Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty Three

COLE

January came back cold and serious.

The break ended the way breaks do, suddenly and without ceremony, and Westbrook reassembled itself on a Monday morning with the slightly dazed energy of people who'd been somewhere warmer and softer and had returned to find everything exactly where they'd left it. Same hallways. Same noise. Same everything.

Except not the same. Because Mara and I walked in together.

Not dramatically. We didn't hold hands in the parking lot or make an announcement. She'd parked on the street and I'd pulled into the lot and we met at the entrance the way we'd agreed without making it into something. But we walked through the front doors together and down the main corridor together and when I stopped at her locker before mine she stood beside me and talked about something her cousin had texted her from San Jose and it was ordinary and easy and visible, and that was the point.

I watched people notice. It was quick, the noticing, the way it always was at a school this size — a look, then another look, the recalibration. Mara kept talking about her cousin and either didn't see it or had decided not to spend energy on it, which was one of the things about her I'd come to understand was not indifference but a carefully chosen economy of attention.

Jess appeared at the locker and looked at us standing there and said, "Finally," which made Mara say "we've been together since October" and Jess say "I mean finally you're not pretending you're not."

I liked Jess. I'd decided this definitively sometime around the formal.

The day moved through its ordinary rhythms and at lunch I sat beside Mara at the corner table and Jess and Dex were already there and the four of us ate and talked and it felt like something that had been finding its shape for months and had arrived at it. Comfortable in the way that things are comfortable when they've stopped being new and become real.

After lunch Mara had the lab and I had practice and we went in opposite directions and I looked back once and she was already gone, moving through the crowd with that particular efficiency of hers, and I smiled at the space where she'd been and kept walking.

Practice was good. Sharp, focused, the team finding its post-break footing faster than Coach expected. He had us run new plays in the second half of the session and I moved through them with the clean certainty I had when things were right in the rest of my life, which I'd noticed was a pattern. Football was better when I wasn't carrying anything heavy. This year I wasn't carrying anything heavy.

Dex jogged beside me between plays. "You look annoyingly well-adjusted."

"I'm fine."

"You're more than fine. It's irritating." He said it without heat. "I told Jess I'd drive her home Thursday."

"Good."

"We're not—" He stopped. Started again. "It's not like you and Mara."

"Okay."

"I'm just saying."

"Dex. You found her a book."

He was quiet for four seconds. "It was a good book."

"Obviously."

Coach blew the whistle and we went back to the drill and I didn't say anything else about the book and neither did he but the point had been made and we both knew it.

After practice I texted Mara: still in the lab?

She replied: just finished. heading home.

I'll walk you.

A pause. practice ended twenty minutes ago. you've been waiting?

I had things to do.

Cole.

I was in the parking lot. come on.

She came through the side exit four minutes later in her jacket, backpack on, the bioluminescence book tucked under one arm because she'd been bringing it everywhere since Christmas in the specific way she consumed things she loved, in every available margin of time. She looked at me leaning against the wall and shook her head slightly.

"You waited in the cold," she said.

"It's not that cold."

"It's forty degrees."

"I've played football in thirty." I pushed off the wall and fell into step beside her. "How was the lab."

"Good. Kamali let me run an extra trial on the enzyme experiment. I got cleaner data." She tucked her hair back from the wind. "How was practice?"

"Good. Coach is happy."

"Is your shoulder okay?"

I looked at her. "You and my mother."

"It's a valid question. You were rolling it again last week."

"It's fine. It's always a little tight in the cold."

She made a sound that meant she was filing this away for future reference and would return to it. I'd learned to recognize that sound.

We walked the long way to her car, which added seven minutes and neither of us mentioned it. The streets around the school were the after-practice version of themselves, quiet and shadowed, most of the day's traffic gone. Our breath made small clouds in the cold air.

"Berkeley sent something," she said, after a while.

I looked at her. "What kind of something."

"An email. They want additional materials. A supplementary portfolio for the science honors program." She said it carefully, with the precision she used when she was containing excitement she didn't fully trust yet. "It's not an acceptance. It's just a request."

"Mara. That's significant."

"It might be nothing."

"It's not nothing. They don't send those to everyone."

She looked straight ahead. "I know," she said quietly. The contained thing was still there but something had gotten through the edges of it, something that looked like hope wearing its good clothes.

I reached over and took her hand as we walked. She held on without looking at me.

"You're going to get in," I said.

"You don't know that."

"I know you. Same thing."

She was quiet for half a block. Then: "The portfolio is due in three weeks. I'll need to work every night."

"Okay."

"Our time will be limited."

"I'll take what I can get."

She looked at me then, finally, and the contained thing had become something warmer and she didn't try to manage it back down and I was glad because it was the right feeling and she deserved to feel it.

"Okay," she said.

Just that. Okay.

It was everything.