Chapter Text
Bloom drops onto her bed, breathless and so sweaty even her eyeballs feel damp. She lifts her wrist to her face, blinks through the moisture, and checks the time. Seven at night on the dot. She started at two. God, unpacking sucks.
Five hours. Five hours to get through three suitcases and a giant bag of miscellaneous stuff bought from Target two days ago. Could she have done it then? Yeah. Could she have done it yesterday? Also yes. But what would be the point if she wasn’t scrambling last minute before her roommate shows up? The dogma—never do today what you can put off until the day after tomorrow—must not be broken.
The weather’s still nice—sunny, breezy, very first week of fall. She rolls over to face the window and tries to breathe it in, but the damn thing only opens a crack. Liability reasons, apparently. What if someone (underage, obviously), drunk off their ass on Cucumber Lime Svedka, throws it open too far and gets launched by the wind out of the window and three floors down? Or gets a D on their chem final and decides to end it all? America’s full of what ifs, she’s learned. They don’t call it the land of lawsuits for nothing.
Still, Bloom loves it here. The school’s old (three hundred years?—refer to the booklet) and looks more like a medieval YA romance film set than an actual institution, and—most importantly—she has a place of her own, if you don’t count a roommate and the two other girls sharing the suite next door. IELTS, SATs, TOEFL, IB—all those seemingly random jumbles of letters that cost her parents half their retirement savings finally paid off. “Thank God,” she’d heard them mutter in the kitchen after the full-ride admission letter came. No way they could’ve paid the sticker price of fifty grand a year, room and board not included.
Sure, it’s not Boston or New York City, more of a “the college is the town” type place tucked into a forest somewhere in New England. But that’s fine. It’s still better than the dusty, one-foot-in-the-grave town she grew up in back in Italy—the kind of place people forget exists until they’re obligated to make a detour triggered by a low fuel warning on their car’s dashboard. Even if it’s mildly soul-crushing that every time she tells someone where she lives now—usually in a three-message conversation spawned by them replying “omg where??” to her instagram story—they either go “where is that?” or “like, near Boston?”
Still better than there. By a lot.
The fourth and final suitcase lies open on the floor, its folded winter clothes forming a face that looks dubiously into Bloom’s soul. The bed creaks as she tries to stand up—and so does her spine. Fine. Power nap it is.
***
Ding!
The sound of the notification is barely audible, but somehow still manages to wake Bloom up—probably because it lines up with whatever bizarre version of time her jet-lagged body’s running on. She opens her eyes to the darkness of the room, blinking off sleep and trying to remember where she is. Her phone’s buried in the pocket of her jeans, lighting up with a blinding flash of 5:30 a.m.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck.
No alarm. Rookie mistake. She shuts her eyes in defeat—just as the full-body discomfort hits her like a truck: the jeans itch and squeeze in all the wrong places, the underwire bra is stabbing the ribs, and the cheap fabric of the shirt makes her want to peel her skin off along with it. Shower first, unpacking second, she decides, and stumbles off to the suite bathroom.
The roommates arrive at eight (according to the group chat that came to be shortly after Campus Housing gave all their numbers to each other), along with the rest of the student body. Bloom got here last week—an international student perk that makes her feel like she’s crashing a VIP party meant for the real moneybags who pay in-state tuition multiplied by three. The extra week exists so they can Uber to a dealership and buy a Porsche in cash.
In the shower, she plans her attack. Out of the shower, she executes it. What took her all afternoon yesterday only takes an hour this time. Today, stress is her friend.
With everything unpacked (and the last few clothes aggressively shoved into drawers), Bloom could finally relax—if her brain weren’t wired like a fire alarm. Too bad her nervous system doesn’t know the difference between meeting three new people at once and getting held at gunpoint. The mere thought of that sends her heart in an overdrive.
She glances at her watch. Breakfast’s already started.
Downstairs, she swipes into the dining hall and eats her lonely yogurt parfait in silence. The room’s surprisingly full—international students, early-arrival athletes, all clustered into small groups. It’s an embarrassingly sharp realization that she’s the only one sitting alone. Not a great start.
