Chapter Text
The thing about living in the dorms was that it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
That was Megan's first mistake.
Her second mistake was assuming that a roommate assignment was, at minimum, a social contract — some basic understanding that two people sharing eighty square feet of living space owed each other a baseline of human decency. Things like: knocking. Asking before borrowing. Not leaving used dishes in a pile so architectural it could qualify as a final project.
Julia had not gotten that memo.
Megan had spent nine months documenting a precise catalogue of grievances. Julia, who played music at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday like the concept of morning classes was personally offensive to her. Julia, who brought people over without warning — hey, hope it's cool, we're just gonna hang for a bit — and those people would still be on the floor at 3 a.m. Julia, who had borrowed Megan's good conditioner, finished it, and put the empty bottle back. The empty bottle. Back on the shelf. Like a threat.
By March, Megan had drafted a mental resignation letter. By May, she'd handed it in. She told the housing office she wouldn't be returning for sophomore year before the semester was even officially over, which felt a little dramatic until she remembered the conditioner. Then it felt like the bare minimum.
The problem with leaving the dorms, of course, was that you had to go somewhere. Summer had stretched out in front of her like a logistical puzzle she hadn't asked to solve: find a place, find roommates, find something within her budget and within a reasonable distance from campus, and do it all before the school year started back up. The in-between looked like this: a twin bed in the guest room of her mom's friend Carol, who lived twenty minutes from campus and was perfectly nice and had a cat named Biscuit who was less perfectly nice.
Megan worked the morning shift at the campus café for the summer — seven to two, five days a week — and spent her afternoons scrolling through rental listings on her laptop with the mounting dread of someone defusing a bomb. Too far. Too expensive. Vibes are off (she couldn't explain the vibes being off, but they were off, and she'd learned to trust that). She'd borrowed Carol's car three separate times to visit apartments. One had smelled like something she couldn't identify and didn't want to. One roommate had spent forty-five minutes explaining her raw food diet in a tone that implied Megan would be expected to adopt it. One place had been genuinely beautiful — good light, close to campus, price that actually worked — and then the girl had casually mentioned her boyfriend stayed over most nights and that Megan should think of him as, like, basically a roommate too. Megan had smiled, said she'd be in touch, and sat in Carol's car in the parking lot in silence for a full minute.
Three weeks. She had three weeks.
It was a Wednesday morning, somewhere in the slow hour between the breakfast rush and the lunch crowd, when Emily leaned across the counter and saved her life. Or at least her housing situation, which at this point felt like the same thing. They'd been restocking the pastry case — Megan handling the croissants, Emily reorganizing the syrup shelf with the energy of someone who genuinely loved a system — when Megan made the mistake of sighing audibly.
"Still nothing?" Emily asked, without turning around.
"I looked at a place yesterday where the living room was also the bedroom. Like, there was a loft. The bed was in the ceiling."
"That's called a studio."
"The ceiling, Emily."
Emily turned around, a bottle of vanilla syrup in each hand, looking like she was solving an equation. "Okay, wait. Actually —" She set the bottles down. "There's this girl I had two classes with last year. Lara. She's in the music department, super chill, not weird about food or whatever. I know she's been looking for a third roommate — she's got a place off-campus with another girl. The price is reasonable too, I think. Only problem is they haven't found anyone yet, they're pretty specific about wanting someone they actually get along with."
"How specific?"
"Like, vibe specific. But you have good vibes." Emily was already on her phone. "I'll give her your number. She's genuinely really nice, Megan. Like, actually nice, not nice nice."
Megan understood the distinction immediately. "Okay," she said, and let herself feel one small, cautious thing that might have been hope.
The text came at 4:17 PM, from a number she didn't recognize.
Lara, 4:17 PM: hey! this is lara — emily gave me your number, hope that's okay :) she mentioned you might be looking for a place?
Megan read it twice, then typed back immediately because she had no chill left in her body after two weeks of bad apartment viewings.
Megan, 4:18 PM: yes hi, definitely okay! yeah i'm looking. what's the situation with the place?
