“Okay, I think that’s all covered.” Rosé said as she righted herself, ”can we stop? I’m starting to get tired.”

“No!” Mia yelled, crawling out from under the bed.

“It’s not here! We searched everywhere, even after I said you hadn’t left it here yesterday and that you had not even taken it out of your bag when you got here today!”

Mia sighted and sat on the bed, resting her head on her hands. Rosé only spoke that fast when she was getting really frustrated, and Mia got why, she was tired too. They’ve spent the last hour searching the whole room and her journal was nowhere to be seen. Mia was starting to get the urge to cry.

“Hey,” Rosé said, sitting by her side and putting an arm around her shoulder, “its okay, no need to cry now, you’ll find it.”

“How?!”

“Well, we could try tracing it back.”

“Tracing?” Mia asked curious, slowly lifting her head from her palms to look at Rosé.

“Yeah, we’ll think about the places you’ve been today and where you could possibly have left it and contact those places.”

Now that she thought about it, this should have been the obvious option from the start, but Mia didn’t want to think about anything that happened earlier. She was so embarassed, only thinking of it and how much of a fool she had been to even try to ask Emily out without even stopping to consider how she might already be dating someone made her face burn and her eyes brim with tears.

“Uhh..”

“Now, why are you crying again?!” Rosé exclaimed, her arms going tighter around her friend and sighing. This would be a long day.

-

She ended up not contacting the library that day. She called the library on Thursday but the clerk said they hadn’t found anything that matched her journal’s description that week, and so there was nowhere to look for it, which meant she had either dropped it somewhere else in between or...no. She did not want to think about the other possibility. Mia had avoided thinking about what happened on Tuesday and, whenever she could, she avoided Emily herself. It was not the easiest feat or even the smartest one seeing as they had a paper to present the next week but she couldn’t help it. Her heart still ached and the embarrassment of it all still set her cheeks on fire every time she remembered it. It was probably even stupid to think that Emily having her journal woud be a possibility anyway.

“Something on your mind?”

Mia looked up from her now very messy piece of lasagna to where her mom was staring at her from the other side of the table. “Not really…”

“Is that so? Could have fooled me with the way you were just staring at the lasagna as if it’d give you all the answers if you just scrambled it enough.” Her mom joked. “Are your classes giving you a hard time? I know this isn’t your dream major but-”

“My classes are FINE!” Mia raised her voice, “I just lost my journal, that’s all.” She said, not really looking away from the table as she spoke. Damn it! She hated how unstable she felt then! Untethered, like anything could set her off into a tirade. Her mom didn’t deserve that.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you.” She apologized softly, her head hanging a bit from the pressure of her own thoughts. “I’m not really hungry, and this week was pretty stressful so I’m gonna sleep early today, ok?”

“okay...” Her mom responded as she saw Mia stand up, plate in hand to take to the sink. When Mia disappeared into the kitchen her mom sighed and looked pensively at the table.

- - - - - - - - - -

On a slow afternoon shift on a Friday at the local library, the sound of the keyboard was the only thing she could notice in the trance she was in, focused solely on getting all the codes of the new books perfectly sorted into the file with their corresponding data on it. She would be sure to get this done today, she would finish entering their codes and data and then tomorrow she would—

“Victoria!” Exclaimed Richard, putting a hand on her shoulder and startling her out of her hardly obtained focus.

shit.

“What is it?!” she exclaimed back.

“She’s been standing there trying to get your attention for minutes!” He pointed to the front of her desk and sure enough there was somebody there.

Emily appeared to be a bit uncomfortable to be the center of the discussion and smiled apologetically at her for it. “Hi, Viv…”