Chapter 27

Chapter Twenty Seven

MARA

March moved fast.

It had the feeling of a month that knew it was important and wasn't going to wait for you to catch up. College decisions were coming in across the senior class — acceptances and rejections and waitlists landing in inboxes daily, the whole hallway carrying that specific current of anxiety and relief in alternating waves. Jess got into her first choice in Portland. Dex was going to San Diego on a partial academic scholarship that he mentioned exactly once and then refused to discuss further, which was the most Dex response possible.

NYU sent their decision on a Tuesday.

I was at the pharmacy when the notification came. In the middle of a transaction, a Tuesday afternoon customer buying cold medicine and reading glasses, and my phone buzzed in my apron pocket and I knew, the way you sometimes know, before I'd even seen the screen.

I finished the transaction. I counted the change correctly. I said have a good evening and meant it. Then I walked to the back, took off my apron, took out my phone, and opened the email.

Full merit scholarship. Housing allowance. Invitation to the honors science cohort.

I read it four times. The words rearranged themselves into certainty on the fourth pass and I sat down on the stool by the back cabinet and put the phone face down on my knee and looked at the wall for a while.

New York.

I'd written the application in October, brave the way Cole had told me to be, and then I'd filed it somewhere in the back of my mind under possible but unlikely and turned my full attention to Berkeley because Berkeley was real and close and something I could touch. NYU had been the brave version of me, the one that reached past the practical into the what if.

The what if had written back.

I texted Cole: can you talk.

He called in forty seconds. "What happened."

"NYU," I said.

Silence. "Mara."

"Full merit. Honors cohort."

Another silence. Longer. "Mara."

"I know."

"Say the whole thing out loud. Tell me."

"New York University offered me a full merit scholarship and a place in the honors science program." My voice came out strange, slightly above a whisper. "I got into NYU, Cole."

He exhaled. The sound of it told me everything about what he wasn't saying yet. "That's—" He stopped. Started again. "That is everything you worked for. Everything. You know that."

"I know."

"Your mom?"

"I haven't called her yet. I called you first."

A pause. "Call her. Go home. I'll come by tonight."

"Cole—"

"Call your mom. I'll see you tonight."

I called my mother. She cried, which she never did, which meant it had gotten past all her defenses before she had time to build them. She composed herself in forty seconds and asked three practical questions about the scholarship terms and I answered them because that was how we both processed things, through the logistics, and by the end of the conversation we were both okay.

I got home at seven. My mother had made dinner, real dinner, the kind that required effort, and she'd set the table properly and there were candles, which we never used, little birthday candles stuck into a piece of foil on the counter because that was what we had.

Cole knocked at seven thirty.

He brought flowers. Not elaborate, just something from the corner store, the cheerful practical kind that didn't pretend to be more than they were, and he gave them to my mother first and she took them and patted his face with one hand and went to find something to put them in.

He sat across from me at the kitchen table and looked at me in that direct way he had.

"How do you feel," he said.

"Strange. Good strange." I turned my water glass on the table. "Scared."

"Of New York?"

"Of choosing." I met his eyes. "I have Berkeley. I have NYU. They're both real and they're both good and they're in completely different directions and choosing one means not choosing the other and I—" I stopped. "I don't know how to pick the wrong one."

"There isn't a wrong one."

"There might be."

"Mara." He leaned forward. "What do you want? Not what's practical. Not what makes the most sense on paper. What do you actually want?"

I looked at him across the table. The candles my mother had stuck in foil were lit on the counter and they made the kitchen look warmer than usual, softer.

"I want to know it doesn't change things," I said. "Between us. Whichever one I choose."

He held my gaze steadily. "It doesn't change things."

"Sacramento and Berkeley are thirty minutes apart. Sacramento and New York are—"

"I know the distance, Mara."

"And?"

He was quiet for a moment. Not the uncertain kind. The kind where he was choosing to say something real rather than something easy. "We're not a distance problem," he said. "We're a people problem. And people problems have solutions."

"That's not specific."

"I know." He reached across the table and took my hand. "I'm not going to tell you where to go. That's yours. That decision belongs entirely to you." His thumb moved across my knuckles. "But I need you to hear me when I tell you that I'm not a reason to make it smaller."

I looked at our hands on the kitchen table.

"What if I want to go to New York," I said quietly.

"Then you go to New York."

"Cole—"

"Then you go to New York," he said again, certain and without flinching, "and we figure out what that looks like and we do that instead of whatever we'd be doing if you stayed."

My mother came back in with the flowers in a jar and set them on the table between us and looked at neither of us and busied herself at the stove.

I looked at the flowers. I looked at Cole.

"I don't know yet," I said.

"I know." He squeezed my hand once. "Take the time."

Outside March was doing its thing, cold and restless, the city moving through it without waiting for anyone.

I sat in my kitchen with flowers from a corner store and a boy who loved me enough to mean it and the biggest decision of my life sitting quiet and patient in the center of everything.

It didn't rush me.

I wasn't ready to rush it.