Chapter 28

Chapter Twenty Eight

MARA

I made a list.

Of course I made a list. It was the most me response to an impossible decision and I was done apologizing for the way my brain worked. I sat at my kitchen table on a Saturday morning with coffee and a legal pad and I wrote Berkeley at the top of one column and NYU at the top of the other and I made myself be honest.

Berkeley: close to home. Close to my mother. Thirty minutes from Sacramento if Cole got the offer and took it. The honors program was serious and well-funded. California roots, California network, a path I could see the shape of.

NYU: New York. The honors science cohort with professors whose research I'd read in actual journals. A city that was completely unknown to me, which was terrifying and also something else, something I didn't have a clean name for. Three thousand miles from my mother. Three thousand miles from Cole.

Full merit scholarship on both.

I stared at the two columns for a long time. The logical answer was obvious. The logical answer was Berkeley, close and connected and thirty minutes from a boy who loved me and a mother who left birthday candles stuck in foil on the counter. The logical answer fit neatly into the architecture of everything I'd built.

The problem was I'd written the NYU essay about light. About things that make their own light because the conditions around them are dark. And somewhere between the first draft and the fourth I'd understood that I was writing about more than bioluminescence. I was writing about wanting to go somewhere nobody had pre-decided who I was. About what it might feel like to walk into a room where nobody knew about the milk carton or the rattling heater or two years of eating lunch next to a broken radiator because it was the least visible corner.

I wanted to find out what I was when I wasn't defined by what I'd survived.

I closed the legal pad and called Jess.

She arrived twenty minutes later with two coffees from the place on Clement Street, which meant Cole had told her I needed her, which meant Cole knew me better than I was always prepared for. She sat across from me and pushed a coffee across the table and looked at the closed legal pad.

"List?" she said.

"List."

"And?"

"The list knows what I want and I'm not ready to admit it."

Jess wrapped her hands around her cup. "NYU."

I looked at her.

"You've known since the email came," she said. "You're not trying to decide. You're trying to be okay with having decided."

I looked at the legal pad. "My mother is here."

"Your mother is also the person who told you to send every application."

"Cole is here."

"Cole told you he's not a reason to make it smaller. He meant it." She paused. "He told Dex the same thing, by the way. That you had to go wherever was right. He said it like it was already settled."

Something moved in my chest. "He didn't tell me he said that."

"He wouldn't." She tilted her head. "He's not going to make it easy for you to stay, Mara. He loves you too much for that."

I looked out the kitchen window. The street was doing its Saturday morning thing, unhurried, the neighborhood sounds I'd grown up inside of, specific and familiar in the way that only home sounds are.

"I'm scared," I said.

"Of New York or of wanting it."

"Both. Neither." I turned my cup on the table. "Of leaving and finding out I was brave enough to go but not brave enough to stay gone."

Jess was quiet for a moment. "That's not a reason to not go. That's just being human."

"Very helpful."

"I know." She reached across and tapped the legal pad once. "Open it."

I opened it. The two columns sat there, patient and complete.

"Which one did you write more in?" she said.

I looked at the page. NYU had seven lines. Berkeley had four.

"There it is," Jess said simply.

Cole came by that afternoon without texting first, which he'd started doing occasionally when he sensed something, that particular instinct of his that I'd stopped being surprised by. He knocked and my mother let him in and he came to the kitchen where I was still at the table and sat down across from me and looked at the legal pad.

"Can I see?" he said.

I turned it toward him. He read both columns slowly, all the way through, without his expression changing. When he finished he turned it back and looked at me.

"Seven and four," he said.

"Jess said the same thing."

"Jess is smart." He folded his hands on the table. "Mara."

"I know."

"Say it."

I looked at him across the kitchen table, at this boy who'd sat here through biology and enzyme kinetics and fear and Christmas and the best Tuesday night of my life, who'd told me to send every application and meant it every time.

"I want to go to New York," I said.

He nodded once. Slow. His jaw moved slightly and then settled.

"Okay," he said.

"Cole—"

"Okay." He said it again, steadier. "Tell me what you need from me right now."

I stared at him. "That's all you're going to say?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. Something. It's New York."

He reached across the table and took my hand. His grip was firm and warm and certain. "It's New York," he said. "And you're going to be remarkable there. And I'm going to be at Sacramento watching film and thinking about you and figuring out what this looks like across three thousand miles." He held my gaze. "And we're going to be fine."

My eyes were doing something I refused to let finish. "You don't know that."

"I know us," he said. "Same thing."

I held onto his hand on the kitchen table and let myself believe him.

Outside March kept moving. April was close.

The decision was made.