We Are Us

“Hi.” I don’t wait for the gray-haired, heavyset woman sitting behind the front desk to look up before I begin speaking. “I’m an incoming freshman and I hope you can help—”

She lifts the glasses hanging on a beaded necklace to her face and peers up at me. “Did you just move into your dorm?”

“Yes. Crawford Hall.”

“And will you be attending orientation this afternoon?”

“Of course.”

“Well then, my dear, you are no longer incoming. You are here.” She beams at me. “Welcome to Worthington University.”

“Thank you,” I say, the depressed fog I’ve been living in fragmenting the slightest bit in the face of her unexpected warmth. “I’m glad to be here.” Regardless of what happens with Gavin, I am grateful to be taking this first step away from Sackett.

“How can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a friend. He was supposed to be here, too. I mean, we applied together and we both got in but…” Sadness and fear and confusion come rushing back, the emotions slamming into me like a rogue wave. I sway on my feet, feeling the blood drain from my face.

The administrator comes rushing around her desk and guides me into a chair. “There, there. If your friend is here, we’ll find him. You just sit down right next to me.” She reaches into her desk drawer and pulls out a handful of Hershey kisses and plastic-wrapped butterscotch candies. “Have a little treat, dear. Sugar makes everything sweeter.”

I unwrap a butterscotch with trembling fingers and place it on my tongue, grateful for the explosion of flavor that somehow manages to help me focus. She looks at me with an encouraging smile. “There you go. All better?”

No. But I nod anyway. “Thank you,” I glance at the nameplate on her desk, “Mrs. McGill.”

“Just call me Roz. Everyone does.” Her chair squeaks as she settles back into it and turns her attention to her computer screen. “Now, you just tell me who you’re looking for and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Gavin. Gavin Cross.”

As Roz’s fingers dance across the keyboard, I allow myself to imagine that she’ll turn to me with an ebullient smile, a

I’ll smile and clap my hands. I’ll say, I know exactly where that is. Thank you, I’ll go find him right now.

We’ll share a laugh and she’ll insist that I take a few more candies with me, maybe remind me to keep a pack of Lifesavers and a water bottle in my backpack.

And then I’ll go find Gavin and…

But her keyboard goes quiet, and I know what she’s going to say before the words leave her mouth. She says them anyway. “I’m sorry dear. There’s no Gavin Cross in our system. He isn’t here.”

He isn’t here.

I manage to nod and thank her again before stumbling back into the sunshine, a fistful of candy melting inside my hand.

He isn’t here.

And I realize that my mom’s advice will be hard to follow. Not the studying part. It’s the “making good choices” part that I need to work on.

My track record is shit.

I entrusted my heart to a beautiful, broken boy. Gavin’s kisses left me loose-limbed and starry-eyed, but his whispered words of love were the cruelest of illusions.

I am his and he is mine and we are us.

I am hers and she is mine and we are us.

We are us.

Lies. All lies.