Free The Dark Space by Ruthie Knox, Mary Ann Rivers

bullshit, though, and that I was just too full of myself to ever notice her before.
    That day, her absence was an ache in my molars, and I couldn’t give a fuck about Jason and Finn, Beth, Sarah, any of them. I wanted to kiss Winnie. I deserved to kiss Winnie.
    I knew this was bullshit, but feelings. What are you gonna do?
    I saluted Mags on my way out the door, fingers flying on my phone’s screen before I was all the way out of the building. Where are you, Winnie-girl?
    I didn’t hear from her right away, so I pounded on the door to her room. I checked the lounge, the library, the student center. No Winnie. I checked the places I liked to go when I wanted to be left alone — down by the river, the quiet upper deck of the nondenominational chapel building, the dugouts at the baseball diamond, the clearing underneath the huge pine tree behind the library — but it was fucking cold, and I was grasping at straws. And being a dick, actually, because if I’d found her at any of those places she’d sure as fuck have been there in part to avoid me, and I knew it.
    But all I was thinking, combing over this campus I knew like the constellation of freckles on my knee, was No Winnie. Where’s Winnie? Gotta find Winnie. Something wrong with Winnie. Like a dog that knows something’s wrong with its owner.
    Fucking Lassie, right? Danger! Winnie danger! Find now.
    I couldn’t find her.
    I curled up in the warm space next to the dryer in one of the laundry rooms and rocked back and forth. I felt then like I was losing my mind — or not my mind, but like I’d lost some part of myself, given it to her when I was supposed to keep it . . . It’s hard to describe. We’d been so tight up in our business for weeks, hands in each other’s back pockets, her eating dinner with me and my parents three or four nights a week, me sleeping over in her room — I felt like she’d been ripped forcibly away from me, and it was only with her gone that I could see how big a hole she left.
    Things had been so amazing, my whole semester sprinkled in fairy dust — hanging out with my mom, holding my dad’s hand, throwing out the box in my head with “LA” stamped on it — I didn’t want to believe it was all meaningless separate from Winnie.
    Can a crush have a corona? Where you feel so much, everything shifts and realigns around this person, but when you lose the girl you lose the entire substance of your so-called transformation?
    That’s what I was worrying about when she called me. If I was just that fucked, when I’d thought a few hours ago I was at the top of my game.
    It was so loud wherever she was, I could barely hear her voice. “Calvin!” she shouted. “Calvin Darling!”
    She said my name like I was someone she’d known in her youth, and we’d just bumped into each other on a transatlantic voyage.
    “Where are you?” I asked.
    “I’m at the Longhorn!”
    The Longhorn is a bar over in Grimes. Occasionally a group of students will head over there in a scrum to line-dance and drink dollar beers on a Wednesday night.
    “Who are you with?”
    “Nobody! But I want to be with you. Come over here, Calvin Darling! I’m lonely.”
    She was drunk, is what she was.
    Winnie doesn’t drink.
    “Tell me where to find you.”
    “It’s not big , Calvin Darling,” she said. “I’m on a stool at the bar. I’m not difficult to locate .”
    I didn’t tell her I’d spent the past four hours trying to locate her. I just said, “Don’t move. Twenty minutes.”
    “Do you have a cowboy hat, Calvin Darling?” she crooned. “Can you pretend to be a cowboy?”
    “Do not move off that stool,” I repeated, and by that time I was at my car, keys in the ignition, yanking at the parking break. “I’ll be there before you know it.”
    Maybe for her, time buckled. For me, twenty minutes was twenty minutes, and I kept hearing the way she’d said my name. Like it was the punch line to a joke. Calvin Darling. Do you have a cowboy