“He just said…everyone he had met had broken up with their girlfriends when they got here…and he wanted to see other girls? I guess? Because he prayed about it, and he’s pretty sure I’m the girl he’s supposed to be with, but he just wants to be totally sure?” Her voice twisted higher on the last few words, and she started to sob again.
“What is wrong with these nut-clutching, mansplaining dickheaded assholes?” Arielle and Amy went quiet at Rion’s outburst. “Well, seriously!” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “You,” she said, motioning to Amy, “were obviously like about to get married, and you,” she pointed at Arielle, “fucking transferred to this school to be with that dumb bitch.”
“She’s not a …” Arielle started, her stomach twisting instinctively at anyone referring to Rachel that way.
“Oh but she is,” Rion said. “Nobody can know you’re together? Suddenly lesbians are this horrible thing? Is she living in fucking 1994 or something?”
Amy’s stomach pulled in as she gave a short, slight laugh, and her mouth twitched up at the corners. Arielle had to admit she was right—Rion was outspoken, but at least she was making this a little more bearable.
“And your guy. Who does he think he is? You’re obviously pretty, and sweet, and the two of you had something really serious. And now he wants to fuck other girls, just because he saw all the fresh Indiana Northern meat?”
Amy’s mouth dropped open, and she stared at Rion. “You think he’s going to—I mean—do you think he’s wanting to make love to other girls?”
Arielle shot a dagger-eyed glance at Rion, and quickly but firmly shook her head.
“No…no,” Rion stammered, giving Arielle a panicked look. “I’m sure he just wants to…you know. Kiss them and stuff?” she checked her response with Arielle, who rolled her eyes at her when Amy wailed.
“Okay, look. Let’s just calm down, okay?” Arielle said in the soothing voice again. She had definitely learned more than she’d thought. Mom hadrubbed Arielle’s back through a few crying sessions when she was fourteen and just starting to come out at school. Ninth grade girls could be brutal in their teasing, and Arielle had learned not to give a shit mostly by Mom teaching her how to deal.
Teasing was one thing, and Rachel was another.
After a few quiet moments, while the girls waited for Amy to start taking deep breaths again, Arielle put slices of pizza on napkins for each of them. She handed one to Rion first, with a slight smile, then nudged one down the coffee table in front of Amy’s face. “Eat,” Arielle said, smoothing her hand over Amy’s long hair before she pulled it away and picked up her own slice.
The girls ate in silence for several moments, and then Rion let her napkin drop to the floor, half the piece of pizza still on it. “Listen,” she said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “Guys are assholes. Girls too, I guess. I swear to God.”
Amy whimpered.
“It’s like they don’t know how to be decent human beings. Do you know what happened to me, literally three weeks before I left to move here?”
Arielle and Amy waited for her to continue.
“I was with this guy, and he was cute, and fun, and really really good in bed, and he just happened to sell pot on the side. And then I fucking got stuck driving his car, with a trunkload of the shit. Nothing like trying to explain to the cops that it’s not your pot and knowing they don’t believe you.”
Arielle whispered “whoa,” and Amy’s eyes were the size of saucers. “So,” Amy’s timid voice broke the silence. “I mean…weren’t you smoking that stuff too? If he was? Or didn’t you at least know it was in there?”
“Of course you’d think that. Everyone else did. It makes sense.” Rion scoffed. “But no. I wouldn’t touch the shit. My only real crime was being stupid enough to drive the car without searching it first. Anyway, I had to go to court. Got a ten thousand dollar fine. Lost all my federal loans. Asshole completely fucked me over.”
“So you broke up with him?” Amy asked quietly.
Rion scoffed, weaving her fingers together and staring down at them. “Didn’t have to. When he saw me after I got out of court, he figured I wanted to kill him. He was right But it’s hard to kill someone that you’re used to kissing, you know?” Now Rion’s voice had gone from hard to broken and quiet.
Arielle shook her head. “You loved him, didn’t you?”
