Chapter Text
When Sterling was nine she packed her bag with an energy she never felt before. This wasn’t just sheer anticipation. It was excitement, mixed with nerves, mixed with an invigorating level of pride at this newfound independence. She’d never gone to a real sleepover before. Occasionally she and Blair had stayed with their grandparents, but that hardly counted considering they were old, and boring, and family.
This time though, it was real. She would be sleeping at a friend’s house without Blair. And not just any friend — April Stevens. Her best friend.
So with that in mind she packed her favorite pajamas, her lucky socks, and the bubble gum toothpaste that Blair always hogged for herself. All of her belongings for the night tucked neatly in the backpack she normally took to school and Sterling held it with care in her lap the whole ride there.
Now, age eighteen, and hopefully a little more mature, that excitement has faded.
As Sterling sits in the backseat of her parents car amongst a high pile of suitcases she feels the pounding of her heart slowly rising until it’s in her throat and in danger of coming up along with her breakfast. All because she’s on her way to college and moving into her first dorm.
She knows this is good for her, knows she loves the campus, but there’s an overwhelming amount of what if’s to go through on the near six hour car ride to Durham, North Carolina.
What if she doesn’t make any friends? What if her roommate smells bad, or is messy, or even worse — what if she’s mean? What if Sterling misses Blair so much her heart explodes?
It’s only been a week since they dropped Blair off at FSU with Bowser’s old bounty hunting connections and every day Sterling has felt like a huge piece of her is missing. She compared it to losing a limb. Her parents said that was dramatic but Blair of course agreed, insisting over FaceTime that she felt the same way.
What if that was all Sterling could stomach? What if missing Blair, her parents, and Chloe was too much? Would it feel like all of her limbs were gone instead of just the left arm that her twin had claimed? What if she missed Bowser and Yolanda? Hell, at this point Sterling’s pretty convinced she’s sad about Miss Cathy too.
“Almost there, Sterl,” Anderson calls from the driver's seat. As if she hasn’t been watching the ETA on their navigation system for the last five and a half hours.
She takes a deep breath. This is normal. Kids go off to college all the time. Blair is at school right now and she’s doing great. Sterling would be doing a lot better if she had been the one to go first and Blair was in the backseat holding her hand, but this is what she’s got and she’s going to get through it. She’s been through worse.
Change is difficult. She learned that the hard way junior year. First she broke up with Luke, only to discover that she also liked girls (one girl especially), and the exciting high of letting herself explore that came crashing down within a few hours as one reveal after another turned her life upside down.
Maybe that’s why this change feels so disruptive. After that one terrible night and nearly two years of therapy it seems as if they all just got comfortable with each other and their new normal, and now it was being ripped apart all over again.
The bathroom that she split with Blair will now be overrun with a group of strangers in their shower shoes. The bedroom that was spacious and all her own, now traded for cramped and shared. The closet, the mattress, the dresser, and the desk are all smaller than anything Sterling has grown up with, which is why Blair warned her not to pack so much. Sterling will have to tell her later that she was right.
“We can bring the extra stuff back home. It’s no problem.”
“What if she needs something, Anderson?”
“It’s not going to fit.”
“That’s fine,” Sterling chimes in before it can turn into an argument. She knows her mother is just nervous and desperate not to cry, and that her father is just trying to steady the course. “If I’m missing something important you can always send it to me.”
“Or come for a weekend with it!”
“Sure, dad.”
Sterling knows how this goodbye is going to play out. She watched it happen with Blair. They’re going to pull her into a tight hug, whisper so many reassuring things into her ear — how much fun she is going to have (but not too much fun), the new friends she’ll make in no time, that they’re just a phone call away — and they’ll make it look easy for her sake. But Sterling knows from her sister’s drop off experience that as soon as she disappears from the rearview mirror they won’t hold their tears back anymore. It’s that knowledge that makes her squeeze a little tighter, sniffle through a second and then a third love you, and wait until the car disappears from view to go back inside.
She trudges up the stairs, wiping at her eye and taking deep breaths. With her parents now gone she’s about to walk into her first moment alone with her roommate, and Sterling will be damned if she sniffles like a child through her whole first impression with this stranger.
“You cried too?”
Her feet shuffle to a stop in the middle of the room, apparently unable to hide the signs of tearful goodbye. It’s the too that she said that gets Sterling to nod, relieved that she doesn’t have to be embarrassed of her puffy eyes and red nose.
“How far are you from here?”
“Almost six hours.”
“That’s not too bad,” Rachel points out. “I’m eight hours.”
“That’s a little worse.”
“Yeah,” she laughs. “Definitely.”
Sterling knows that they should figure out some boundaries for living in the same space since they don’t actually know each other, but it’s their first night and she doesn’t really want to think too much. She’s too exhausted from an emotionally draining day that began at an early hour. So they just talk, stumbling through the awkward basic questions of likes and dislikes, what their major is, and trying to remember where any of the buildings are.
“The library is on the other end of campus by the science building.”
“Which science building?”
Rachel pauses. “Maybe we should just print out a map.”
When Sterling cracks open a second sleeve of Oreos after telling a story about working in the yogurt shop (she doesn’t dare mention bounty hunting), she decides that for now it feels like a sleepover. The dorm, which seems nothing like home, appears to be way more temporary than it actually is and the lack of parental supervision creates what she hopes isn’t a habit of snacking so late into the night. But once the chatter dies down and Rachel interrupts a stiff silence by shutting the light to go to sleep, Sterling remembers that sleepovers aren’t always a constant loop of snacks and laughter — including the very first one she went to.
That night the light in April’s room quickly went out at the sound of parents arguing downstairs. Her reach for the bedside lamp was like a reflex, hiding them in the dark as harsh words were thrown carelessly around just below them. It sounded nothing like the disagreements Sterling had overheard from her own parents. This was a fight in every sense of the word.
Mr. Stevens' voice boomed up the stairs in a tone Sterling didn’t think her father even had, and there was a tremor in the otherwise delicate tone of his wife, as well as in the young girl who tugged her blanket up higher. Apparently once the house went dark the family that often baked cookies and watched movies together lost their light as well.
“You know,” Sterling said, voice drastically softer than the ones downstairs, “Blair and I usually make a fort at night if we’re scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Then why are you squeezing my hand so tight?”
April looked down as if she didn’t even realize she was doing it. “I thought you were scared,” she insisted, loosening her grip like she might let go.
Sterling held on. “If I was,” she said hypothetically, “would you want to make a fort?”
It was simple then, piling up pillows and blankets, and whispering until they felt better. Now when staring at the ceiling and listening to her roommate snore starts to feel daunting, all Sterling can do is get up to fill her water bottle, in hopes that the walk down the long hallway clears her head.
For the most part it’s quiet. The fountain trickles slowly in an otherwise empty hall, a few muffled voices can be heard through thin walls, and there’s new noises like footsteps up above and the subtle hum of fluorescent lights that Sterling is sure she’ll get used to in time.
As she’s putting the cap back on her bottle a door clicks shut a few rooms down. Sterling instinctively follows the sound to a familiar face staring blankly back at her for a moment.
Should she smile? Should she wave?
Sterling doesn’t get to decide, because April Stevens just rolls her eyes and disappears into the bathroom without a word.