Lara, 4:20 PM: so it's a 3bd/1ba in a building about 10 min from campus on foot — kitchen, big living room, balcony, elevator in the building. me and my roommate daniela live there, we've had the third room open for a bit. price is pretty manageable, i can send you the breakdown. we just... haven't clicked with anyone we've met yet lol
Lara, 4:20 PM: which sounds picky but i think you know what i mean
Megan, 4:21 PM: no i completely know what you mean. i've been to four of these "interviews" and i get it
Lara, 4:22 PM: exactly lmaooo. so maybe we could grab coffee or something first? just to get a feel before you see the place
Megan, 4:23 PM: i work at the campus café actually, i'm off at 2 tomorrow if you want to just come by there?
Lara, 4:24 PM: omg perfect. see you then :)
Megan set her phone down and looked at Biscuit, who was staring at her from across the room with the flat, judgmental expression of a cat who knew things.
"Don't," she told him.
He blinked, slowly, and looked away.
She almost didn't recognize Lara at first — she came in with someone, which Megan hadn't expected, and for a second she did the thing where you make eye contact with a stranger and aren't sure if it's the right stranger. But then the girl's face shifted into recognition and she lifted a hand in a small wave, and Megan waved back from behind the counter. Lara was pretty in the way that some people just naturally were — effortless about it, the kind of girl who probably looked the same in sweats as she did dressed up. She had warm eyes and an easy smile, and she moved through the café with the loose-limbed confidence of someone comfortable in most rooms. The girl with her was the opposite kind of energy: bright, expressive, already looking around the café like it was mildly exciting just to be in it. Dark hair, wide smile, the kind of person who would introduce herself to strangers at a party and actually mean it.
"Megan?" Lara asked, when they reached the counter.
"That's me." She smiled. "Good timing, I'm like five minutes from clocking out. What do you guys want? On me."
The other girl's eyes lit up. "Oh, we're going to be great friends," she said. "I'm Daniela, by the way. I basically invited myself. Hope that's okay."
"It's more than okay," Megan said, and meant it.
She took their orders — an iced matcha for Lara, a caramel latte for Daniela — and made herself a cold brew with an extra shot because she'd been on her feet since seven and she deserved it. She finished her closing tasks on autopilot, untied her apron, and carried the three drinks to the corner table where they'd settled in.
The conversation started the way good conversations did: easy, with no effort required. Daniela talked with her hands and laughed loudly and didn't seem remotely self-conscious about either. Lara was more measured, attentive, the kind of listener who actually waited for you to finish before responding. Megan found herself relaxing into the booth without noticing she'd done it.
By the time their drinks were half gone, Daniela was already suggesting they go see the apartment.
"You don't have to decide today," Lara said quickly, with the mild exasperation of someone used to managing Daniela's pace. "We can just show you around."
"I want to see it," Megan said. "Honestly, I'm sold on you guys already. The apartment's kind of a formality at this point."
Daniela pointed at her. "See? She gets it."
The building was exactly what the listing had promised: clean, well-lit, close enough to campus that Megan could make out the edge of the quad from the street. The elevator worked, which felt like a luxury after a year of hauling things up four flights of dorm stairs. The apartment itself was bigger than she'd expected — the living room had real furniture in it, not just the ghost outlines of where furniture had once been, and the kitchen had counter space and a window above the sink that let in actual light. The balcony was narrow but real, overlooking a courtyard below, and Megan stood out there for a moment and breathed in the warm afternoon air and thought: yeah. The room was the clincher. South-facing, so the afternoon light came in at an angle that turned the whole space golden. A window seat. Hardwood floors. More square footage than she'd had all of freshman year.
"I'll take it," she said.
Daniela made a sound that was either a cheer or a gasp — possibly both. Lara laughed and said she'd get the paperwork together, that Megan could move in whenever she was ready. As they were heading back down in the elevator, Daniela mentioned casually that they had a group of friends who lived in the apartment right next door — same building, same floor, practically an extension of the same space.
"We're basically always in each other's places," she said. "So fair warning, you'll probably meet them pretty fast. But they're great. You'll love them."
"Sounds good to me," Megan said. "Honestly, I barely talked to anyone last year. I'm due for some friends."
Daniela looked at her with an expression of absolute sincerity. "Megan," she said, "your social life is about to change dramatically."
Move-in day was a Saturday in late August, which meant Los Angeles was doing its thing — that particular kind of dry, golden heat that sat on your shoulders like a second layer of clothing. The sky was the color of something you'd put on a postcard, cloudless and almost aggressively blue, and the light hit the front of the building in a way that made everything look slightly cinematic. Two and a half weeks since she'd found the listing. Somehow, barely.
