Chapter 29

Chapter Twenty Nine

MARA

I submitted the enrollment confirmation to NYU on a Monday morning before school.

No ceremony around it. Just me and my laptop at the kitchen table at six forty-five AM, my mother already gone for her early shift, the house quiet and the street outside still dark. I read the confirmation page once, clicked submit, watched the screen change to the congratulations message with the violet NYU logo and the words that made it real.

Then I made toast and went to school.

I told Jess between first and second period. She grabbed my arm in the hallway and squeezed it once without saying anything and that was exactly right. I told Kamali after lab and she looked at me over her glasses with the expression she reserved for things she'd seen coming that had finally arrived.

"Good," she said. Simply and completely. "Good."

Cole already knew. He'd known since Saturday at the kitchen table. But when I texted him from the bathroom between second and third — submitted — he replied in under a minute with: there she is. Then: proud of you doesn't cover it but it's what I have.

I stood in the bathroom and read it twice and went to calc and tried to pay attention and succeeded about halfway.

The rest of the school day had a specific quality to it, the way days do when something has shifted underneath them. Same hallways, same faces, same noise, but I moved through it differently, with the particular lightness of someone who has made an irreversible choice and found it solid underfoot. April was six weeks away. Graduation was May. New York was September.

Everything between now and then was borrowed time and I was going to spend it carefully.

After school I went to the lab and sat with Kamali for an hour, not working, just talking — about the NYU program, the research opportunities, what to expect from a city that was nothing like this one. She'd done her graduate work in Boston and had opinions about East Coast academic culture that were useful and specific. She also said, at the end, something I wasn't expecting.

"You changed this year," she said. "Not your ability. That was always there. But something else. You started taking up more room."

I thought about that on the walk home. About heaters and corner tables and the slow process of learning that space was something you were allowed to occupy.

Cole picked me up at six for dinner. Just us, the place near the water where we'd had tacos the night he'd told me he was done pretending, the first time we'd gone somewhere that was ours rather than proximate to something else. He'd chosen it deliberately, I understood, because he was that kind of person, the kind who marked things with the right places.

We sat at the same picnic table. Same heat lamp working halfway. The bay dark and scattered with light.

He ordered for both of us because he remembered what I always got, which I had come to understand was one of his specific love languages, the remembering. I looked at him across the paper trays and the chip bag and thought about October again, which I'd been doing a lot, measuring the distance between then and now.

"Stop thinking so hard," he said.

"I'm celebrating."

"You're also thinking."

"I can do both."

He smiled. The full one. "What are you thinking about."

"October," I said. "The first time we came here. You said you were done pretending."

"I was."

"It was brave."

He looked at me. "You were the brave one. Every step."

"You sat at my table uninvited."

"That wasn't brave. That was strategy."

I laughed. He stole a chip. The heat lamp hummed between us and the bay did its quiet thing and I let myself be fully in it, in the realness of him across from me, knowing that these ordinary moments were the ones I'd reach for later when New York was loud and new and nothing was familiar yet.

After dinner we drove to the overlook near the park, the one with the view of the whole bay and the bridge lit up gold against the dark. We sat in the car with the engine off and the heat fading slowly and I was in his jacket again, the one I'd never fully returned, and his arm was around me and my head was on his shoulder.

"Four months," I said.

"September."

"Are we going to talk about it? Actually talk about it."

He shifted slightly so he could see my face. "What do you want to say."

"I don't know how to do long distance," I said. "I've never done it. I don't know the rules."

"There aren't rules."

"There have to be some."

He considered it. "Honesty," he said. "When something's wrong we say so. We don't let things go quiet and build into something. We call, not just text. And we visit when we can."

"Sacramento to New York isn't a weekend trip."

"No. But winter break is long. And I'll have away games on the East Coast. And flights get cheaper if you book early." He said it practically, the way he approached things he'd already decided to figure out. "I've been looking at it."

I turned to look at him. "You've been researching flights."

"Since January."

"Cole."

"I wanted to know what we were working with." He met my eyes. "I'm not going into this blind, Mara. I've thought about it."

I looked at him for a long moment. Outside the bridge glittered across the water, enormous and indifferent and beautiful. "What else," I said. "What else have you been thinking."

"That it's going to be hard," he said directly. "Some weeks harder than others. That there will be nights where the time difference makes it worse and we're both exhausted and it's not going to feel romantic. It's going to feel like maintenance." He held my gaze. "And I think it's worth maintaining."

"Even across three thousand miles."

"Especially across three thousand miles." He reached up and touched my face with the backs of his fingers, light and familiar. "You're going to have a whole life there. New people, new city, the research you actually love. I want you to have all of it."

"And you?"

"I'll have football and Sacramento and a very loud roommate situation probably. And a reason to book flights east." He looked at me steadily. "I'm not asking you to hold back on any of it. I'm just asking you to call me."

Something broke open in my chest quietly, the way ice breaks in late winter, not dramatic, just the giving way of something that had been held tight for a long time.

"I'm going to miss you so much," I said.

"I know." His voice was lower. "I'm going to miss you too. Every day."

He pulled me back against his shoulder and I tucked myself into the familiar shape of him and we sat there at the overlook with the city spread out below us and said nothing for a long time.

The bridge lights held steady across the water.

Four months.

That was what we had. And we were going to use every day of it, and it was going to be good, and then September would come and we would do the hard thing because we were both people who did hard things.

I knew this about us.

It was enough to hold onto.