Someone Else by Rebecca Phillips Page A

he had single-handedly rendered me braindead.
    My knees still quaking, I swiftly scaled the stairs and peered into Jamie’s room. He was passed out cold. I made sure his door was shut tight before carefully maneuvering the stairs again, making sure to use the railing to support my unsteady body.
    This time I found Michael stretched out on the living room couch, head back, eyes closed. I slid in beside him, nudging his leg with mine. His head lifted and he gave me a tired smile. “You’re exhausted,” I said, snuggling into him.
    “I was in class all morning, then I packed up the car and drove for six hours non-stop. I think I’m just crashing from all the coffee I drank on the way home.”
    “Are you glad to be home?”
    “I’m glad to see you,” he said again. “Yeah, it’s good to be home. It’ll be nice to have some decent food and a bathroom all to myself for a couple of days.”
    “And some rest,” I said when he yawned.
    “Yeah, that too.”
    I twisted my body so that it lay flat against his and slipped my hand under his shirt. He was warm and smelled faintly of dog drool from Leo’s enthusiastic welcome.
    “I missed this,” he said, his fingers raking across his back.
    There were certain things I promised myself I would not say this weekend, no matter what. Because I knew if I said the words out loud they would set a snowball rolling downward, growing bigger and more dangerous by the second, picking up speed with every inch it traveled. But I said them anyway.
    “This is too hard.”
    Michael opened his eyes to look at me. “What is?”
    “The long-distance thing.” I bit my bottom lip. Too late to take it back now. “It’s too hard for me.”
    “It’s hard for me too,” he said, stroking my hair.
    My thoughts came out in a rush, like someone had opened a release valve in my brain. “I was so excited about you coming home but I dreaded it too, because I knew you’d just have to leave again.”
    “Well, I’m here now, so...”
    “I know, but we have four years of this. How can we survive four years when it’s only been a few weeks and already I’m sick of it…” I stopped then because my throat had swelled up, damming the flood.
    “I hate it too,” Michael said. “It sucks. But we knew it was going to be like this, right?”
    “You don’t hate it. You like Avery. You’re having a blast there.” I didn’t mention what I had once believed, deep down—that he would hate Avery and miss me so much that he’d transfer to our local college within weeks and swear to never leave home—and me—again.
    “I like it,” he said carefully. “But not all the time. Sometimes I get homesick. Sometimes living with so many different people really gets on my nerves. Sometimes I’m miserable when I think about you, back here. That’s why I stay so busy, and why I distract myself with school and my friends.”
    I had to laugh a little. That sounded all too familiar. Michael and I were alike in a lot of ways, but that was one of our biggest similarities—in the face of despair, we kept our minds busy and tried not to wallow.
    “We can make it work,” he said, brushing some hair off my cheek. “It’ll get better.”
    I stared into his storm-cloud eyes, trying to soak in the optimism that shone there. Then I took his hand and we went upstairs to my bedroom, where we locked the door and turned off the lights.
     
    ****
     
    The same day I found out that Michael was coming home for the weekend, I’d fixed it with Charlie—my supervisor at Chick N’ Burger—to have that Saturday off. Michael came back to my father’s house in the early afternoon, looking a lot more rested than he had the night before.
    “I slept in until eleven,” he said when I commented on his lack of dark circles. “The house was so unbelievably quiet.”
    He seemed to be enjoying his short reprieve from dorm life, at least.
    We stopped by the kitchen so Michael could say hello to my dad, who was busy getting his