Malcolm had borrowed his cousin's truck, which Megan had told him approximately four times was unnecessary and which she was now extremely grateful for. He'd shown up at Carol's at nine on the dot — because Malcolm was constitutionally incapable of being late — with iced coffees from the drive-through and a playlist already queued up, and Megan had hugged him in the driveway and gotten sunscreen on his shirt and apologized and he'd shrugged and said it was fine. She'd known Malcolm for less than a year — they'd met first semester, in the particular way you meet people in college, thrown together by proximity and circumstance until one day you realize the proximity has turned into something real.
They loaded the truck in two trips. Megan didn't have much — a year of dorm living had cured her of any attachment to objects that couldn't survive being shoved in a box. Books, clothes, her desk lamp, her speaker, the plant on her windowsill that had survived Julia through sheer spite and that Megan had named Survivor accordingly. Lara and Daniela were waiting in the lobby when they pulled up, which Megan hadn't asked for but which made something warm settle in her chest. They did two elevator trips with Malcolm's help, boxes stacked in arms, everyone talking over each other in the easy chaos of people who don't yet know each other well enough to be annoyed by anything. By the time the last box was upstairs, Malcolm had somewhere to be, and he left with a side hug and a call me if you need anything that Megan knew he meant.
The three of them stood in the hallway with the last armful of bags between them.
"That's everything," Megan said, a little breathless.
"Last trip," Daniela said, shifting the bag on her shoulder. "Let's go."
They took the elevator down, loaded up, came back up — and when the doors opened and they stepped out into the hallway, Megan heard, before she heard anything else, before she understood what was happening or why her body reacted the way it did, a laugh.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't remarkable, objectively. It was just a laugh in a hallway, from somewhere down by the neighboring apartment's door.
But Megan knew that laugh.
She knew it the way you know a song you haven't heard in years — the first two notes and something in your chest just moves, involuntary and immediate, before your brain has caught up. She knew it from somewhere deep and archived and specific: from a version of herself that was thirteen years old, sitting on warm concrete at the edge of a playground while the sun went flat and golden, listening to that exact sound and thinking, without fully understanding why, that it was one of her favorite things in the world.
♪ "I Knew It, I Knew You" — Taylor Swift
She turned around.
There were two girls at the end of the hallway, coming from the direction of the apartment next door. One of them Megan didn't recognize: tall, with long dark hair that fell past her shoulders, and a face that was striking in the particular way of someone who knew exactly how to hold their expression — composed, deliberate, like she took up exactly the space she intended to and had decided on that amount carefully. The other one was the source of the laugh. She was looking down at something on her phone, still smiling at whatever had just been funny, and she hadn't looked up yet, and for a single suspended second Megan had the strange and dizzying experience of watching someone she used to know exist in a world that had kept moving without her. She looked the same. She looked completely different. She looked like what happened when someone you'd held a fixed image of in your mind for years turned out to have kept growing after you stopped watching — same features, same way of holding herself, but more settled into them somehow. More there.
The tall girl spotted them first.
"Oh, hey — did something happen?"
"Daniela forgot her key," Lara said, with the tone of someone who had expected this.
"I didn't forget it, I just —" Daniela paused. "Okay, I forgot it."
The girl laughed — warm, genuine, a little delighted by it — and extended her hand toward Megan. "I'm Sophia," she said. Her voice had the easy confidence of someone who introduced herself and expected people to be glad about it, which Megan immediately was. "You must be the new roommate."
"Megan, yeah." She shook her hand. "Hi."
"Welcome." Sophia smiled, bright and certain, like she'd already decided this was going to be fine. Then she stepped aside slightly.
The other girl had looked up from her phone.
For the span of about two seconds, they looked at each other. Megan watched something flicker across that face — surprise, quickly arranged into neutral. Something tightening at the edges. Something that could have been a dozen things and that Megan wasn't going to try to name.
"I'm Yoonchae," she said. Her voice was even. "Nice to meet you."
The thing about that sentence was that it was a perfect sentence. Nothing wrong with it. The right words in the right order. Nice to meet you.
Megan felt something settle in her chest like a stone dropped in still water.
"You too," she said, and smiled, and let it go.
Sophia produced a spare key from her jacket pocket with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had anticipated this exact situation. "I made a copy after the third time," she told Daniela, patient in the way of someone who had long accepted that chaos lived nearby and had simply planned accordingly.
Daniela accepted the key with zero shame. "You're literally a genius."
