The kitchen clock ticked. Angie was still watching me, still smiling that soft, calibrated smile.
Behind her, on the counter, her phone lit up with a new notification:
I looked at the coffee. The hoodie. The novel she wasn’t really reading. PerfectGirlfriend 24 11 24 Angie Faith Roommate...
“You okay?” she asked.
I stumbled into the kitchen of our shared two-bedroom, still half-asleep, and found her already there. Hair in a loose ponytail. Wearing my favorite hoodie (the gray one I’d never actually lent her). She was reading a paperback with a cover so tastefully worn it looked like a movie prop. The kitchen clock ticked
“How do you always know?” I mumbled.
That was the thing about Angie. She wasn’t just a good roommate. She was a PerfectGirlfriend —except we weren’t dating. We’d never even kissed. But she did the things girlfriends in commercials did: stocked the fridge with my favorite seltzer, left little sticky-note jokes on the bathroom mirror, remembered the name of my childhood dog. The hoodie
End of piece.