The ball smacks the gym floor so hard I feel it in my teeth.

That's Suki Kimura's set. Perfect arc, perfect spin, placed exactly where my hand needs to be three-tenths of a second before my hand gets there. I'm mid-air when I connect, and the kill lands so clean the libero doesn't even dive. Just watches it hit.

Rubber squeak. Sweat on my upper lip. The gym smells like floor polish and someone's too-sweet body spray, and underneath it all, that particular Ridgeway scent, old wood and industrial cleaner and years of girls leaving everything on this court.

"Nice." Suki doesn't yell it. She says it once, already resetting, already scanning the rotation.

I land. My knees absorb the shock. My forearms are already bruising from an hour of passes, and I can feel tomorrow's soreness settling into my shoulders like rent I haven't paid yet.

She sets again. This time a back set, quick, and I have to trust it's going where she says it's going because I can't see her hands. I swing anyway. Another kill.

The setter-hitter relationship is like this: she puts the ball exactly where I need it, and I don't think. I just go. It requires a kind of faith I'm not good at anywhere else in my life.

"Rowe." Coach Herrera's whistle is around her neck but she never uses it. Just the voice. "Your approach is two inches off. Fix it or sit."

I fix it.

Practice runs another forty minutes. Suki sets to me eleven more times. I'm not counting. Okay, I'm counting. But only because her sets feel different from every setter I've played with. There's no hesitation. No adjustment mid-flight. She commits and expects me to be there.

Nobody expects me to be anywhere.

After, in the locker room, the team is loud. Keely Salazar is telling a story about her sister's boyfriend that involves a raccoon and a broken window, and Dina is doing her hair in the mirror with the focus of a surgeon.

I shower fast, pulling my hoodie over damp skin, stuffing my feet into slides. The hallway is quiet. My phone has been in my locker for two hours, which is the longest I've gone without checking it since I transferred.

Seven notifications.

Six are the team group chat. Keely sent a meme. Dina replied with a single period. Someone named Britt is asking about film review times.

The seventh is a text from a number I deleted but still recognize the way you recognize a scar.

miss u. not in a weird way. just miss u.

Taya.

I read it twice. Three times. My thumb hovers over the screen. The locker room door opens behind me, and I shove the phone into my hoodie pocket so fast I almost drop it.

Suki walks past. Hair still wet, tucked behind one ear. She smells like coconut shampoo and clean cotton, and for one stupid second I catalogue that information like it matters.

It doesn't matter.

"You coming?" She's got her bag over one shoulder, already walking toward the dorm. Like it's simple. Like walking somewhere with someone is just a thing people do.

"Yeah." I fall into step beside her. The evening air hits my damp skin and I shiver, but not from the cold. From the transition. Court-me to world-me. The version who knows exactly where to be, to the version who hasn't figured that out yet.

Our dorm room is a standard double. Suki's side: one plant on the windowsill, books in a stack that's definitely organized by some system I can't crack, bed made tight enough to bounce a quarter. My side: three open suitcases I haven't unpacked, phone charger already tangled in the sheets, yesterday's practice jersey hanging off the desk chair.

She sits on her bed. Opens a textbook. Just like that. Like the day is done and the evening is for reading.

I sit on my bed. Three feet of floor between us. The overhead light is off. She's using a desk lamp. The room is quiet in a way that makes my skin itch because quiet means I have to think, and thinking means I'm reaching for my phone, and reaching for my phone means I'm reading that text again.

miss u. not in a weird way.

Everything with Taya was in a weird way.

I put the phone face-down on my mattress. My thumb finds the power button, presses, releases. The screen dies. I turn it back on.

Suki turns a page.

"Hey," she says, without looking up. "The dining hall does late-night waffles on Tuesdays. If you want."

Tuesday. That's tomorrow. She's inviting me to eat waffles. This is a completely normal roommate interaction and I'm treating it like a bomb I need to defuse.

"I want," I say, too fast.

She looks up. There's her face doing a thing I don't have vocabulary for yet, but her mouth does this thing, not quite a smile, more like the sketch of one someone erased too fast, and she goes back to her book.

My phone buzzes again. Face-down on the mattress.

I don't flip it over.

But I don't delete the number either.