Chapter 21: Chapter One

Chapter Twenty One

COLE

Winter break was two weeks.

Two weeks sounded like nothing until Mara left for her aunt's place in San Jose the day after school ended and suddenly two weeks was a very specific and inconvenient amount of time. I drove home from dropping Dex at the airport for his family trip and sat in my room and looked at my phone and thought about how thoroughly one person had rearranged the furniture of my daily life without either of us planning it.

I texted her at nine that night.

how's San Jose

She replied eleven minutes later, which I'd learned meant she was in a conversation and had stepped away to answer. loud. my aunt has four kids under ten. I've been here three hours and I've already mediated two disputes about a television remote.

who won

nobody. I hid the remote.

that's not mediating that's just hiding evidence

it worked didn't it

I smiled at my phone in my empty room. how long are you there

ten days. then home for Christmas. you?

here the whole time. mom's doing Christmas Eve dinner.

A pause. Then: that sounds nice.

I read that twice. Something in the two words, the way she'd said it simply without adding anything, made me think about her house on Christmas Eve. Her mother working the morning shift. The particular quiet of two people in a house that was warm but small.

I typed: come.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Cole.

my mom will make enough food for twelve people. she always does. come for dinner.

Another pause, longer this time. I don't want to intrude.

you won't be intruding. my mom has been asking about you since October.

she doesn't know me.

she knows you make me study. she thinks you're a hero.

I could almost see her face at that, the expression she had when something amused her and she was trying not to show it. Then: let me ask my mom.

I set the phone down and felt something settle in my chest that had been unsettled since she'd left that morning.

She texted back forty minutes later. Her mother had a shift until four but they could come after. Both of them. Her mother had apparently agreed immediately, which told me something about Elena Delgado that I already mostly knew.

both of you, I confirmed.

both of us, she said.

Then: goodnight Cole.

The ten days passed the way breaks pass when you're waiting for them to end — slowly and then in a rush. I worked out, helped my mom with the house, drove Dex to get food when he came back early because his grandmother's cooking had, in his words, become a philosophical experience he wasn't ready for. I read two books, which was two more than I'd read voluntarily in recent memory, and I thought about Mara more than was strictly necessary and didn't apologize to myself for it.

She texted throughout. Not constantly, not in a way that demanded anything — just the thread of her, running through the days. A photo of her youngest cousin asleep on the kitchen floor surrounded by toy cars. A question about a calc concept that turned into a forty-minute conversation about something else entirely. One night she sent a voice note by accident and immediately sent three texts apologizing and I played it three times because it was fifteen seconds of her laughing at something off-screen and I wasn't going to pretend that wasn't the best thing that had happened all week.

Christmas Eve she knocked at my door at five-thirty.

My mother opened it before I made it downstairs, which was becoming a pattern in my life. I heard her voice, warm and immediate, and then Mara's lower and careful, and by the time I came down they were already in the kitchen and my mother was showing Mara something on the stove and Mara was asking a question about it with the focused attention she gave everything worth understanding.

Elena Delgado arrived twenty minutes later with a dish she'd made — something she'd been specific about, she wasn't coming empty-handed, Mara had texted me this like a warning — and my mother received it like a gift from someone she'd known for years and they fell into conversation in the kitchen doorway with the ease of two women who'd spent a long time figuring things out alone.

I stood in my own hallway and watched this happen.

Mara appeared beside me. She'd worn a dark red sweater and her hair was down and she smelled like the cold. She looked at the two mothers in the kitchen doorway and then looked at me.

"They're going to be friends," she said quietly.

"They already are."

She looked at them a moment longer. Something moved through her expression, soft and complicated, the look she had when something mattered more than she'd prepared for.

"Hey," I said.

She turned to me.

"Hi." I said it low, just for her.

"Hi." The corner of her mouth moved. "I missed you."

She said it simply, no cushioning around it, and I knew what it cost her to say simple things simply because I'd watched her learn to do it in real time. I reached out and took her hand and she let me.

"I missed you too," I said.

Dinner was loud in the best way. My mother had made enough for twelve as promised and nobody went hungry and the conversation moved between Spanish and English without stopping and at some point Mara's mother told a story about Mara at age nine that made everyone at the table laugh and Mara covered her face and said Mom in a tone that made her mother tell a second story.

I sat beside Mara and felt her shoulder warm against mine and watched her laugh the real laugh, the uninhibited one, and thought about October again, about the corner table and the rattling heater, about a girl who'd been conserving herself for so long she'd forgotten what it felt like to use it all up.

She wasn't conserving anything right now.

She was right here, all of her, and she was laughing.

I'd have failed a hundred classes for this.