Chapter 1 The Weight Of A Room

• Junie POV
• I have been laughed at in eleven different rooms on this campus, and I could rank them for you like a girl ranking her scars.
• Tonight's room made the top three.
• The cake was still warm in my hands when Vienna Cole looked at it, looked at me, and said my body was basically a confession. Not in those words. Vienna's too smart to say something ugly in ugly words she wraps her knives in ribbon so nobody can call her out without looking unhinged for noticing the blade.
• "Wow, Junie." Her eyes flicked from the tart to my stomach and back, slow, so everyone in the room had time to follow the path. "Making the dessert and eating the evidence. Efficient."
• Four people laughed. Out of fifteen in that kitchenette, only four but four laughs in a quiet room land like forty. I felt it start where it always starts, that hot flood crawling up from my collarbone into my ears, fast, like a match dropped under my skin. Twenty years of practice keeping my face still, and Vienna still finds the one seam in the armor every single time.
• "It's a lemon tart," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which counted as a win. "Want a slice?"
• "I'm good." She patted her flat stomach, slow, deliberate, like she was showing off a car in a lot. That was the whole joke. Here's my body. Here's yours. We both know which one this room prefers.
• Grayson stood behind her, saying nothing.
• My ex. Three months out from being my boyfriend, still stuck in this elective with me because neither of us had the sense to drop it when things ended. He didn't laugh I'll give him that much, because fairness costs me something and I still pay it. He looked at the floor instead. Shifted his weight. If you didn't know him, you might mistake that for decency.
• I knew him. That look was a boy waiting for the discomfort to pass so he could stop having to think about it.
• Somehow that was worse than if he'd laughed.
• "Vienna." Professor Marlowe didn't even glance up from the sheet pan she was scraping clean. "Enough."
• "I was complimenting her work ethic." Vienna's eyes went wide and innocent, and a few more people laughed at that one, because it was actually a good line — I'll give her that too. Vienna Cole has never once said something cruel without also making it clever. That's how she's gotten away with three straight years of this without anyone calling it what it is.
• I cut the tart into twelve slices, because the recipe card said twelve slices, and I have never once in my life deviated from a recipe card mid-panic. I laid them out on wax paper squares. I did not cry. I did not throw the tart at her head, though I want it on record that I pictured it in vivid, buttery detail.
• Here's what nobody tells you about being the fat girl in a room: you learn math nobody else has to learn. Every doorway, I'm calculating whether I'll brush a chair. Every photo, I'm angling my body so the widest part hides behind someone else. Every laugh, I'm running a fast, involuntary audit — was that about me — before the thought even finishes forming. It's exhausting in a way that's invisible, because from the outside it just looks like I'm quiet. Shy. Nobody sees the spreadsheet running behind my eyes, tallying exits and angles and whether my thighs will touch the seat back.
• I washed my hands. I didn't look at Grayson again, which took more discipline than the tart had.
• That's when I noticed Rhett Calloway watching me from the doorway.
• My first thought, and I promised myself years ago I'd stop editing my own thoughts into something more flattering my first thought was great, an audience. Rhett doesn't take the baking elective. Rhett Calloway exists on this campus to be tall and tan and aware of both facts, the kind of good-looking that stops conversations mid-sentence, the guy the campus paper puts on its "most eligible" list every year like being born with good bones is an achievement. I'd said maybe four words to him in two years, three of which were "sorry" after I clipped his elbow in the dining hall line.
• He wasn't laughing.
• That threw me harder than anything Vienna had said. I braced for the smirk, the exchanged look with some friend I hadn't clocked, the small cruelty traded around a room like pocket change. Instead he stood there with his arms crossed, watching the whole thing with an expression I couldn't place — until I was halfway through wiping the counter and finally understood what it was.
• He looked annoyed. Not at me.
• "You made those?" he asked, once the room had cleared out and it was just him, me, and Professor Marlowe pretending to reorganize a drawer of whisks that didn't need it.
• "I did."
• "Can I have one?"
• I looked at him a beat too long, hunting for the angle. There's always an angle when a guy who looks like that talks to a girl who looks like me — a bet with his friends, a bit for a video, some cruelty I hadn't spotted the shape of yet. I couldn't find one. He just stood there, hand half out toward the tray, confused by my hesitation like I'd said something in a language he didn't speak.
• "Yeah," I said. "Sure."
• He took a slice, ate half of it in one bite in a way that would've horrified my mother, and made this small, involuntary sound — not performed, not a bit, just real and surprised — and said, "Okay, that's actually insane. Are you secretly a professional?"
• "I'm a sophomore failing macroeconomics," I said, before I could stop myself, and he laughed — really laughed, head back, the kind you can't fake — and something in my chest did a small, unfamiliar flip that I immediately, aggressively told myself to ignore.
• Because I know how this goes. I know boys like Rhett Calloway don't end up as anything but a funny story in the life of a girl like me — a girl whose ex can't meet her eyes in a room full of people, a girl whose body is apparently open conversation at a baking club meeting. Whatever this was, five minutes and a slice of tart and a laugh that sounded real, it wasn't going anywhere. Things like that don't happen to girls like me. They happen to girls like Vienna.
• I told myself that the whole walk back to my dorm. I told myself that while I sat on my bed and ate none of the leftover tart I'd brought home, even though I wanted to, because some small poisoned part of my brain had decided that eating it alone, in front of myself, was its own kind of confession.
• I almost believed it. Right up until the text came in.
• Unknown number: this is rhett, got your # off the sign-up sheet in the kitchenette. that tart may have ruined every other dessert for me forever. teach me?
• I stared at the screen for four full minutes before I typed anything. Deleted it. Typed it again.
• Somewhere in my dorm's group chat, a screenshot from tonight was already circulating someone's angle on the kitchenette, Vienna's line about the cake and the evidence, three rows of laughing emojis stacked underneath it and I hadn't seen it yet. I would, in about eleven minutes. It would take the small warm thing blooming in my chest and try to stomp it flat.
• But for four minutes, before I saw that screenshot, I got to just be a girl holding a phone, staring at a text from a boy who'd watched the worst version of her night happen and hadn't laughed once.
• I typed back: Only if you bring your own apron. I'm not sharing mine.
• He answered so fast I knew he'd been staring at his phone too.
• rhett: deal. tuesday?
• I stared at the water stain on my ceiling for a long time after that, the one shaped vaguely like Florida that my roommate Priya and I had named Steve, and thought: this is either the best thing that's happened to me all year, or the thing that finally breaks me.
• I had no idea, lying there, that it would be both.