“Well,” Rion grumbled, “I wouldn’t say…I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah. I lived in a state run group home for the last year and a half. He was kind of the only person I had.” Rion stared down at her hands some more, and Arielle thought she heard her sniffle, too. Clearly she was done with that conversation, for now at least. They were all quiet for a very long few seconds.
“Okay,” Arielle finally said, tossing her pizza down onto the coffee table with a dull thump. “This is pathetic. We are pathetic.”
Yeah, she still felt completely devastated, like Rachel had permanently poisoned the part of her that could feel happiness. But there was another feeling too, the one that insisted that this was utter bullshit.
Just like Rion, she knew she was worth more than this. And from what little she knew of Amy, and from what she could see of Rion, she knew the same thing about them.
“Jesus, give her a minute,” Rion said, crossing over to the chair next to Amy and sitting down. She looked the girl up and down, as though she was wondering what to do with her. Then she reached into the bag, pulled out a pint of ice cream, cracked the top off, and handed it to Amy, who took it, looking lost. Then Rion mumbled, “Sorry,” and pulled a spoon out of the bag, too. She barely had time to hold it out to Amy before the poor, sniffling girl snatched it and started to dig in.
“Seriously,” Arielle said, watching her two roommates strike up a camaraderie before her eyes. “People screw with us, and we cry and eat ice cream? What the hell are we doing?”
Amy sniffled. “You guys are swearing a lot.”
Rion snorted and pulled another pint out of the bag.
“I’ll be right back,” Arielle said, pushing herself out of her chair, “Be ready to hand one of those over to me.”
In her room, Arielle dug through one of the three huge duffels she’d crammed in her dad’s trunk before the drive up to Northern. She was a sucker for two things: color coding and office supplies, and even though she’d be using her laptop for almost everything in classes, she’d stocked up on a few cute notebooks and fancy pens. She found a notebook that was absolutely perfect—a composition style, so that pages couldn’t be torn out—and had three birds in some artsy-collagey configuration on the front. She grabbed a pack of new gel pens and stalked back into the common room.
“We are not going to let this happen again,” Arielle said.
“And we’re going to do that with a notebook and cutesy pens?”
Arielle glared at Rion, but Amy cracked a smile.
“We all know this is bullshit, right? Sorry, Amy—” Arielle said as she wiggled her yoga-pantsed butt back over the cheap dorm furniture upholstery.
“We all know our exes”—she swallowed—“totally screwed us over. We know we didn’t deserve that, right?”
“And we’re never going to put up with anything close to it ever again,” Rion said.
“Exactly,” Arielle said, willing certainty into her shaky voice. Unfortunately, at this point, she couldn’t promise she wouldn’t jump back into Rachel’s arms and pick right back where they left off on their happily ever after, given the chance.
But deep down, she also knew that that happily ever after had been totally destroyed by whatever it was that made Rachel embarrassed to be her girlfriend.
“Adam said…he said he thinks we belong together,” Amy’s voice cracked as she fought to get some volume into it. “He just wants to be sure. So probably, we’ll …”
“No,” Arielle interrupted, slamming her hand on the cover of the notebook, then fiercely opening the cover and tearing the cap off the pen with her teeth
. “You will not be getting back together. I’m sorry, because I don’t really know you at all, but I know that any guy who promises a girl forever and then comes to college with her and then dumps her ass is not forever. He is not The One.”
How much was she talking about Amy, and how much was she talking about herself?
Arielle shook her head. It didn’t matter. “Listen to me,” she said, trying to infuse every word with conviction, “The three of us were put in this Suite together for a reason. I know we were.”
Actually, Arielle had been put in the Suite because she was a late transfer.
“My best friend backed out of our double last month,” Amy said. “Decided to start at the community college close to home instead.”
Rion swallowed another bite of ice cream. “And I’m here because—”
“Shut UP!” Arielle said, beginning to scribble furiously. “I’m serious. We’re all here for a reason, and I’m going to tell you what it is right now.” The ink from the green gel pen was especially shimmery, and it pulled a spark of happiness through the darkness threatening to take over Arielle’s whole experience at Northern. The words formed under her pen almost by themselves, and when she finished writing, she held up the notebook for the girls to see.
