Page 79 of Leaving the Station

He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. I opened the carefully wrapped package, and inside there was a small metal key.

“Is this—?”

“A key to my dorm,” he offered, nodding excitedly.

“You’re not allowed to replicate keys,” I told him.

Even after months of not going to class and doing everything in my power to accomplish as little as possible, there was a part of me that clung to my old goody-two-shoes tendencies.

He shrugged. “If I get caught, it’ll have been worth it.”

“Thank you,” I said, though what I wanted to say was,Why?

I had my own dorm, and if I wanted to go to his room, he could let me in. The last time I had been there was after the party, when we had the... confusing hookup.

The only answer I could fathom was that he liked what had happened that night and wanted it to happen again. Maybe he understood that our dynamic had shifted. Or maybe he just wanted to have sex with me and this was the smoothest way he could think to bring it up.

Looking in his eyes, it seemed more likely that it was the latter.

“Should we maybe use the key now?” he asked, cupping my kneecap with his palm.

If I’d felt the same power I had the night of the party, I would’ve said yes with no hesitation. But I was curious nonetheless.

“Yeah.” My entire body was clenched. “Sure.”

As we snuck through campus, the whole thing felt as illicit as all of our other late-night escapades. We scanned our student IDs to get into Alden’s building, then ran up the back stairwell.

The closer we got to his room, though, the less nervous I became. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the running, the scheming. It brought me closer to myself, to the version of me that Alden made me actually enjoy.

“Use your key,” he whispered as we stood in front of his door.

I pulled the small metal key out of the box and tried to get it to work, but I was shaking and the lock wouldn’t turn.

“Here,” he said, placing his hand over mine and turning the key for me.

“So,” he said, grinning.

“So,” I parroted, trying to keep my face neutral.

He leaned in to kiss me, but when he grabbed my waist, I directed his arms up to my neck. We kissed like that, standing up, for a while, neither of us wanting to make the move to the bed.

“I have condoms,” he said as he came up for air. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

It wasn’t, but I couldn’t have told him that.

“Cool,” I said, and he took that as confirmation to pull open his desk drawer and rip one off the pack.

We made our way to the bed, and I briefly closed my eyes, imagining myself as someone else. I tried to think myself into a different body, a boy’s body, or maybe just into Alden’s. He pulled his socks off, and I pulled mine off too.

One item of clothing down, many more to go.

“I’ve never been with anyone like you,” he told me as I sat on his bed. His expression was open and expectant.

I knew from our late-night conversations that he had a high school girlfriend with whom things had ended terribly. He never told me her last name, but it was easy enough to find her online.

Based on her Instagram presence, she seemed like someone I would’ve gotten along with. She was shorter than me and more feminine. She had two emotional support rats named Mario andLuigi and was working to make computer science more inclusive.

There was no evidence of Alden on her page, except in her tagged photos. There were pictures of them sharing plates of food at busy diners, of them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at high school parties. They looked good together. Definitely better than me and Alden, though we didn’t have any photos together that would have proven that.