Chapter 16: Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

COLE

She laughed more after that.

Not constantly, not in a way that changed who she was — Mara was still Mara, still the girl who corrected your terminology and moved through the school like she was conserving energy for something more important. But there was something easier in her now, some door that had been left open that hadn't been before. I noticed it in small things. The way she'd look up from her notebook when I sat down and not arrange her face first. The way she texted back faster, without the deliberate pause she used to put in like she was rationing herself.

I noticed everything about her. That had become a fact of my life I'd stopped fighting.

The exam results came back Friday. Ninety-four.

I took a photo of the portal screen and sent it to her before I sent it to anyone else, including Dex, which said something about the current order of things in my life. She replied with a single exclamation mark and then immediately followed it with: I'm proud of you. Then, like she'd surprised herself: genuinely.

I read that second text four times.

Coach found me after practice Friday and told me my starting spot was secure through the playoffs, which was what all of this had been about in the beginning. I stood there in the equipment room listening to him and thought about a girl in a corner of the cafeteria next to a rattling heater and how that had been the actual beginning of something, and this — the starting spot, the playoffs, all the things I'd told myself mattered — felt like the background to it now.

I didn't tell Coach that.

Saturday I picked her up at noon because she'd said she had the afternoon free and I'd said good, without a plan, which was unlike me but felt right. She came out in her jacket, the one with the working zipper she'd bought last month — she'd mentioned it once, casually, not making anything of it, but I'd remembered — and got in the car and looked at me.

"Where are we going."

"You'll see."

"Cole."

"Trust me."

She put her seatbelt on with the expression she had when she was deciding whether to argue. She decided not to. I took that as a win.

I drove us to the botanical garden near the park, which I'd been to exactly once, in seventh grade, on a field trip I'd mostly ignored. I'd looked it up Thursday night because I'd been thinking about what Mara would like, actually like, not what most people expected to be taken on a Saturday afternoon. She'd mentioned bioluminescence once, the marine biology thing she'd given up at twelve, and I'd thought about that. About the way her brain went toward things that were intricate and alive and worth paying attention to.

We walked through the gate and she looked around and something in her face went quiet in the good way.

"This is not what I expected," she said.

"What did you expect."

"I don't know. Somewhere louder."

"You hate loud."

She glanced at me. "I don't hate loud."

"You eat lunch next to a broken heater because it drowns out the cafeteria."

"That's about the light."

"Mara."

"Fine." The corner of her mouth moved. "I find loud exhausting."

We walked the main path and she read every information placard, every single one, and I walked at her pace and read them too because watching her read things was its own kind of interesting. She had this way of going still when something caught her attention, like the rest of her systems paused to redirect the power.

At the succulent section she stopped for a long time.

"These survive because they store everything internally," she said, not really to me, more thinking out loud. "All the water, all the resources. They don't depend on external conditions."

"Is this about the plants."

She looked at me. "Yes it's about the plants."

"Okay."

"Don't read into it."

"I'm not reading into it."

She looked back at the display. "You're reading into it."

"A little." I stood beside her, close enough that our arms touched. "There's nothing wrong with needing external conditions. Things grow better that way usually."

She was quiet for a moment. "That's surprisingly wise for a man who failed bio in October."

"I had a good teacher."

She laughed, the real one, and I felt it the way I always did, like something that had been slightly off had corrected itself.

We found a bench near the greenhouse section and sat with coffee from the cart by the entrance, and the afternoon light came through the glass panels in long pale strips and she had her hands around her cup and her shoulder against mine and neither of us said anything for a while.

"Cole," she said eventually.

"Yeah."

"I've been thinking about New York."

I looked at her. "NYU."

"The application's almost done. I just have to submit it." She stared at her coffee. "It's terrifying."

"Send it."

"It's expensive. The city is expensive. I'd need financial aid and a part-time job and a roommate situation that doesn't—"

"Mara." I turned toward her. "Send it."

She looked up at me. "It's far."

There it was. Not NYU exactly. The distance.

I held her gaze. "Send it anyway."

"We haven't even talked about—"

"I know. We don't have to talk about it today." I took her free hand and held it the way I'd started to, easy, like it had always belonged there. "But don't not send it because of me. Don't make that calculation. I'm not worth shrinking for."

She looked at me for a long moment, this look I was still learning, the one that meant she was deciding how much of something to let through.

"You're surprisingly easy to talk to," she said. "For someone who walked into my lunch period uninvited."

"You let me stay."

"I did." She leaned her head against my shoulder. "I'm glad I did."

I pressed a kiss to the top of her head and she didn't move away and the greenhouse light came through warm and steady and outside the city made its noise and in here everything was quiet and growing and ours.

"Send the application," I said into her hair.

She squeezed my hand once.

She sent it that night. She texted me a screenshot at eleven PM with no caption, just the confirmation screen.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I typed: I knewyou would.

She sent back: goodnight Cole.

I smiled at my phone in the dark like an idiot.

Worth it. Completely worth it.