Amy blinked hard, clearing her eyes of the last of the tears, and Rion let out an exasperated sigh as she leaned forward to read.
“The Broken Hearts’ Society of Suite 17C?” Rion read.
“Yep. We’ve all ended up on the wrong end of some really bad breakups, and we’re having a hard time dealing. It’s true. And you know what that means?”
“We’re pathetic?” Amy offered.
“Yes, okay.” Arielle rolled her eyes. “We’re pathetic, today. That’s why we’re never going to let anything like that happen ever, ever again. We’re going to have such an amazing, jerk-free year, that we’re going to make our exes look like pathetic losers at the end of it. And we’re all going to hold each other accountable.” Arielle swallowed down the doubt rising in her chest. She doubted that gorgeous, confident, social butterfly Rachel could ever look like a pathetic loser, but now that she’d given the whole speech, she owed it to her roommates to at least consider it a possibility.
“So how are we supposed to do that?” Something like hope sparked inside Arielle as she heard a hint of willingness in Rion’s question.
“We’re going to hold a meeting. Every other Sunday. Just like this, with ice cream and pizza, but without the crying.”
“My mom only packed like a month’s worth of tissues anyway,” Amy joked, finally letting a real smile creep onto her face.
“It’s only going to work if everyone’s in. We all have to help each other.” Arielle looked straight at Amy, who swallowed hard, then nodded. She moved her eyes to Rion. She stabbed her plastic fork into the ice cream, taking a long time to twist out a scoop, then shove it in her mouth, then swallow. She looked up at the girls, letting her gaze shift from one to the other. “I’d probably have to listen to you girls talking about exes and crushes and dating and love no matter what, right?”
“Right,” Arielle nodded, keeping her face solemn.
“Fine,” Rion said, passing a pint of ice cream to Arielle as promised. “How’s this going to work?”
“Concentrate on your ice cream,” Arielle mumbled, trying to catch hold of the stream of words jumping up in her head like magic. She flipped open to the second page of the book and wrote so furiously her hand ached when she was done. The notebook made a hefty thud when she dropped it, open-faced, on the floor right next to the pizza.
Rion leaned in to read aloud:
We, the residents of Harrison Tower Suite 17C, hereby promise not to enter into a relationship with any individual possessing the qualities of our exes, who tore our hearts out and smeared them across the Indiana Northern quad, specific to each of our members as follows:
Rion Burke: Hereby swears never again to date any motherfucking asshole who has had any involvement, association with, or history of using illegal drugs, or behaving recklessly under the influence of alcohol, or participating in any legal infraction or crime that would result in disciplinary action. She is not that kind of girl, and refuses to be brought into that shit by association ever again.
Arielle Duval: Hereby resolves never again to date any girl who is not confident of, secure in, and proud of being a lesbian. The ideal girlfriend will have had enough experience dating women to know with 100% certainty that she is sexually attracted to, and sees herself having a future with, another woman. Furthermore, she will be fully out and secure with anyone in the universe knowing about her sexual orientation.
Amy Bauer: Hereby promises never again to fall so deeply in love with a guy, and become so wholly attached to him, that she loses any idea of who she is without him. She will not discuss commitment or a solid future with any guy before she has her own plan for a future, independent of any relationship.
To this end, we resolve to meet on a semi-weekly basis to report our dating behaviors (or lack thereof) and hold one another accountable for our backslides, pitfalls, and slip-ups, and to cheer on our successes.
Because one soul-destroying breakup is more than enough for one lifetime.
Arielle
Arielle squinted at the large metal sign planted in the ground in front of a cement behemoth of a building. She double-checked her schedule. It didn’t look like the sort of building that would hold a women’s studies class, but more surprising things had happened since she’d arrived here. She nodded when the name matched up with the one on her schedule, relieved she wouldn’t have to backtrack halfway across campus like she’d had to after this morning’s statistics class.
