GABBY
By the time Ryan dropped her in front of Shay’s dorm building, the general anxiety that had been simmering behind her breastbone all day had flared up into something immediate and unignorable; Gabby tried to take a deep breath. Sometimes her panic felt like a stranger handing her a screaming baby and then walking blithely away: She didn’t want it. She couldn’t control it. And her guess was as good as anybody else’s about what would make it stop.
Here! she texted, glancing nervously around the lobby. It looked like a fancy apartment, with a bank of elevators and a reception desk and swarms of college kids rushing across the marble tile in a blur of scarves and boots and slouchy wool hats that somehow hung effortlessly off the very back of people’s heads without ever slipping off. Gabby jammed her hands in the pockets of her parka, feeling like she might as well be wearing a sign around her neck that said Embarrassing High Schooler from the Suburbs. She hovered near the revolving door and stared studiously down at her sneakers, trying not to get in anyone’s way.
Be right down! Shay texted back after what felt like an eternity. Gabby let out a breath.
It was an even longer, more uncomfortable age before Shay finally appeared in the lobby, wearing jeans and a pale gray T-shirt that showed off her collarbones, her long hair in a braid over one shoulder. “Well hey,” she said, planting a kiss on Gabby’s mouth, smiling. Then she pulled back and frowned. “Are you okay?”
“Yup!” Gabby lied. The last thing she wanted was to be showing up on her girlfriend’s college doorstep smack in the middle of a panicker. She thought maybe if she could act like it wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t be. “I’m great. Really happy to see you.”
“Me too.” Shay grinned as she led Gabby up a flight of narrow stairs and down a cinderblock hallway, waving or saying hi to almost everyone they passed. “I have a million things planned for while you’re here.”
Gabby’s eyes widened. “You do?”
“I do,” Shay said, stopping in front of a door festooned with a giant construction-paper heart reading Shay and Adria and letting them inside. “Some things before others, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Gabby looked around hungrily at the twin sets of university-issue furniture, the Christmas lights strung up above the windows. It looked so different from Shay’s room at home—the fact that it was a dorm, obviously, but it wasn’t just that. The bookshelves were crammed with titles Gabby had never even heard of. A poster of a band she didn’t know hung on one wall. She recognized some of the people in the photos tacked to the bulletin board, including herself, but definitely not all of them. When she spotted Shay’s cello leaning up against the corner, she felt herself exhale in recognition. That, at least, was the same.
“Stop staring at my stuff,” Shay said, wrapping her arms around Gabby’s waist and blowing a raspberry into the side of her neck. “Pay attention to me.”
“Oh, I’m paying attention,” Gabby assured her, turning around for a kiss. She closed her eyes, shivering as Shay bit gently along the edge of her bottom lip, tongue and teeth and the faint smell of lavender. This was good, she thought, cupping Shay’s sharp face in her two hands. This was steadying.
“Good,” Shay said, pulling back with a noisy smack and hopping up onto her bed, which was lifted onto a set of plastic risers. “Tell me everything.”
Gabby laughed and climbed up beside her. “Tell you everything?”
“Yeah!” Shay said, settling back against the wall and pulling a pillow into her lap. “Like what’s new, all that stuff.”
“What’s new?” Gabby hesitated, abruptly unable to think of anything. She wasn’t used to having to tell Shay what was new. At home their relationship had been one long and meandering conversation full of tiny, valuable trivialities: new Photoshop filters and what to eat for a snack after cello practice, the chapters of Wuthering Heights that Gabby had to read for homework and Kristina prancing around the house singing all the songs from Funny Girl at the top of her lungs. Nothing had ever been new, because they’d told it all to each other the exact moment it happened. Faced with the task of coming up with her most important headlines, it felt, suddenly and terrifyingly, like maybe Gabby had nothing to say. “Um.”
Shay was laughing, but not in a mean way. “Relax, Gabby-Girl,” she said, kicking her boots off and crossing her ankles on the bedspread. “It’s just me.”
“I know,” Gabby said, a little too shrilly. “I know that. Things are just kind of the same, is all. School, yearbook. All the usual things.”