Page 3 of And They Were Roommates

A burst of orientation chatter beyond the window brings the world rushing back around me. Lifting my glasses to scrub my face, I open my eyes again.

A poster of a white teenage boy on the ceiling smiles back.

I jolt and grip the bed. He wears an aloha shirt with half thebuttons undone, and a parrot perches on his shoulder. Large cursive text placed across his chest readsSexiest Poet of the Year. That face is familiar. Too familiar.

My pulse spikes as I hop on top of the mattress to get a better look.

He looks older than when we met at fourteen. His hair is longer, flowing to his shoulders, but I could never forget those blazing blue irises and upturned nose. I check the ceiling above the other bed. Another poster of the same blond, smirking in a tuxedo.

He became a model in the last two years. Or a famous poet. Or both. Hewasthe most talented student during that poetry workshop I was forced to take at Shakespeare and Classics camp. Subjectively, at least. To others.

I’m trapped with a roommate who’s his diehard stan? Him, of all obnoxiously vain people?

Vain. The word clicks something into place for me.

Hewasthe vainest at camp. Hewouldhang up posters of himself.

Maybe this isn’t a stan.

I rush over to my roommate’s desk and rummage through the stacked composition notebooks. A name, an address, something to identify the person I’ll spend every night with for who knows how long? When I open up the third notebook, I go still at the name on the corner.

The only name who would know the truth regardless of how well I hide. Who stole my first kiss and shattered my heart, and who can expose whatever he’d like as soon as he sees me.

Jasper Grimes.

Chapter 2PARADISE LOST

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

Delilah spits out her energy drink. “Aroommate?”

I grimace at the regurgitated green liquid on the grass. “That’s what I told them.”

“You paid for a single room,” she says, raising her bumpy nose at me, the only physical similarity we share as best friends. While I can barely control my dark curls, she complains about her blond hair lying too flat. While I have boxes for brows, she’s never had to pluck hers. While Delilah was taller than me by an inch when we met at camp, my shoe inserts shoot me up enough to be the tall one now.

“I also tried to tell them that,” I say.

Digging her stiletto acrylics so hard into her drink that the aluminum crinkles, Delilah leans against the soaring brick wall dividing our brother and sister campuses.

A few parents and students passing through the wall’s gate stare at Delilah’s palpable dark aura the longer she emanates her fury.

My shoulders tense. The focus isn’t on me, but still. “People are watching.”

“Enjoy the show,” Delilah barks at the setting sun and courtyard, where an unsettling séance circle of cupid statues inside a marble fountain shoot water from their arrows. “How dare they shove a roommate on you?”

I haven’t even told her the worst part: It’s Jasper Grimes, the asshole who had me bawling my eyes out to her at the end of summer two years ago.

Delilah has “accidentally” committed arson on oak trees in the surrounding Au Sable Forks woods more times than I’ve seen her in person since camp—twice. Both were a result of her angrily monologuing about Valentine’s strictness and chucking around sparklers that she snuck into camp. Since she’s upset now, I need to assess that anger on a range from tree arson to whole planet arson before I tell her the entire story. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t have any sparklers handy. But with Delilah, you never really know.

“I can’t even help you,” Delilah goes on. “My academy is right there, but it’s basically not with this cockblockade in the way.”

“The what?”

“This wall between us! We all call it that.” She smacks the palm of her hand against the brick wall.

Yet another word I don’t know. Delilah already informed me that summer campers never learn the real campus slang, like how both academy courtyards are the Halos due to their circular shapes and the chocolate-caramel lattes sold at the coffee stands are Jesuses because they taste as good as him. Or something. Cockblockade, however, evaded me.

At least I was familiar with how traditionally the academies operate, even after the recentSaint Valentine’stoValentine Academyrebrand—an attempt to separate from its religious-focused origins. At camp, everyone attended workshops on the sister campus but slept in their respective residential halls on very-most-opposite map corners, split by this wall. As students now, we only get free rein today and during some winter mixer—which Delilahclaims is our sole time to celebrate after months of studying, and which I’ll unquestionably avoid.

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