was serious, how things in high school always are. Avery had met her twice. That was enough. Lying on their backs on his bedroom’s hardwood floor, basking in the last notes of a Pink Floyd album, he talked about her. Sarah. His pauses hung in the air like smoke until they filled the room completely. Avery could not find any words for him. She counted the seconds until Ora got back to their floor with the takeout they’d ordered for dinner. The room was silent, but not quiet; the whirring from the fridge seemed to grow until it was all Avery could hear, and intermittent shouts made their way up through the dewy windowpane from across the quad below. Only Tom’s eyes were moving, following a spider along the wall and across the ceiling. The fridge stopped. A moment passed. Another. The silence was louder than before, harder to ignore. Finally, Tom filled the emptiness, and Avery listened. When Ora opened the door, chest rising and falling, Avery sat in the corner, quiet, knees hugged tight. By the time they got to it, their miso soup was cold. Tom didn’t take off his bracelet—the pink and blue one, the one Sarah had made for him—until the threads untangled enough for the knots to come apart on their own. Just over a year later, when they all got ready at Ora’s for the February formal, it was Avery who took the photos of Tom and Noelle, Avery who posed them, made them laugh. Tom took more instruction than Noelle did. After, when the air in the room became too thick to breathe, she stepped out onto a balcony and rested in the sounds of open city and altitude. She looked to the traffic heading downtown, watched it for a while. The winter air stung her skin, and her body tightened against the cold, leaving little spaces between the fabric of her dress and her goosebumps. Through the glass door, she watched Tom watch Noelle, glowing dark in velvet. Edgar bit into a fruit, light caught in the juice that ran down his fingers and into his sleeve. She slipped back inside. 28
Goose