Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty Four

MARA

The portfolio consumed three weeks of my life completely.

I worked on it the way I worked on everything important — methodically, in layers, the structure first and then the substance and then the details that made the substance mean something. Kamali let me use the lab after hours twice a week. I digitized my best experiment write-ups, annotated them, added the context that turned data into argument. I wrote a personal statement about bioluminescence that started as one thing and became, somewhere around the fourth draft, about my mother and the medical bills in the kitchen drawer and the way some things make their own light precisely because the conditions around them are dark.

I didn't show anyone until it was done. Not Jess, not my mother. Not Cole, though he asked once, gently, and accepted the not yet without making it a thing.

I submitted it on a Tuesday night at eleven forty-seven PM, thirteen minutes before the deadline, because I'd been revising the final paragraph until the last possible moment and that was simply who I was.

Cole was awake. I knew because he texted at eleven fifty: did you send it.

I hadn't told him the deadline was tonight. how did you know.

you've had your focused face all week. tonight felt like the end of something. did you send it.

I looked at the confirmation email on my screen. yes.

good. now sleep.

I'm not tired.

Mara.

I know, I know. I looked at the ceiling. what if it's not enough.

A pause. Then: it's enough. you're enough. sleep.

I put the phone down and lay in the dark and tried to follow instructions. It took a while. My brain had been running at a specific high pitch for three weeks and it didn't know how to come down from it in a single evening. But somewhere around midnight the exhaustion won and I went under and slept better than I had since January.

The weeks after the submission were quieter. The good kind of quiet, the kind that comes after effort, when you've done the thing and the outcome is no longer yours to affect and you have to make peace with that. I'd never been good at making peace with things outside my control but I was trying, and trying was something.

Cole helped with that without meaning to. He was good at the present tense in a way I was still learning, good at being inside whatever was happening without one eye on what came next. I'd started borrowing that from him, small amounts, in careful doses.

February arrived.

Jess and Dex became official sometime in the first week, which Jess announced by sending me a single text that said fine. yes. don't. and I sent back I said nothing and she said you were thinking it which was accurate.

The four of us fell into a rhythm that felt earned, the kind of easy that comes from actual time rather than proximity. Lunch at the corner table, drives after practice when the weather allowed, a Saturday in late February where we went to the farmers market near the park because Dex had claimed he needed specific produce for something he was cooking and nobody believed him but we all went anyway.

Cole and I walked slightly ahead of Jess and Dex through the market stalls and he had his hand in mine and the morning was cold and bright and smelled like bread from the bakery stand and coffee from somewhere.

"My coach called yesterday," Cole said.

I looked at him. "College coach?"

"Yeah. Sacramento State. They've been watching the season stats." He said it the way he said significant things, evenly, without inflation. "They want to schedule a visit."

I stopped walking. He stopped beside me. "Cole. That's—"

"It's just a visit."

"It's a recruitment visit. That's significant."

"Maybe."

"Cole."

He looked at me, and underneath the even delivery something was there, the same thing I'd had about Berkeley, the contained version of hope. "Yeah," he said. "It's significant."

I squeezed his hand hard. "I'm proud of you."

Something moved through his face at that. "Yeah?"

"I've been proud of you since the ninety-four," I said. "This is just more of the same."

He looked at me for a moment in the cold morning light. Then he raised our joined hands and pressed a kiss to my knuckles and kept walking and I walked beside him and felt the fullness of it, the two of us in our separate uncertainties, moving toward separate things that were also somehow the same direction.

Behind us Dex was arguing with a vendor about tomatoes. Jess's voice cut through, precise and decisive, and the argument ended. Cole glanced back and smiled.

"She's good for him," he said.

"She's good for everyone. It's exhausting."

"You're good for everyone."

"I'm precise and demanding."

"Same thing, in the right context." He said it simply, like a fact, and I felt it land the way his simple things always landed, without fuss and deeper than expected.

We stopped at the bread stand and he bought a sourdough loaf without consulting anyone and tucked it under his arm and looked entirely satisfied with this decision and I looked at him standing there in the February morning with a bread loaf and thought, not for the first time, about NYU.

About the distance between San Francisco and New York.

About Sacramento State and what a recruitment visit might become.

We hadn't talked about it. The specific it, the one that lived past May, past graduation, past the edge of the year we were standing in. We'd talked around it, approached it, retreated in the gentlemanly way of two people who didn't want to put weight on something still being built.

But it was there. It had been there since I'd submitted the NYU application and he'd told me to send it anyway.

"Hey," Cole said.

I looked up.

He was watching me with the expression that meant he knew where I'd gone. He didn't ask. He just held out a piece of the bread he'd torn off, warm still from the stand, and waited.

I took it.

Some conversations had their own timing. This one wasn't ready yet.

But it was coming.

We both knew it was coming.