Page 74 of Leaving the Station

“Are you okay?” Oakley asks.

“I need some water,” I say, running out of her room.

Because running is always my first instinct.

Three Months into College

Alden and I didn’t talk about what happened the night of the party. Maybe he didn’t notice that anything changed.

I, however, did.

It was harder to be around him. I felt ashamed, like I had used him, had been a different person when we made out and I grabbed his waist and told him what to do.

I absolutely could not tell him that that version of me was more real than the person he’d been dating for months.

“Do you want to come home with me?” Alden asked on the Friday before a three-day weekend. “Just for a couple of days?”

I was sure I’d misheard him, so I kept scrolling mindlessly through Instagram on my computer, a habit that had formed early in the semester and was proving hard to break.

“Zoe,” he said, tilting my laptop screen down so I was forced to look at him.

“I have a lot of work to do,” I said. It was a lie and he knew it; in the months we’d been dating, he’d almost never seen me do schoolwork. “I think I’d rather stay on campus.”

“Of course,” he said. “Just thought I’d offer.”

The last thing on earth I wanted to do was meet Alden’sparents. He almost never talked about them—all I knew was that his mom was obsessed with dental hygiene.

“I’ll miss you,” Alden told me.

“Same,” I said automatically. “I’ll miss you too.”

On the first day of the short break, campus was emptier than I’d ever seen it.

I wandered into the library for the first time since I had gone there with Alden at the beginning of the semester, which felt like it had happened in another lifetime. There were some grad students writing papers and librarians tiredly stacking books, but other than that it was blissfully quiet.

I climbed to the sixth floor, the designated silent area, and the stillness rang in my ears. Each step I took reverberated off the walls.

It was the first time I had felt peaceful in a part of campus that wasn’t the greenhouse.

I didn’t want to go back to my dorm so I stayed there for a while, wandering the stacks and pulling books off the shelves just to look at the illustrations.

When I checked my phone, it was nearly evening, and I had an email from Randall asking if I was still on campus.

Yes, I told him.I am.

He asked if I wanted to come to the greenhouse and help him with a project.

Yes, I told him. I did.

When I got there, his face was covered in sweat and soil.“Thank goodness you’re here,” he told me. “I’m trying to repot this palm.”

He was in the main conservatory, standing over a tarp, a small palm tree sitting naked on the ground. Outside of the pot, there was only a clump of soil around its roots to protect the plant from the outside world.

I had an overwhelming urge to hug the palm, even though I knew that logically that was a bad idea because of its desert adaptations: spikes that wouldn’t hesitate to poke me and drought-resistant leaves that would block my path.

Randall and I worked in silence for a while. I helped him create a soil mix for the palm tree’s new pot, one that was larger, that would allow it to grow unobstructed.

“Three, two, one,” he counted down, and we heaved the tree into its new home and covered it with soil. I watered it in, and we were done.