It took me a long time to sleep that night, despite all the alcohol I was saturated with, and which made the room spin whenever I tried to lie down. Undressed, with my make-up only half-removed (and most of that washed off by crying) I tried very hard to sleep, but even with my foot on the floor to stop the spinning, I wasn't able to black out and just forget it all. I kept thinking about him, and about how it had felt to dance with him. 

Maria knocked at around eleven whilst I was still lying with the light on. She stuck her head round the door with her black hair all tangly and her pyjamas on, and I wondered whether Luke had only just left. But it was nice to see her alone, without him. It didn't happen all that often, so I asked her in and sat up for a while.

She came and perched on the bed, her legs drawn up, and rested her chin on them. She had a kind of rabbit cuteness that made me want to hug her, too. But I told myself off inside for being a sad, lonely old spinster. Human contact wasn't everything. 

"So. How was it?" 

She'd spared a few minutes to tell me how great I looked earlier in the evening, which I'd appreciated. But I realised she was now expecting me to have hooked up with someone, or at least flirted with someone. I couldn't admit to that right now.

"It was fine," I said, with a slight shrug. "I talked math and biochemistry with a few people, and then knocked into some people trying to dance."

"No gossip?"

She looked up at me, a little bit sneakily. I wondered if she knew, somehow. Had someone called her up to tell her about how I'd danced with Joe-Moe? There was nobody there that I knew from her circles, but that didn't mean there wasn't someone there who knew her.

I shook my head at her. She might be giving me a meaningful look, but I was good at keeping all my feelings quiet. 

"I drank about four times the amount of wine I should have," I said. "But that's about it."

"OK." She sighed, and seemed to take me at my word. "I hate it when there's no gossip."

"I keep meaning to ask how long you're staying up for," I said, changing the subject quite deliberately. "Are you going to be here after the semester?"

"Oh yeah," she said, suddenly enthused. "I'm here for five days, and then my family are taking me ski-ing. I haven't been in two years, and I'm going to be useless, but I love it even when I swallow more snow than I ski over."

"That sounds great," I said, and realised it meant I'd have the house to myself for a full week before I went home to spend the festive season with my family. In any other mood, I'd have been looking forward to it. But right now, it sounded lonely. 

"How about you?" she asked, nudging me with her toe. "Are you going anywhere cool?"

"Ahh, that'd be a no. My programming project needs the computer lab. I'm going to be lucky to get it done by the twenty-fourth."

"Couldn't your step-dad just buy you your own computer lab?" she asked.

"He probably could. But I wouldn't let him."

Maria gave a huge, drowsy yawn, and then stood and shuffled to the door. 

"Sleep well, Cinderella," she said.

"Up yours, Pocahontas."

Maria laughed and closed the door behind her. 

I missed Maria. I mean, not just when she left the room. That would be weird. But how it was before she and Luke paired up. The time when we were the best of friends, and only left each other to sleep or go to class. I missed how laid-back she was, and how much we could make each other laugh. 

I looked over at my phone. I was willing to bet my Mom would be happy to take a call from me. I'd bet, if she remembered it around her own pretty hectic life, that she would want to know how the dinner had gone. But the things she'd want to know were exactly the things I couldn't talk about. Things like whether I'd met anyone nice (debatable) and interesting (unfortunately, that was a yes) and whether I'd danced with anyone (which wasn't exactly dancing, but was definitely touching, and enjoying it, and I wondered if he'd ended up dancing with anyone else and I hoped-so-hoped-not, tried not to think about banging his head together with the head of any girl he decided to dance with...)

"Ahhh, stop it," I said to myself, and buried my head under a pillow. About an hour later, I gave up and rooted out two fresh cryptic crosswords from the pile of newspapers under my desk.

I have a secret passion for crosswords. They're like work, only not. I can lose myself in them, not seeing the words as words, but as signs and clues. 

It worked pretty well in the end. After working my way through eight clues, I fell asleep. At least, I assume I did. I woke up at nine with my face pressed on the letters and their reverse images smudged onto my cheek.

It was impossible to sit still that day, and I didn't even have any work to do. I'd spent so much of the past week burying myself in it to convince myself I wasn't lonely that there was nothing left undone except the upcoming project, and I had to wait for my tutor to give final approval of my title. I'd even done the corrections on my awful paper of the previous week, which Professor Lang hadn't actually been all that disappointed in. 

So I needed something to do, and given that it was a fine if breezy day with no snow on the ground, that something was going to have to be cycling.

