Beneath The Skin(116)

“Sam,” she answers plainly, her voice two octaves lower than I was expecting.

Sam? Samantha, my roommate? Obviously. “When did you move in?” I ask, flabbergasted. “I … I’ve been asleep. I didn’t even hear you at all.”

“I didn’t really move in.”

I blink a few times in the semidarkness, waiting for more of an explanation. I don’t get one. I stretch my neck up a bit, scanning her side of the room only to find three books on her desk alongside an ancient brick of a laptop and a sad table lamp, the only source of light in the room other than the sunrise coming through the blinds and painting stripes of orange across the back of her head.

I wipe my eyes and stare. “You don’t even have sheets. You’re … You’re sleeping on the bare mattress.”

“It’s okay,” she decides, looking down at it. Her every movement is as slow as a sloth. She wears sweatpants and a loose shirt that looks scavenged from a charity donation bin. For half a second, I worry she is exactly that: a girl with cents in her pockets, here on the last scraps of money her parents could find. They had to put a second mortgage on the house to afford tuition. They sold their grandma’s ashes on eBay. She is her family’s last hope.

“So … we’re roommates,” I state unnecessarily.

“Yep.” She offers me an odd, straight line of her lips, almost like an apology, before returning to the book in her lap, a curtain of hair covering her face.

I stare at her for a while, still clutching the sheets to my neck. I’m pretty sure the worry is obvious on my face and she saw every bit of it. For as little emotion as she seems to show, I might never know whether I’ve offended her or not.

Well, she’s who I got. Might as well make the best of it. “So … you’re a Music major? What instrument do you play?”

Sam lifts her head again, drawing a curtain of her greasy hair behind her ear. “Piano.”

The girl sounds like a dude. She seriously sounds like a dude. “Oh. Don’t you need to practice?” I let my eyes do another scan of the room. “Did you bring, like, a little keyboard or something?”

“They have private piano-playing rooms at the Music building.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.”

“I wanted a Yamaha,” she admits, fiddling with the bent corner of a page in her book, “but my mom made me choose between paying for school or buying expensive electronics, and … well, I’m here, so …”

“Yes. Right. You’re … You’re here.”

An awkward silence settles between us once again. I put a smile into that silence. She glances sullenly through the window, stripes of the morning sun drawn across her plain face. Then she turns back to me, her eyes like two spots of mud. “And you are—”

“A Theatre major,” I finish for her, hugging my sheets tightly. “I’m Dessie.”

“I’m Sam,” she repeats, like I’d already forgotten.

And with that, Sam returns to reading, and I let myself lie back down, my eyes catching the time on the clock: not a minute past seven in the morning. That is decidedly too early to be awake, considering my first class isn’t until ten.

But try as I might, that damn dream of mine won’t resume where we left off.

I don’t understand what’s so special about one hot guy. Why am I finding myself so … obsessed with him? I’m on a campus full of countless good-looking guys. Engineers. Artists. Architects. Singers. Other actors. Why am I so focused on the one guy who wouldn’t bother to turn and acknowledge my existence, even when I was talking directly to him?

A half hour passes. I can’t seem to hear anything but the quiet turning of pages.

Another half hour, and that lamp seems brighter than the sun at noon, somehow blinding me through my clenched-shut eyelids. Or maybe it’s the actual sun.

When I give up and rise at half past eight, I feel like I got approximately zero hours of sleep. My head spins and a queasiness settles into my stomach. Why do I instantly want to blame mister hot-shit from the mixer for my lack of rest?

I help myself to a morning shower. Even with all the soap and the slipperiness and the assumption of privacy, I’m too distracted with what diseases my feet might be picking up to revive the morning’s dream. Mental note: purchase some flip-flops for the shower. I keep hitting my elbows against the wall every time I turn. The room steams up in a matter of five seconds.

I can’t even sing as I like to do in the shower, not when I know an entire hallway of boys and girls will hear me. I try to hum and even that miniscule hint of melody feels amplified to the point of vibrating the tiled walls. I feel utterly silenced when I want to sing.