The Roommate Situation by Zoe X. Rider

showed up.”
    “And you had one last year?”
    “Both years. Different guys.” He side-eyes me. “Both of them lived.”
    “Lucky asshole.”
    After a moment, he says, “It must have been fucked-up, finding your roommate like that.”
    I push my hands deeper into my pockets. “Fucked-up is one way to put it.”
    “If you ever want to talk about it.”
    “I think what I need to do,” I say, “is not talk, if that’s okay. About that, I mean. Anything else is fair game.” The whole Skip thing had started to fade back into a nice, safe closet. I kind of liked it to stay there.
    “Fair enough.” He takes another drag.
    I watch a group of people pass on the other side of the street, the campus side, laughing.
    “Does it get easier?” I ask.
    “What—people dying?”
    “Classes. Once you get past the boring introductory stuff.”
    He shrugs. “It’s a lot of work the whole way through, I guess. Do you need help with any of your classes? I mean, I never took economics, but—”
    “Not unless you can help make them less mind-numbingly fucking boring.”
    He smiles. “Probably not.”
    “The beer does help,” I say.
    A couple of girls are headed in our direction, dressed to go out, deep in conversation: “He said he was studying in the library and turned his phone off, but that doesn’t even begin to explain—”
    I watch them pass, watching Derek out of the corner of my eye at the same time. Watching him watch the tops of the buildings on campus. Watching him lift his cigarette to his mouth.
    “So,” I say, “if someone was willing to model your stuff, would you use them?”
    “Sure, I guess.”
    “Would you pay them?”
    He drops the cigarette on the sidewalk, grinds it out with his foot. “I couldn’t pay much. I don’t make all that much. Are you offering?”
    “As long as you don’t include my head in the photo.” There. It was out. My solution to paying for a guitar.
    He slides his gaze toward me. It’s a quick appraisal; then he’s stepping off the sidewalk, his hands in his jacket pockets. “Let me think about it,” he says as I fall in step.
    “At least the chest harness.”
    “You’re just dying to try that on, aren’t you?”
    “No, not especially.” I want to try the cuffs on, on both wrists this time. For more than a few seconds. When I’m not shell-shocked. I have no idea where that’s coming from, the memory of their feel in my hands, of that one Derek put on my wrist to show off how it worked. What were they like with locks on them? My head swims a little as we climb the steps to the building. My arms can almost sense what it would be like to have my wrists locked together.
    I say, “The harness just doesn’t look that interesting, lying there like it is.”
    “Like a pile of spaghetti.”
    “Fettuccini. The other sellers put theirs on mannequins, which is better, but I don’t think that looks all that great either. Though…”
    He yanks the door to the building open, and when I don’t finish my sentence, he says, “What?”
    My face is hot. I’ve been running my mouth and— Damn. I say, “Of course, if the chest harness is meant for a woman…”
    “Like I give a shit who wears them,” he says.
    He heads for the stairwell. “The harnesses are the worst seller, so you might be right. It isn’t presented right.”
    “There you go. Raise the price a few bucks, and give me a cut. If it still doesn’t sell, you’re not out anything. If it does, you’re still not out anything, and I make a little money every time one goes out the door.”
    “Maybe you should switch to business instead of economics,” he says.
    “Yeah, because that doesn’t sound just as fucking boring.”
    “All right,” he says, shedding his jacket in the room. “Back to work.”

Chapter Six
    “Late night last night?” Chuck asks as I slump into a seat across the table from him.
    “Astronomy can go fuck itself.” I’d seen the dark circles in the bathroom mirror when I’d