The Roommate Who Stopped Pretending

The letter came on a Tuesday, slipped under my door in the gray light before breakfast, and I knew before I opened it that my life was about to get worse. Covington Academy does not send letters for good news. Good news comes in emails, or in the dean's office with a handshake and a photograph for the alumni bulletin. Bad news comes on heavy cream paper with the crest pressed into the top corner, the way it had come when they told me my scholarship was under review, the way it had come when they told me my room assignment would remain single for medical privacy reasons. I had held onto that room for two years. It was the one thing I had. I sat on the edge of my bed and unfolded the paper. Due to unprecedented enrollment, the Office of Residential Life has found it necessary to reassign a limited number of private rooms. Your accommodation will now be shared, effective immediately. Your new roommate will arrive this afternoon. We appreciate your flexibility. I read it three times. The words did not change. I had told them, in the first week of my freshman year, that I needed to live alone. I had sat in the office of a woman named Dr. Meyers and explained that I had a condition, that I could not risk being observed at night, that I would rather leave the school than share a room. I had not told her what the condition was. I had only told her that it was serious, and that if anyone found out, I would be finished. She had looked at me for a long moment and then she had written something in my file, and for two years that note had protected me. Now it was gone. Enrollment was up. Money was tight, even at a school where the tuition could buy a small house. And I was a scholarship student, which meant that when they needed someone to absorb the inconvenience, they looked at me first. I folded the letter and put it in the drawer with the others. The room itself was nothing special. Two beds now, though for two years there had been only one. My bed, against the wall, with the geography textbook and the stack of paperbacks I never had time to read. The new bed, made up with white sheets, waiting. A second desk. A second chair. A second wardrobe, empty, its doors hanging open like a mouth. I stood at the window and watched the campus below. Covington sits on a bluff above a town called Harrow Bay, where the ocean is always gray and the fog rolls in at four in the afternoon and stays until morning. The buildings are old stone and new glass, and the students who walk between them have the easy confidence of people who have never had to wonder whether they belong. I had spent two years learning how to walk like them. I had spent two years keeping my head down and my grades up and my secret locked behind a door that no one else had a key to. That afternoon, the door opened. He was taller than I expected. That was the first thing I noticed, because I had expected someone small and nervous, the kind of transfer student who arrives in the middle of the term with a duffel bag and a look of permanent apology. He was not that. He was tall, with dark hair that fell across his forehead and eyes that were almost black, and he carried a single leather bag over one shoulder like he had been living out of it for years and had no intention of stopping. He wore a gray sweater and jeans that had been washed too many times, and when he looked at me, he did not look away. "You're Adrian," he said. It was not a question. "Yes," I said. "And you're the transfer student." "Rowan Hale." He set the bag down on the empty bed. "They told me you requested a single." "I did." "Then I'm sorry." He said it without any particular warmth, but without any hostility either. It was a statement of fact. "I requested one too. They gave me you." I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing. He unpacked his bag in silence, and I watched him. A few shirts. A notebook. A small wooden box that he set on the windowsill and did not open. No photographs. No posters. Nothing that told me who he was or where he had come from. "You don't have much," I said. "I travel light." "From where?" He glanced at me. "Does it matter?" "People usually want to talk about where they're from." "I'm not people," he said, and went back to unpacking. I turned away and pretended to study, but I couldn't concentrate. There was a stranger in my room, three feet from my bed, and tonight at 11:47 everything would change. I had known this moment would come. I had known it since the letter arrived. But knowing and experiencing are different things, and as the light faded outside the window, I felt the familiar tightening in my chest, the same tightening I had felt every night for as long as I could remember, the knowledge that I was about to become something I could not control. At dinner, Rowan sat across from me in the dining hall and ate without speaking. The other students glanced at him, curious, the way they always looked at new arrivals, but no one came over. Covington is not a friendly place. It is a place where people measure each other and decide whether they are worth the effort, and Rowan, in his washed-out sweater, with his single bag and his silence, did not look worth the effort to anyone but me. "Why did you transfer?" I asked. He looked up. "Why do you care?" "I have to live with you." "That's fair." He set down his fork. "I got into some trouble at my last school. Nothing criminal. Just... a disagreement with the administration about how they ran things." "What kind of disagreement?" "The kind that ends with you leaving," he said, and smiled, and it was the first time I had seen him smile, and it did something strange to my chest that I did not want to examine. That night, I lay in bed and watched the clock on my phone. 11:30. 11:35. 11:40. Rowan was in the other bed, his breathing slow and even, and I prayed that he was asleep, that he would stay asleep, that tonight of all nights nothing would happen. At 11:46, I got up and went into the bathroom and locked the door. At 11:47, the change came. It always starts the same way. A coldness in my hands, like I have plunged them into ice water. Then the shaking, deep and uncontrollable, as if something inside me is trying to get out. Then the blood, not much, just a few drops from my nose and my gums, staining the white porcelain of the sink. I gripped the edge of the counter and breathed through it, the way I had learned to breathe, counting the seconds until it passed. It never lasted more than ten minutes. Ten minutes of my body turning against me, and then it was over, and I was ordinary again. But this time, when I looked up, the door was open. Rowan was standing in the doorway. He had picked the lock, or maybe I had not locked it properly, or maybe none of that mattered because he was there, and he was looking at me, and I could not hide the blood on my face or the tremor in my hands or the terror in my eyes. I waited for him to run. I waited for him to call for help, to wake the whole floor, to do what any normal person would do when they found their new roommate bleeding in a locked bathroom at midnight. He did none of those things. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, and then he sat down on the edge of the bathtub, and he looked at me with those dark eyes, and he said, "How long has it been happening?" I could not speak. My mouth was full of the taste of copper. "Adrian," he said. "How long?" "Since I was twelve," I whispered. He nodded slowly. "And you've been hiding it." "I have to." "Why?" "Because if anyone finds out, I'm done. I'll lose the scholarship. I'll lose everything." He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "They can't find out." "They will. You'll tell them." "No," he said. "I won't." I stared at him. "Why not?" He stood up and took a step toward me, and I should have flinched away, but I didn't, because there was something in his face that I recognized, something I had seen in my own mirror. He reached out and touched my cheek, just below my eye, where the blood had dried. His fingers were warm, warmer than mine, and steady. "Because I have the same secret," he said. The room went very still. "I know what it's like," he continued, "to live every day afraid that someone will see. To schedule your whole life around what happens at night. To wonder if you're the only one." He dropped his hand. "You're not the only one." I wanted to believe him. I wanted it so badly that it hurt. But two years of hiding had taught me that wanting is not the same as trusting, and I had trusted people before. I had trusted my father, who left. I had trusted my mother, who told me I was sick and needed to be fixed. I had trusted the doctors, who took my blood and gave me nothing back but a diagnosis I could not pronounce and a list of medications that made me worse. "Why should I believe you?" I asked. "Because I can prove it," he said. "Tomorrow night. Same time. You'll see." He left the bathroom and went back to his bed, and I stood there in the dark for a long time, my hands still shaking, my face still wet, and I did not know whether I had just been saved or whether I had just walked into a trap that was worse than anything I had faced before. ***** The next day, I watched him. I could not help it. In class, in the dining hall, in the library, my eyes found him and followed him, looking for the lie. He was quiet and self-contained, the way I was, and he did not seek anyone's company but mine. When our English teacher called on him, he answered in a low, careful voice, and I noticed that he never touched his face the way other people did, never rubbed his eyes or scratched his nose, as if he were afraid of what his own hands might do. I noticed that he drank water constantly, four or five glasses with every meal, and that he went to the bathroom more often than anyone else in the room. I noticed these things because I did them too. I did them because I knew what it was like to feel your body turning on you, to feel the coldness in your hands and the pressure behind your eyes and the knowledge that you had minutes, not hours, to get somewhere private before it happened. At 11:40 that night, he got up and went into the bathroom. He did not close the door all the way. He left it open a c***k, and I could see the light spilling out into the room, and I could hear him breathing, and I knew he was waiting for me. I got up and went to the door. He was standing in front of the mirror, and he had rolled up his sleeves, and I could see the marks on his arms. They looked like mine. Thin white lines, old and new, the scars of a body that never stopped fighting itself. Across the sink, the porcelain was stained with the same copper red that I knew so well. He turned and looked at me. His eyes were dark, but they were steady, and he did not try to hide his hands or turn his face away. "Eleven forty-seven," he said. "Every night. It lasts seven minutes. Nosebleed, tremor, then it stops. No one can know." "How did you survive?" I asked. "How did you hide it?" "Same way you did. I kept moving. New school, new room, new life. I never let anyone close enough to see." He paused. "Until you." "Why me?" He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "Because the last time I met someone like us, I was too careful, and I lost them. I'm not going to make that mistake again." I did not know what to say. So I did what I had never done before. I reached out and took his hand. His fingers closed around mine, and they were warm, and steady, and I felt something in my chest loosen, something I had been holding tighter than I knew. ***** But the world does not stop because two people find each other. The next morning, I was summoned to the office of Dean Kessler. Dean Kessler had been at Covington for twenty years, and in that time she had developed a particular dislike for scholarship students who required what she called "special accommodations." I had been in her office twice before, both times to justify the single room, and both times she had looked at me like I was trying to take something from her that I did not deserve. "Sit down, Adrian," she said. I sat. "I understand you have a new roommate." "Yes, ma'am." "Rowan Hale." She pronounced the name carefully, as if testing it. "Transfer from Westfield Academy. Impressive record, until he was asked to leave." She folded her hands on the desk. "Do you know why he was asked to leave?" "No, ma'am." "Neither do I. The records are sealed." She leaned forward. "That makes me uncomfortable. It should make you uncomfortable too. You have access to a dormitory room that other students would be grateful for. You have a scholarship that pays for more than you could ever repay. And now you are living with a student whose history we cannot verify." She paused. "If I discover that either of you is hiding something, I will not protect you. Do you understand?" I understood. I understood that she was looking for a reason to take my room, my scholarship, my place at Covington. I understood that Rowan had given her one by coming here. And I understood that we could not let her find out what we were. That night, we sat on the floor between our beds and made a plan. "We need somewhere to go," Rowan said. "When it happens. Somewhere private, somewhere no one will look." "The basement," I said. "There's an old storage room under the east wing. The lock is broken. No one goes down there." "We need a cover story. Something to explain why we're together so much." "We're roommates. That's enough." "It isn't." He looked at me. "People will notice. The dean will notice. And when people notice, they start asking questions." "So what do we do?" He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "We give them something else to talk about." "What do you mean?" "I mean we let them think they know our secret," he said. "We let them think we're just two people who..." He stopped, and for the first time since I had met him, he looked uncertain. "Who are close." "Close," I repeated. "Close enough that they stop looking for anything else." I felt my face warm. "You want them to think we're together." "I want them to stop looking," he said. "What they think doesn't matter." But it did matter. It mattered to me, though I could not explain why, and I lay awake that night listening to him breathe and wondering what it would be like to let someone close enough to see every part of me, not just the parts I had hidden, but the parts I had forgotten how to show.