Loathe to Love You by Ali Hazelwood

            Hannah is back in Houston, which is good for her Internet connection, but bad for her peace of mind. She has been butting heads with some NASA big-shot guy who has been vetoing her pet research project for no reason whatsoever. Hannah is, of course, ready for murder. I can’t see her hands through FaceTime, but I’m almost positive she’s sharpening a shiv.

            There is something reassuring in hearing about their lives. It reminds me of grad school, when we couldn’t afford therapy and we’d engage in some healthy communal bitching every other night, just to survive the madness. There were some bad moments—it was grad school: there were a lot of bad moments—but in the end, we were together. In the end, everything turned out to be all right.

            So maybe that’s what will happen this time, too. I’m on the verge of homelessness, my heart feels like a stone, and I want to be with someone way more than that someone wants to be with me. But Sadie and Hannah are (more or less) here, and therefore things will turn out to be (more or less) all right.

            “Men were a mistake,” Sadie says.

            “Big mistake,” Hannah adds.

            “Huge.” I sink deeper into the living room couch, wondering if Liam, my personal mistake, will come home tonight. It’s already past nine. Maybe he’s out for dinner. Maybe, if he has something to celebrate, he’ll sleep elsewhere. At Emma’s, perhaps.

            “Sometimes they’re useful,” Sadie points out. “Like that guy with a Korn T-shirt who helped me open a jar of pickled radishes in 2018.”

            “Oh yeah.” I nod. “I remember that.”

            “Hands down my most profound experience with a man.”

            “In hindsight, you should have asked him to marry you.”

            “A missed opportunity.”

            “Could it be that we’ve just been exceptionally unlucky?” There is some noise on Hannah’s side of the line. Maybe she is sharpening a shiv. “Could it be that the tides will turn and we’ll finally meet dudes who don’t deserve to be fed a bowl of thumbtacks?”

            “It could be,” I say. Be positive, Helena used to tell me. Negativity is for old farts like me. “Really, everything could be. It could be that we’ll be randomly selected for a lifetime supply of Nutella.”

            Sadie snorts. “It could be that the surrealist slam poem I wrote in third grade will win me the Nobel Prize for literature.”

            “That my cactus will actually bloom this year.”

            “That they’ll start producing Twizzlers ice cream.”

            “That Firefly will get the final season it deserves.”

            No one talks for a few seconds. Until Hannah says: “Mara, you broke the flow. Come up with something delightful and yet unobtainable.”

            “Oh, right. Uhm, it could be that Liam will come home, and ask me not to move out, and then he’ll bend me over the nearest piece of furniture and fuck me hard and fast.” By the time I’ve finished the sentence, Sadie is laughing and Hannah is whistling.

            “Hard and fast, huh?”

            “Yup.” I shake my head. “Absolutely preposterous, though.”

            “Nah. Well, no more than my slam poem,” Sadie concedes. “So, how goes the unrequited crush?”

            “It’s not really a crush.” Plenty unrequited, though.

            “I thought we had agreed that fantasizing about being bent over the kitchen sink does, in fact, constitute a crush?”

            I huff. “Fine. It’s . . . good. Barely there, really. I don’t really daydream about having sex with him that often.” Liar. What a liar. “Still in the larval stage.” It’s hitting its teenage years and is strong as an ox. “I think that some distance will be good. I have a lead on a cheap-ish apartment downtown.” I’ll miss this place. I’ll miss feeling close to Helena. I’ll miss the way Liam makes fun of me for being unable to learn the buttons of the stupid PlayStation controllers. So, so much.

            “And you’re sure Liam’s okay with you leaving?”