna have to start charging for therapy sessions though. Being in college ain't cheap."