Regardless of how big my ass is, it won’t be big enough to crush Nameless’ huge fat head. Also, I would not touch him with any body part that is not spiked and or doused in black mamba venom. Now that he’s going to my school, I have to devise ways in which to rid myself of him sans homicide. Maybe, like, a fortuitous black hole.

But first, I have to throw a tantrum. It’s an area in which I have great experience.

“Do I even wanna know what you’re doing?” Yvette looks down as I attach myself to her leg the second she walks in the room. I whimper attractively.

“I’m taking the time to revisit your ‘drop out of college in the first year’ plan.”

“Oh, stop,” Yvette throws her laptop bag on her bed. She drags her feet to her desk. “While you’re down there, untie my shoes for me.”

“Like I was saying,” I untie with gusto. “I recently discovered someone I really don’t like goes here.”

“That dude you were talking with the other night? Model McFartington?”

“Have I called him that? That sounds like something I would say.”

“You say it a lot. In your sleep.”

“Yvette!” I wail. “It’s not Model McFartington. There is another person on my shitlist. Model McFartington is on the shitlist, also, but he is not number one, and also he’s got a bunch of red squiggly lines through his name, because sometimes I take him off the list and sometimes I add him back on.”

Yvette raises one studded eyebrow.

“It’s complicated,” I summarize. “Let’s drop out.”

“No,” she says simply.

“WhhHHHYY?” I inquire delicately.

“We gotta experience the whole nine yards of college agony before we drop out. We have to black out drink a bunch and swear off men forever and fail a bunch of classes and try cocaine. That’s at least seven months worth of work right there.”

“Says who.”

“Says every poignant coming of age movie ever.”

“Ugh!” I let go of her foot and roll under my bed. I see a moldy dick carved into the wood mattress slats and immediately roll back out. “Ugh.”

“Look, I’m sorry about this dude, okay? Or…two dudes, or whatever you have going on. Point them out to me and I’ll sock them so hard they’ll vomit up what’s left of their souls. But right now, I gotta finish this Chem essay or I’m screwed. Metaphorically. I haven’t actually gotten screwed in a while.”

These are her famous last words, because when I go to get dinner and come back full of burrito and knock for her to let me in there is groaning emanating from the door and I hear Yvette demand for something ‘harder’. I trip over a dust particle with alarming grace as I make my way to calmer waters. Jack opens his door with sleep-mussed hair and no shirt and it’s then I realize these waters are about as calm as people who win free cars on Oprah.

“My roommate’s being gross so I live here now,” I say as I push past him.

“You can’t,” he points out.

“They said that to Columbus too, and look what happened there.” I flop on his bed. I know it’s his because it’s perfectly made, covers just a little wrinkly from sleep. His roommate’s bed is a mercifully empty nest of messy blankets. Jack pulls a shirt on and yawns, sitting beside me.

“You’ve got sleep boogers,” I point at his eyes. He rubs them vigorously.

“You can stay here if you want,” He says, still rubbing one eye. It is a drastically human, vulnerable motion I’ve never seen him do before. “But I’m leaving in fifteen minutes.”

“You look like a little kid,” I laugh. “With eye problems.”

“Shut up,” He growls, and rubs harder. His cheeks are sleep-flushed and his hair sticks up every which way.

“Still got a duck’s butt for a hairstyle, huh?”

“Still got the most infantile insults for a defense mechanism, huh?”

“At least it is not an animal’s backside.”

“The sounds are similar.”

I flip him off with both hands and he retorts by leaning against the wall and closing his eyes. The dusk-rose sky looms outside the window, sunset slanting in and painting the white walls peach-striped.

“What do you want to know first?” Jack asks finally.

A thousand questions erupt, but I pick the least confrontational one. “Where are you going in fifteen minutes?”

“A friend invited my roommate to a barbeque. He’s dragging me along.”

“Who’s your roommate?”

“Charlie. An idiot, but a passionate idiot. I’ve heard that counts for something.”

“Uh, you are looking at living proof of that right here,” I point at my chest. Jack smirks and cracks his eyes open to look at me, the ice-blue of them melted to faint purple by the red sun.

“You’re not an idiot, Isis.”

“I know. Duh.”

“You’re a moron,” He corrects, and closes his eyes again, falling to lie on his side. I debate the merits of pulling his fingers off one by one and decide they are much too pretty to be removed. For now.

I hug my knees and try to remember how to breathe right, like normal people do. People who aren’t chased by ghosts. Or in this case, chased by sadistic ex-boyfriends. And just as I start to spiral down into the darkness, where the monster lives and breathes and gnaws, Jack reaches up and pulls me down, and I squeak, and we’re lying on his soft bed, him behind me, me as the little spoon. His heat and weight presses against the contours of my spine, the smell of mint and honey surrounding me like a blanket. It’s the smell I longed for in the darkest nights alone, thinking about the war, and his hands, and what it would be like to kiss him, hard and for real and maybe more because maybe, just maybe, he’s the one person in the world who might kiss my stretch marks instead of calling them ugly -

“Stop,” He mumbles into my hair.

“Stop what?”

“Stop looking so sad all the time.”

I scrunch my face up, and he nuzzles into my neck further. My heart suddenly decides it’s an astronaut and attempts to do forty backflips in what feels like zero-G.

“W-Why go here for school?” I ask. Jack exhales.

“Work.”

The zero-G cuts out, replaced with molasses and lead and spikes.

“Obviously. Of course, it’s so obvious, frat boys just don’t cut it, college girls need a suave and experienced undertaker of the vajayjay to relieve stress, because everyone in the world is obsessed with sex, apparently –”

“I’m not an escort,” He says patiently. “I work for someone else now. Doing other things.”

“Wow. That’s so specific. I feel like I’ve gleaned a lot of valuable and specific information from this conversation.”

“Remember the guys who were in that forest? The guy in a tweed suit? The ones who chased you?”

“Yeah, but –”

The door opens just then. Jack and I sit up hastily. In walks Tinyballs Mcsuitypants, he of the running-after-me-in-a-dark-Ohio-forest-because-his-boss-told-him-to. His black hair’s in spikes, skin amber. He freezes, dark eyes catching on me.