Chapter 398 | The Grocery List

Chapter 398: 398 | The Grocery List

At 8:52 Jordan’s phone buzzed against the bench and he looked at it because his hands were free and his discipline was down there somewhere with his lower back.

ALEXIS: you posted a shirtless picture in mouse ears

ALEXIS: at midnight

ALEXIS: like a person with no shame or supervision

He typed back one-handed.

JORDAN: you looked

ALEXIS: everyone looked. thats how instagram works

JORDAN: eleven times, princess

ALEXIS: i hate you

Then, four minutes later, while he was racking the plates:

ALEXIS: are you coming to econ or are you still recovering from whatever that was

Jordan closed the app and stared at the wall for a second, because that was the part he had not fully budgeted for either. Not the walking. Not the mattress. The math of it. Two girls who wanted him in the same room and a third one texting from a Newport estate at nine in the morning to be mean about a photo she had studied like a midterm, and somewhere behind all of it a golden interface keeping receipts.

He was tired in the muscles and tired somewhere under the muscles, and the second one was newer.

"You good?" Kyle said.

"I’m going to sleep through Econ."

"You can’t sleep through Econ, Jones takes attendance now."

"I’ll sleep with my eyes open. It’s a skill."

He did not sleep through Econ. He sat in the third row of Bluffs 150 with a Powerade and the last functioning quarter of his central nervous system, and Kumiko dropped into the seat on his left at 8:58 wearing a lavender cardigan buttoned wrong at the bottom and both ribbons back in place, and she looked at him and her whole face went pink before she had even said anything.

"Good morning," she said, at a volume for church.

"Morning, Kumi."

Her pen skidded across the notepad. "Okay so I need you to know that I slept eleven hours, which is the most I’ve slept since October, and I woke up and I could not feel my legs, and I want to be clear that this is a compliment, and also I have a bruise here," she pointed at her own collarbone, at the fresh mark sitting directly on top of the old one, "which is technically two bruises stacked, which is a first for me, which I did write down."

"You put it in the notebook."

"Page twenty-one. There’s a diagram." She looked at him sideways. "It’s not a good diagram."

Alexis arrived at 8:59 in a camel coat over a white knit thing, sunglasses still on indoors, and she sat down on his right without acknowledging either of them, which was how she said hello. Her hair was pulled back tight. She smelled expensive.

Jordan noticed, halfway through Jones’s aggregate supply slide, that she was wearing the gray henley under the knit. Again. Two weeks running, dry cleaner story intact.

"You’re staring," she said, not turning her head.

"You’re wearing my shirt."

"It’s a very common shirt."

"It’s got a hole in the left cuff."

Alexis’s typing stopped for exactly two keystrokes, which for her was a scream, and then resumed at increased velocity.

Kumiko leaned across him with a folded note and Jordan opened it under the desk. A stick figure with spiky hair. Mouse ears. Hearts. Underneath, in careful print: thank you for the whole weekend, all of it, even the parts I slept through.

He put it in his jacket pocket, which he had never once done with a piece of paper in his life, and Alexis clocked the movement out of the corner of her eye and clocked it hard.

Math at ten was where he actually lost the thread. Nguyen filled the board with something involving series convergence and Jordan’s pen stopped moving about four minutes in and did not resume, and beside him Ava Moreno filled a page and a half with equations neater than printing.

"You’ve written the date," she said around 10:20, at a whisper, without looking up. "Twice. On the same line. Which is statistically unusual for you, because I’ve been sitting here for three weeks and you write it once and then you take notes, and the notes are bad but they exist, and today they don’t, and I noticed, which I’m aware sounds like surveillance but is actually just proximity and pattern recognition and I’m going to stop talking now."

"Long weekend."

"Oh." Ava’s pen paused. "Was it a good long weekend or a bad long weekend."

"Good."

"Okay." She wrote something. "Then I’m not going to ask any of the eleven follow-up questions I just generated."

"Appreciate it."

"They’re mostly logistical," she said, and went back to her equations, and Jordan put his forehead on the heel of his hand and looked at the whiteboard and understood absolutely nothing on it.

His phone buzzed twice.

ELIZA: hey. is thursday still on for the writeup

ELIZA: also i saw your post. you look happy. thats not a weird thing to say i dont think

Fifty-eight percent, the System had said. Eleven messages drafted and deleted while a guy with his arm around her waist explained something to a different blonde in a kitchen full of red cups.

He did not answer. He would answer at nine that night, six hours, the way Chloe had scripted it, and the fact that he was following a script written by his pregnant girlfriend to emotionally dismantle his ex-girlfriend for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars was a sentence he could not have parsed in January and now just sat there in his head like a grocery list.

A month later he came home at 12:40 with the plan of dying quietly for two hours. The apartment smelled like lemon cleaner and rice. Chloe was on the couch in his black shirt with her laptop and a mug, hair up, glasses on, which she only wore when she had already decided nobody was coming over.

"You’re gray," she said.

"I’m the same color I always am."

"You’re gray and you’re walking like your grandmother." She closed the laptop. "Come here."

He got as far as the arm of the couch before she pulled him down by the wrist and got him horizontal with his head in her lap, which meant he was down for the count, tactically speaking.

Her fingers went into his hair.