She would open her eyes and the entire horrible scene from the night before would storm into her consciousness. Her disappointment was so sharp, she felt like a child who had discovered, upon sneaking downstairs early in the morning, that Santa had not come. When these awful feelings flooded her she would turn over and sob back to sleep. Intermittently, she worried about crossing paths with Rusty somehow, somewhere, but she couldn’t remember whether he had told her what the hell he did every day. Had he lived on the edge of campus, in one of those three-stories, where she always thought grad students held keg parties for the undergrad girls? Could he be a grad student? Where had he come from? Had what happened between them even happened at all? Or had it been one wicked nightmare? Millie came by and left a package of Ramen noodles on the hallway floor, and Trisha ate them under her covers, watching episode after episode of Grey’s Anatomy on Hulu. Trisha had gone right to Millie’s room when she returned from her arctic walk of shame at ten past one that morning, but she could see through the crack under the door that the light was out.