"I know." Sophia turned back to Megan. "Okay, we'll let you get settled. But we're basically always back and forth, so you'll see us constantly." She paused, and when she said the next part it didn't sound like a pleasantry. "We're really glad you're here."
"Thanks," Megan said. "I'm glad too."
She didn't look at Yoonchae again. She could feel, in the particular way you can feel someone looking anywhere that isn't you, that Yoonchae wasn't looking at her either.
By evening, the boxes were open and her clothes were mostly in the closet and Survivor had a spot on the windowsill that caught the tail end of the day's light. Lara knocked, asked if she needed anything, told her to text if she got hungry and they'd figure out dinner. Megan said she was fine, thank you, she'd be out in a bit. Then she sat on the edge of her new bed and thought about Yoonchae.
It wasn't the first time she'd thought about her in years — that would be a lie, and Megan had always been a bad liar, at least to herself. But it was the first time in years that the thinking had something to attach to, something concrete and present instead of just the vague shape of a memory. She remembered being thirteen and thinking that Yoonchae was the coolest person she knew — not in the way that required effort, but in the way that came from actually being interested in things. Yoonchae had a sketchbook that went everywhere with her, pages filling up with drawings Megan wasn't sure she was supposed to see but that Yoonchae would turn toward her sometimes, tilting the book so Megan could look. She remembered lying in the grass at the park near Yoonchae's house, both of them on their backs, watching clouds do nothing in particular. She remembered that Yoonchae smelled like whatever shampoo her mom bought and that this was a weirdly specific thing to still know.
She remembered the afternoon she'd kissed her. It had been an ordinary day — nothing significant about it — and it had happened in the way things sometimes do when you've been orbiting someone long enough: suddenly, and also not suddenly at all. The way it had landed: surprised, a little breathless, and then Yoonchae had laughed (that laugh, that specific laugh, the one Megan had just heard in a hallway for the first time in six years) and Megan had laughed too and they'd looked at each other like well and it had been okay. It had been more than okay.
And then the next day, Yoonchae wasn't there. Not absent — physically there, in school, in the hallways — but not there in the way she'd been the day before. Megan had tried to catch her eye in class and Yoonchae had looked straight through her. She'd waited by her locker and when Yoonchae finally came, she'd gone quiet and still in that way that meant she was bracing for something, and then she'd said, low and fast and without looking up: you need to leave me alone. i don't like girls.
Megan had stood there for a second too long — hadn't known what to do with that, hadn't understood it, because two days ago they'd been lying in the grass and it had been fine — and in that standing-there-too-long, two girls from their year had been close enough to hear. She still didn't know exactly what they'd caught. She knew what had happened after: the way the rumor had moved through the grade with the specific velocity of something people find interesting, the whispers that grew into something louder, the way some people had started to look at her differently and then started saying things out loud. Middle school cruelty has a particular quality — it's rarely organized, just diffuse and constant, a drip that gets everywhere. By the following month, school had become a place Megan was counting down hours to leave. She'd told her mom eventually. Her mom had cried, which Megan hadn't wanted, and then had gotten very quiet and practical, which Megan had. They'd figured out the exámenes libres — so she could finish the year without going back — and at the end of the year, when her mom suggested Hawaii, where her aunt lived, where there was space and coast and a place to start over, Megan had said yes before she finished the sentence. Tyler -her brother- had been good about it.
She hadn't been angry, was the thing. She'd tried to locate the anger and found something softer underneath: grief, mostly. The specific and ordinary loss of a person she'd loved being her best friend. It had hurt. It still hurt, a little, in the distant way of old things. But she'd never been able to make herself hate Yoonchae for it, even when it would have been simpler.
She still didn't know why. She still didn't, sitting in her new room in the last light of the day. She just knew that she'd heard that laugh in a hallway and felt something unknot in her chest that she hadn't known was still knotted — something new and familiar both at once, settling into the place where it had always lived.
She looked out the window. The courtyard below was empty. The sky was doing that Los Angeles thing where it turned colors for no reason, pink and orange bleeding into something almost absurd, like the city was showing off.
Okay, she thought. Okay. She could do this. She could be a person who lived next door to Yoonchae and didn't make it weird and let it be what it was, which was nothing, which was just two people who used to know each other and didn't anymore.
She could absolutely do that.
(She was, as previously established, a bad liar. But she was working on it.)