She shovels the rest of the yogurt into her mouth, dumps the empty bowl on the dish return belt, and speed-walks out of there before anyone can look at her too long. It’s not enough to keep telling yourself no one cares. The only way to really kill the feeling of being observed like a sad little zoo monkey is to read everyone’s minds. Since that’s not an option, Bloom takes the next best route—leaving.
Her watch reads 7:30. Half an hour until she meets the girls.
That thought alone makes her hands start shaking again. Should she just go sit on her bed and wait for them to show up?
“Giving desperate…” whispers the little bitchy voice in her head.
The warm weather beckons her to stay a while, and the grassy lawn nearby is a great vantage point—she will see who and when shows up, and will make her perfect timely entrance once everyone has more or less situated. The plan is air-tight.
With her butt on the ground, Bloom puts on the earphones and gets to work: on the menu is going through all her social medias, checking messages and scrolling through the feeds. Around her, the world hums—yelling and laughter, a bouncing ball, the occasional rustle of paper, all underlined by birdsong.
She’s just finishing her WhatsApp duties—feeling triumphant as the last notification disappears—when she notices the steady stream of students hauling their belongings in large rolling carts toward the quads. By the time she’s done with Snapchat, her shoulder is slouching into her knee, and she's lost in the feed.
It's during her scheduled Instagram doomscroll that it happens.
“Watch out!”
The shout cuts straight through the song in her earphones. Bloom looks up just in time to register a football hurtling at her face. Her internet-fried brain issues a delayed order: dodge. She tries.
She fails.
The football slams into her shoulder with full force, knocking her halfway onto the grass.
“I’m so, so sorry!” someone calls out, footsteps pounding toward her. “Are you okay?”
She blinks up, breath caught. God, why do these things only ever happen to her?
The voice belongs to a blonde guy, crouched beside her. She catches his eyes—blue. Pretty.
“Yeah,” she mutters quickly, grabbing his outstretched hand and finding herself upright before her brain fully catches up. Her shoulder pulses.
“I’m glad,” he says, smiling awkwardly. “I’m really sorry, again.”
She nods, unsure what else to say, and watches him jog back to his friend with the ball. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, with a half-up man bun that makes him look so hot it’s ridiculous. Bloom swallows, mouth suddenly dry. The pain is not quite there—a pretty boy sighting must’ve left her body in a state of shock.
First day and already lovestruck. Cupid’s got unconventional methods these days, she thinks, speed-walking back toward the dorm.
***
The suite is chaotic, full of boxes and bins to the point Bloom can barely reach her room. Clearly, they’ve been here a while—some things are already unpacked, and the common space is halfway transformed with a plush rug, bean bag chairs, and two different lamps, tastefully mismatched.
“There she is!” chirps a girl Bloom hadn’t even seen—small, energetic, and stylish in a cropped red tube top and baggy jeans that swallow her shoes. Her jet-black hair is tied up in two high pigtails. “Flora, your roommate’s here!”
That prompts another girl to peek from one of the bedrooms—olive-skinned, with long brown hair swept elegantly over her shoulder. She smiles warmly. “We were wondering where you went. Could you pass me that bag on the floor?”
Bloom steps in, grabs the duffel, and sets it on the bed, freezing as she lifts her eyes to observe the room. The transformation is dramatic. Flora’s side of the room looks like it’s been colonized by an entire rainforest. There are plants—plants—everywhere.
“Hey, Flora, can you—” Another unfamiliar face walks in, cutting off mid-sentence when her eyes land on Bloom’s arm. She’s wearing full techwear despite the warm weather, her hair short and dyed bubblegum pink. “That looks bad, girl. Are you okay?”
Bloom looks down for the first time to inspect the damage. The bruise, colored with every shade of blue and purple, is so large her tee sleeve barely conceals it.
Right. That football.
And suddenly, yeah—now it hurts.