Of course, it probably didn’t help that, with every step across the quad, she was desperately hoping that she wouldn’t look up to see Rachel approaching her. Or hoping that she did see Rachel. She really didn’t know. The memory of her still felt so real, down to the smell of her peach perfume, and the swoop of her warm blonde hair. The girl invaded her dreams almost every night. Arielle always woke up expecting Rachel to be warming the narrow space left in her twin extra-long mattress, but when she opened her eyes, it was always cold.
At least, after the first week post-breakup, she had stopped crying over the empty bed. Well, most of the time. And at least when she had cried, letting out sobs so loud she sounded like a dying hyena, she had her own room so that Rion and Amy wouldn’t hear it. Thank God for Harrison Tower.
The motley collection of girls in the classroom confirmed she was in the right place—Womens’ Studies 272. In fact, there were only girls in this class, most of them looking more like Rion, with weird hair, clothing, piercings, or some combination of the three. One wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “FEMINIST KILLJOY” in all caps, and another was discussing a protest at the Statehouse this past weekend, and her subsequent arrest. Two girls in the back corner were having an animated conversation about something…intense, and Arielle flinched when one of them practically screamed, “Since I have a vagina.” It became painfully obvious to Arielle that what she’d thought would be a large entry-level class was almost entirely populated with upperclassmen, passionate about the subject at hand.
Not to mention that the women’s studies major she imagined she’d be so perfect for might not have been such a great idea after all.
Of course, she’d come one minute before class started, leaving her with a choice of three seats in the second row, or any seat she pleased in the first row, directly in front of the instructor. Awesome. She focused on the floor, tucking a loose curly strand of hair behind her ear and counting the number of pairs of combat boots and Birkenstocks and watching her ballet flats walk past them. And then, all of the sudden, a pair of gold sequined canvas shoes caught her eye. And they were next to an empty seat, too. Arielle practically grinned at the feeling of relief. She wasn’t the only normal girl in this class. Or abnormal. Whatever.
She slung her bag to the grou
nd and settled into the empty seat. “It’s left-handed,” a soft alto voice warned her. Arielle smiled and followed the gold shoes up a long, toned, smooth-as-silk pair of legs, and solid yet curvy-in-all-the-right-places torso to one of the most captivating faces she’d ever seen.
The girl had perfectly clear, amber skin, free of any freckles or blemishes except for a beauty mark an inch below and to the right of her left eye. And her eyes—deep brown, almost black, but with so much depth, like they held a million points of light. The top lid was so delicate, curving and smoothing into the top of her cheekbone, that Arielle had to fight the urge to reach out and touch it.
Thanks to a less-than-diverse Indiana upbringing, Arielle hadn’t met very many Asian people in her lifetime, and she had never before wondered what kind of Asian someone was. Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese—she’d never cared, until now. She had no explanation for it, but she wanted to know every single thing about this girl. Being around Rachel had felt like transforming herself into a dam against a flood of hormones that would eventually break her down. It was out of control, it threatened to consume her. With just a few words, this girl had infused her with calm.
Arielle took a deep breath, trying to stop the telltale lazy flip of her stomach. She smiled politely at the girl, then talked herself into looking up at the board, getting out her computer, tucking her hair behind her ears, all in an effort to avoid staring. When she looked again, the girl was looking back at her. Goddamn, she was gorgeous.
“I don’t mind,” Arielle managed as she slid into the desk.
“Good. It’s nice to have company up here. Do you think sitting in the front of the class is the same as sitting in the front of the bus? Accepting that you just aren’t one of the cool kids?” The girl’s subdued smile could have been friendly or just polite, but somehow it felt like something more. Arielle’s brain went a mile a minute. Introducing herself had never been one of her strong suits, as ridiculous as it sounded, and when she was this mesmerized by someone’s face, it was a recipe for disaster. But there was no way she’d ever meet anyone here if she couldn’t manage to say her name out loud.
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