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a lot of forearm force to keep it down or I was gonna end up with splatter in my face.
    Morning rituals complete, I wandered back into the kitchen and opened the fridge to see what I had to eat for breakfast. My share of the food consisted of two eggs, and a half a quart of chocolate milk. I shrugged. Better than nothing. Finding a dish was more challenging than figuring out what to eat.
    “Get the one with the tickler,” Darla said, the walls impossibly thin here. I shuddered.
    A sauté pan caked on with something that probably had been cooked four days ago was on top of the heap of dishes. Joe and Trevor didn’t have a dishwasher—I supposed that, technically, I was the dishwasher, considering the fact that they weren’t charging me any rent to couch surf. It probably was the best thing to do. I pulled the plates, and cups, and pans out, stacked them neatly, put them back in and filled the sink with hot water and soap, letting everything soak before I tackled them.
    This gave me the chance to set the nasty sauté pan filled with hot water and soap on the counter, give it five minutes and I’d be able to start eating. The chocolate milk, thank God, wasn’t rancid, so at least I filled my stomach before setting down on my bed—that would be the couch—to wait for the water to do its job. That gave me five minutes to obsess about Amy, not that I needed an excuse to think about her. The events of four and a half years ago came slamming through my mind, boom, boom, boom, like paintballs, multicolored and painful.
    Slap. Slap. Slap. It sounded like someone’s upper body was being flung against the wall. Why did they have to do it right there? The wall that they were sexually bitch-slapping was the one right behind the kitchen sink.
    “No, you climb on top,” a guy’s voice said, I couldn’t tell whether it was Joe or Trevor, and I didn’t want to know. I grabbed my pillow and just curled it around the back of my head, my palms pressing against my ears.
    Amy. Amy. Amy . That long brown hair, her sweet smile, that intense gaze when she was laser-focused on something. Why hadn’t she come up on stage and said something to me? You stupid idiot , I thought, of course she’s not going to do that. You’re the one who blew it . Four and a half years and I hadn’t spoken to her, nothing. It was as if she didn’t exist. All of that anger, and resentment, and confusion, and desire from four and a half years ago...it turns out, hadn’t really gone away.
    The anger had, the resentment, too. It was what had happened when I went home and saw Dad that made me never contact with her again. It had absolutely nothing to do with her—that was the kicker. It was my own shame. All me. Knowing her, she assumed that it was all about her, and bridging that was like asking me to go to the moon on a pogo stick.
    Joe rounded the corner, naked, ass muscles rippling as I caught him out of the corner of my eye before I could quickly turn away and close my lids, wincing. “Jesus, Ross, do you have to parade that shit around?”
    “Sorry.” I could tell from his tone of voice that he wasn’t. “We just need some food.”
    I could hear the refrigerator door open. He grabbed something, slammed it shut, and padded away. And then, the unmistakable sound of a can of whipped cream being discharged. “I’ll get a yeast infection if you put it there! ” I heard Darla say.
    My stomach tightened and I cringed.
    “How about there?” I heard one of the guys say. Sshfft!
    “ Oh , that’s nice,” she moaned.
    I walked to the window and stared out over the rooftops. Joe and Trevor had a fourth floor apartment in one of those brick blocks that littered Allston, where all the students were crammed in. God, I needed my own place. I reached in my back pocket for that card Liam had given me last night, pulled it out. Entertainment, huh?
    I found my smartphone—even when you’re stone cold broke, you’ve got $35 a month for a basic plan—and