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check the temperature of the water first. Claire asked why, and that brought on an insane volume of information about cooking pasta at just the right temperatures, and the physics and chemistry of food, and honestly, even as much of a physics junkie as Claire was, she couldn’t really apply it to box pasta with reconstituted cheese substance that sold for a buck a box. She just backed off and let Liz conduct all her temperature observations, mix the sauce, and generally obsess about getting the chicken chunks just the right size to go into the pasta once it was done. All this took about an hour, which was about half an hour more than Claire wanted to spend on mac and cheese, even if Liz added something she said were Chinese herbs and white truffle oil. In the end, it tasted pretty much like she expected, but by then Claire was willing to eat the box, too.
    Claire took the cleaning up role, which seemed to suit Liz, and when that was done, she headed for the stairs.
    ‘Wait,’ Liz said. ‘So – you’re leaving? Just like that?’
    ‘What do you mean, just like that?’
    ‘It’s our first night here! Don’t you think we ought to, you know, celebrate? I have a movie we can watch, or we can just catch up and talk—’ Liz was practically begging her. ‘Please? I know it’s been a really long time and maybe – maybe you’re just really feeling lost, and I want you to like it here. So let me help.’
    I just want to go upstairs, call Shane, and spend all night talking
. But if she said that out loud, it would sound like she was some girl who couldn’t exist without a boy, and wasn’t that what all this coming-to-MIT had been intended to prove? Pretty ridiculous to fail the first test, on the first day she was apart from him.
    ‘Sure,’ Claire said, and tried to force some cheer into her voice. She felt horrible, but it wasn’t Liz’s fault. Her former best friend was trying to fill the void, and the least Claire could do was let her.
    Besides … she could call Shane later.

     
    Elizabeth was, as it turned out, a movie
fanatic
, and six hours later, Claire finally begged off from the video assault and climbed the stairs, feeling more like a zombie than a survivor of the living-dead attack. Watching gory horror movies on the first night in a creaky old house, with a flaky roommate, was not nearly as much fun as it had been in the Glass House, surrounded by people she loved and trusted. That house had always seemed – and been, on some level –
alive
, and protective of them.
    This one felt cold, alien, and utterly indifferent to her life or death, which made imagining the creaks and bangs to be serial killers intent on murder all too easy.
    Claire made it up the steep climb, turned on the lights, and climbed in bed with her phone. She thought about shutting the lights off again, but in her sleep-deprived, overstimulated state, every shadow looked like a monster, and she thought she could see things moving at the corners of her eyes.
    Better to leave them on.
    She dialled Shane’s number and snuggled down in the pillows, warm and safe, finally, beneath the covers even if the mattress felt weirdly hard, and the sheets smelt of unfamiliar detergent.
    His cell rang, and rang, and rang, and finally it went to voicemail.
    That was like an ice dagger to the heart; she felt numbed and destroyed, all at once.
He didn’t answer
. She’d called, she’d watched the video, and he wasn’t there, wasn’t answering. She was too tired to think rationally, so the next thing in her mind was that he’d gotten angry, turned his phone off, maybe even blocked her calls. What if he’d gone out? When she’d moved to Morganville, Shane had been dating other girls, though not seriously … maybe he’d already called one of them, gone out to the movies, or …
    … Or worse. Maybe he was already forgetting her, laughing at some other girl’s jokes. Someone older and prettier.
    Stop it,
she told herself angrily, and shut off