LOVE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION

Chapter 04: No anchors

I hadn't left the room in days and it was now two days to graduation.

Not to shower. Not to attend my last classes. Not to check the graduation emails flooding my inbox. Not even to pretend the world still existed beyond the four beige walls that had become both my shelter and my prison. Glad they weren't amber maybe I'd be mad by now.

Food cartons were stacked beside my bed like quiet evidence of everything I was trying not to feel. Grease stained the sheets. Crumbs clung to my shirt. My laptop lay abandoned on the floor, screen dark, notifications piling up like unanswered prayers. The air smelled like sugar and grease and something heavier underneath the particular staleness of a person who had stopped moving.

I ate because it filled the silence.

I ate because chewing was easier than thinking.

I ate because if my mouth was busy, maybe my heart wouldn't scream.

But this time it was different, and somewhere beneath the mess of it I knew that. This wasn't the careful, calculated indulgence of a girl trying to stay soft enough for someone else's preference. There was no performance in it. No offering. It was messy and graceless and entirely my own and as shameful as that felt, it was also the most honest thing I'd done in years.

My roommate had decamped to her boyfriend's apartment after finals. The room was entirely mine. At least one of us would graduate with the love of her life beside her.

The knock came sharp and impatient.

I ignored it.

The second knock was louder.

The third came with a voice.

"Ellie. Open the door before I kick it down."

I groaned and rolled onto my side, burying my face in a pillow.

"Go away, Zania."

"Oh, I will not," she replied. "You've been rotting in here like expired milk and I refuse to let my best friend become a cautionary tale."

"I'm not in the mood."

"Yeah, no shit."

She walked in anyway nudging a pile of clothes aside with her foot, sweeping the room in one slow, devastating look. The food. The mess. The unwashed sheets. The hollow stillness clinging to everything like a second layer of air.

"Oh my God," she said flatly. "He really did a number on you."

I didn't move.

She shut the door, dropped her bag on the only chair not buried under dirty clothes or empty takeout containers, and marched straight to the window. She yanked the curtains open. Sunlight flooded the room brutally, exposing every discarded container, every tear-stained hoodie, every corner of the wreckage I had been quietly living inside.

I hissed and threw an arm over my eyes.

"Are you trying to kill me?"

"I'm trying to resurrect you," Zania said. "Same difference."

She turned around, arms crossed, eyes sharp. "You haven't showered."

"Didn't feel necessary."

"You haven't eaten a vegetable."

"I had ketchup."

"That doesn't count."

"It's tomato based."

"Ha. Very funny," Zania replied flatly.

Silence stretched between us — thick and fragile. Then she sat on the edge of the bed carefully, like she was approaching something that might shatter if handled wrong.

"Talk to me," she said quietly.

"There's nothing to say," I muttered. "He said what he said."

This was so embarrassing. I hadn't even told her yet but bad news had a way of spreading like wildfire. She had heard it from someone else and thought they were lying, but she knew it was true the moment she called me several times and got no response.

She was quiet for a moment, just watching me. Then "Ellie. Look at me."

I turned my head slowly.

"You are allowed to be devastated," she said. "Nine years is not nothing. What he did was not nothing. But the way you're coping right now is hurting you. Not him. You."

My jaw tightened. "Don't make this about food."

"I'm not making it about food," she said. "I'm making it about you. The girl I know doesn't disappear for days. The girl I know gets angry. Gets loud. Gets better." She paused. "Where is she?"

The question sat heavy between us.

"I don't know," I admitted, my voice barely above a whisper. "I don't know who I am without him, Zania. I built everything around him. Everything. And now there's just nothing. I'm just nothing."

"Well, I won't lie and say I didn't expect this," Zania said. "I knew the breakup would happen I just expected it a couple of months after sophomore year. I mean, you made it all the way to graduation together. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Guess my instincts were right."

She exhaled slowly. "And that," she said firmly, "is the biggest lie you have ever told yourself but it may become true if you keep going like this."

Tears burned behind my eyes. "You're supposed to be on my side."

