Asking Around

Marcie

My heart hammers so loudly I can barely hear myself ask, “The new photographer?”

“Yeah, Ben something.” Heather drops her keys on the hall table along with a small pile of envelopes, likely bills.

Oh, god. Oh, fuck. My feet move without my command, dragging me closer to Heather. Her blonde hair in its usual high ponytail shines in the summer sun. I try to focus on that, to ground myself. My ribs feel like they’re caving in.

“What did he say?” I manage.

“Well, he thinks you’re cute.” Heather furrows her eyebrows and takes a step back. “He’s helping out in one of your classes, right?”

Heather doesn’t know about my institutionalization. She wasn’t on campus yet. And, god, I’d like to keep it that way. I need one person on campus who knows me and doesn’t look at me like I’m about to crack. Deep breaths, Marcie.

“Yes.” I take another step back that I hope doesn’t look robotic and drop my laptop on the table. “How did he find you?”

That seems to put her a little more at ease. She saunters into the kitchen and begins pulling out the kettle for tea. I watch her through the breakfast bar and try not to seem like I’m about to explode.

“Oh, he basically stumbled into the office in a daze, and Steph asked him,” she says. “And then apparently Danny, which I couldn’t explain with a gun to my head.”

I nod. She needs to go faster. I need to be normal.

“Anyway, Steph and Danny told him I was your roommate, so he came to me.” She pours water into the kettle, plugs it in, and turns around. “He wanted to know if you wanted to go out sometime.”

Ben’s hair is the same color as Ryan’s. Ben’s smile is the same smile as Ryan’s. Ben has a million pictures of women who look exactly like me. Maybe Ryan survived, and he knows what I—”

“What did he say?” I blurt.

Heather raises a perfectly arched eyebrow. “That he wanted to go out.”

“No, like exactly.” I pick at the skin around my thumbnail where she can’t see. Should I giggle? Normal girls giggle when a guy likes them. I force a laugh, and it comes out sounding like I’m insane.

“You know, I thought he was cute, but I didn’t expect you to turn yourself inside out like this.” Heather laughs and grabs another mug. “I’m making you chamomile. You need to chill.”

She thinks I like him. Is that good? Should I correct her?

She turns back before I decide. “I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he was really sweet. Kind of awkward. He barely met my eyes, and he started across the room to talk to me like three times before he actually made it.”

Ryan was confident. He had no problem approaching people. But I haven’t seen Ryan in six years.

Because Ryan is dead, the Dana-voice in my head reminds me.

I nod and pick up the mail to give my hands something other to do than tearing my hangnails to shreds. Magazine for Heather. Bill for me. Bill for Heather. And at the bottom of the pile, a piece of spam mail clearly bearing the name Lily Nelson. My heart skips a beat.

“He called me Marcie?” I ask. “Like, without fumbling?”

Heather blinks a few times. “Uh, yeah? Why? I think he got your name from the class list.”

He called me Marcie. Not Lily. My heart rate starts to slow. When I finally got released from the institution and started rejoining the living world, I returned to just about a million messages across my various social media platforms. Condolences for Ryan, for being locked up. More than enough messages asking if I saw something that night that “drove me crazy.” I ran into Dana’s office on a day we didn’t have an appointment, sobbing, and told her I couldn’t be Lily Nelson anymore. I wanted to be dead. But Dana pointed out I could just delete my accounts and change my name. Starting fresh was often smart after a trauma. So I deleted everything, smashed my old phone, filed a bunch of paperwork, and left Lily in the past where she belonged.

I’m Marcie because Ryan only knew Lily.

The kettle pops. Heather pours two mugs of tea and sets them on the breakfast bar between us.

“So, should I tell him you’re interested? It might be good for you to have a boyfriend. Get you out of the apartment a little more.” Heather grins. “Oh my god, you can double with Everett and me!”

“No,” I say sharply.

Heather flinches back a little. “I thought—”

“I’m not interested.” Even if he’s not Ryan—and he’s not, he can’t be, it’s not possible—I could never go out with Ben. I don’t even know if I can see him again. “I never will be. Tell him to back off.”

“Whoa.” Heather fiddles with her teabag. “Should I, like, tell other people to stay away? Am I missing part of the story?”

If he’s not Ryan, I don’t want to ruin his life. I shake my head. “He just… gives me the creeps.”

“Noted.” She nods. “Maybe I’ll warn Steph anyway. He did go up to her first. Did he, like, say anything or…?”

“I want to talk about something else.” I gnaw on my lip. “Please.”

“No problem. God, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.” She shakes her head. “Trust me, I have plenty to talk about. So, you know how excited I was to work with Mrs. Mathers?”

I nod. She spent almost all summer gushing about the head editor of the Arkly and what a dream learning from her would be.

“Well, it turns out she fucking quit the week before classes started.” Heather yanks the teabag out of her cup and drops it immediately in the trash. “So we’ve got this new guy, Scott.” She says his name like it’s poison. “He wants us to call him Mr. Daugherty, but there’s no way I’m doing that.”

“That bad already?” I ask, trying to hold onto the normalcy of this conversation instead of letting my mind wander.

“I can’t even begin to explain.” Heather rolls her eyes luxuriously. She’s really good at it, somehow. “It’s like he literally doesn’t even see the writers. I got chucked this assignment, which I’m really fucking grateful for, but he took my photographer into his office to have a whole conversation about his ‘angle’ for the piece. Kel literally had to leave the meeting and come out and tell me the whole thing.”

I grimace supportively and fiddle with my own tea. I only have to make a few listening noises for Heather to keep going, which is one of my favorite things about her. It’s not that she doesn’t care about me—I think she does, in her own way—but she’s a nonstop conversation machine powered by “mm-hmms.” After Scott, she tells me about the weird power dynamic between juniors and seniors on the paper, as well as how crazy it is to work with real adults for the first time. I don’t mention that I’ve done that with my summer job at one of the cafes in town. Heather’s parents help out with tuition, so she spent the summer volunteering with a few other kids on a paper they were writing, editing, and publishing themselves. The spam letter for Lily taunts me from the pile of discarded mail. My mom would probably help out with tuition if I asked her. But I cut her off with everyone else in the great phone-smashing. Marcie’s parents are on a sailboat trip around the world with no cell reception. It’s easier this way.

By the time Heather moves onto what her assignment actually is, I almost feel normal, and my tea is brutally over-steeped. I pull out the bag and lean over the breakfast bar to drop it in the trash next to hers. She smiles sheepishly.

“The universal Marcie signal for homework you really need to get to?”

I nod. “But I hope Scott pulls his head out of his ass soon.”

“Thanks.” She rolls her eyes again like she’s not hopeful. “But, oh my god, I completely forgot. How was the first day of your first full semester?”

I wander over to the table where I left my laptop, turning the question over in my head. “Remains to be seen, I think.”