I used up a good hour eating breakfast, locating my kit and making myself lunch to take along in my panniers. After I thought I was ready, I realised I'd better take waterproof trousers and my really thick high vis jacket in case it got wet later. 

And then, with a feeling like leaving everything that was difficult behind, I wheeled my bike out of the car-port and joined the moderate traffic leading over the river. 

It took fifteen miles to get my brain to shut up. Every cyclist coming the other way looked like Joe-Moe today, which set my heart pounding every time. Sometimes, when they got closer, they turned out to be women, which just went to show what an idiot I was being. 

By the time I reached the quieter roads beyond Medford, though, my heart was having to work hard enough on its own to keep that from happening. A moderate hangover makes cycling about fifty percent harder over the long haul, and I started to zone into the rhythm of pedalling. I focused on being efficient; on engaging my abdominal muscles; on keeping a consistent pressure throughout each cycle of the pedals; on using my hamstrings and my quads equally. Little by little, I was leaving all those confused, exciting and painful thoughts behind and being nothing more than a girl on a bike.

I looped up through pretty Lexington and then struck out towards the Howard Parker. It's probably my favourite place close to Campus, a state forest where you can disappear down trails that skirt round lakes and glades. I didn't stop once in the three hours it took me to get there, and by the time I did, I was tired enough to need a really long break.

I took lunch on some of the smooth grey rocks that tumble towards one of the waters, and then lay back on them and rested. Even with my extra layers put on, it was a little chilly until I added the high vis jacket. It was one of those times it would be better to keep going and not cool off, but it was easier just then to lie back and let the end of the hangover drift away.

After being so good for three hours, I figured I had this whole Joe thing nailed. I didn't need to think about him - I just needed to do the things that made me feel good and I could forget about it all. 

It was only whilst idly thinking about how it would feel to work in Comms at Nasa that I realised I was imagining all the astronauts with slow, dangerous smiles and messy hair. And then after that, it got confused as I became an astronaut myself, and Joe and I were alone in a space station, miles from anywhere, drifting closer and closer together in the endless cold of space. 

I woke up in near-darkness with a shock. I was freezing cold, and realised I had been shivering in my dreams for a while. I staggered to my feet, stiffly, and went to get more of my kit out before realising I was already wearing all of it. 

And then I realised something a lot, lot worse. My lovely slimline back wheel was sitting on a totally flat tyre, visible as a useless slug underneath it even in the twilight.

"Shit," I said. "Shit, shit, shit."

I knew as soon as I saw it that I hadn't brought my puncture repair kit. I'd gotten so used to the expensive new tyres Fernando had bought me earlier in the year that I'd started to assume punctures no longer happened. 

"What were you thinking?" I asked myself, and threw my bike down in a full-on rage. This was not the time or the place to be without a bike. I'd seen three people in all my time in the park, and I was twenty-five miles from home, without a wallet. 

It was one of those situations that tests your desire to be independent. It's something I've always prided myself on, the ability to get out of things on my own, without needing to ask for help. But then there's being freezing cold, and grittily tired and hungover, in the middle of nowhere without the means to get yourself out of it.

I picked my bike up again, apologised to it for throwing it in the first place, and pulled out my phone to dial my Mom. I started walking as I went, and couldn't help looking around me every few yards to see if there was anyone trying to sneak up on me. 

There was no answer: not from her or from Fernando. I tried Maria after that, but it was the same story, and Fiona was evidently too busy with the new love of her life to pick up too. Which left me just about out of options. 

In desperation, I tried Brad (whose number I'd failed to delete when we broke up) and then everyone else over again when he didn't reply either. By then I was almost at the edge of the park, and coming up on the long, straight road back to Boston. 

I looked up down the long length towards Boston, and then back up it. There were a few cars coming my way, spaced-out up the rise. I was almost as nervous of who might be in them as I was of being on my own.

I unlocked my phone again, thinking that there had to be a bus. I started walking, anyway, and was alarmed to find that my teeth were actually clacking together as I shivered. It must have turned into a colder night than I'd thought. 

The first car swished by me, brightening and then darkening my little world for a moment. I had only a little signal on my cellphone, enough that it took about a minute to load a page with the Boston area bus routes on. 

I'd almost got there when I heard the second car. I moved further in off the road, and then looked up at it as I realised that the engine was slowing.

Please don't be some kind of weirdo, I thought. I just need to get home. 

It pulled up a little way in front of me, the rear red lights slightly dusty. The door opened with a squeak, and a voice called out of it, "Are you ok?"

It wasn't just some kind of weirdo. It was worse: it was Joe-Moe.