"I am on your side," she said. "That's exactly why I'm sitting in this disaster of a room telling you the truth instead of letting you disappear into it." She leaned forward. "Girl. You better remember who the hell you are."

I laughed bitterly, the sound scraping out of me raw and hollow. "I genuinely don't know anymore."

"Then let me remind you," she said without missing a beat. "You carried three group projects on your back while your boyfriend barely passed his own exams. You are the girl professors still talk about in hallways. You are the girl who had scholarship offers lined up like answered prayers — offers you kept turning down for a man who just called you a pig in front of witnesses."

The words landed differently when stacked like that. I looked away.

"You're also," she continued, softer now, "the girl who let a mediocre man become her entire universe. And that's not a crime. But it cannot be your ending."

Silence again. But a different kind less suffocating, more still.

"You didn't even plan to go to graduation," she said. "Your parents are flying in, Ellie. For you. Their only child."

"He'll be there," I said quietly. "His friends. Everyone who watched that night. Maybe her too."

"They'll see you either way," Zania said. "Might as well give them something worth seeing."

I didn't answer. But I didn't argue either.

She reached down, picked up my laptop from the floor, and placed it on the bed between us.

"Open your email."

"Zania "

"I bet there are offers sitting in there."

"There's nothing "

"Open. It."

I exhaled slowly and lifted the laptop. The screen came to life. My inbox loaded.

Zania leaned over my shoulder and went very still.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh my God."

"What?"

"You have seven offers."

I stared at the screen. Internships. Entry-level analyst roles. Research assistantships. A consulting firm. A tech startup. A policy institute. All of them sitting quietly in my inbox while I'd been staring at the ceiling for days.

"These have just been sitting here?" Zania asked.

"I didn't want to look."

She let out a short laugh. "You are genuinely insane."

We went through each one carefully reading, comparing, weighing locations against benefits against growth potential. Zania turned sharp and analytical the way she always did when a problem needed solving. Then she paused, scrolled back, and tapped the screen.

"This one," she said slowly. "Ellie. This is the one."

I read the header.

Location: Manhattan, New York.

My stomach dropped. "That's far."

"It's a fresh start," Zania said. "Real opportunity. Real distance."

"I'd have to move."

"Yes."

"I don't know anyone there."

"You didn't know anyone here in Boston either," she said. "Once."

"It's scary."

"So was loving Jalen," she said quietly, "but you did it until it became the most comfortable thing in your life."

That shut me up completely.

"You don't have an anchor holding you back anymore," Zania said. "That's terrifying. But Ellie it's also the first time in nine years that's actually been true."

The words settled over me slowly, like something I'd needed to hear without knowing it.

"And," she added carefully, "I could use a change too."

I looked at her. "You don't have to come."

"I want to." Her voice dropped. "Losing my mum — staying here feels heavy. I can't go anywhere without remembering I went there with her. My dad wants me close but close just means surrounded by grief with nowhere for it to go." She paused. "Manhattan sounds like somewhere grief might get distracted."

I reached over and took her hand.

We sat like that for a moment — two women at the edge of something neither of us was entirely ready for, both of us out of reasons to stay.

"What about law internships for you?" I asked finally.

Zania smiled. "Please. My dad knows someone everywhere."

I laughed real and unguarded, the first real laugh in days and the sound surprised me with how much it felt like myself.

"Okay," Zania said, standing, clapping her hands like she was closing a deal. "Here's what happens now. You shower. You eat something that grew from the ground. And you accept that offer before you talk yourself out of it."

"And graduation?"

"You," she said, pointing directly at me, "are getting gloriously, aggressively glammed up. And you are going to walk across that stage and remind every single person in that room exactly who you are."

I swallowed hard.

For the first time since the breakup, something shifted beneath the wreckage not quite hope, not quite certainty, but something that felt like the first quiet step toward both.

I pulled the laptop onto my knees, opened the offer, and started typing my acceptance.

New York. A new job. A new city. A life that finally belonged entirely to me.

My finger hovered over the send button for exactly three seconds long enough to feel the weight of it, short enough that fear couldn't talk me out of it.

I hit send.