Chapter 30

Chapter Thirty

COLE

April arrived and the city changed its light.

San Francisco did this specific thing in spring that I'd grown up inside of without naming — the fog pulled back earlier, the afternoons went gold instead of grey, the whole place came into a different version of itself like something waking up. I'd always liked April. This one I was paying more attention to, logging it, because I understood now that some seasons are the last of something and you don't always know that while you're inside them.

Senior year had a month left.

I sat with that on a Tuesday morning before practice, on the bleachers alone, looking out at the field. The grass was the deep green it got in spring and the sky was doing the April thing, high and clear, and I thought about the freshman who'd sat in these same bleachers three years ago trying to figure out if football was still his after his father left. Whether it was his or his father's. Whether anything was his.

It was his. I knew that now. All of it.

Mara texted: where are you. Jess says practice doesn't start for twenty minutes.

I looked at the message. The surveillance network she and Jess operated was something I'd given up resisting in February.

bleachers. thinking.

about what.

I looked at the field. everything. nothing. the usual.

She sent back: come find me when you're done with everything and nothing.

I found her at the corner table. She had her bioluminescence book open and a coffee from the cart by the front entrance and she was in the specific posture she had when she was actually reading, completely still, not performing reading but doing it. I sat beside her instead of across and she moved to make room without looking up.

After a minute she closed the book and looked at me. "Talk."

"I'm okay."

"Cole."

"I'm okay. I'm just—" I thought about the bleachers and the field and the freshman who needed to know what was his. "It's ending."

"School."

"Everything. School, this—" I gestured at the cafeteria, the corner, the heater rattling its familiar rattle. "In six weeks we graduate and I go to Sacramento in August and you go to New York in September and this specific version of things is done."

She looked at me steadily. "Yes."

"I know it's supposed to be good. It is good. I just—"

"You're allowed to feel both things."

I looked at her. "Yeah?"

"Yes." She closed her hand over mine on the table. "Missing something and wanting it at the same time isn't a contradiction. It's just true."

I turned my hand over and held hers. "When did you get good at this."

"I've always been good at this. You just didn't know me yet."

That landed somewhere real. I squeezed her hand. "The Sacramento offer is official. I signed Tuesday."

Her face did the thing it did when she was containing something large. "You didn't tell me."

"I'm telling you now."

"Cole. That's enormous."

"I know."

"Division one football. On scholarship." She looked at me with the full attention she gave things that mattered. "How does it feel."

"Like standing at the edge of something real." I looked at the table. "Like that thing you said about New York. Wanting to find out what you are when nobody's pre-decided it."

She was quiet for a moment. "That's exactly what it is."

"You told me that. The essay you read me."

"You remembered that."

"I remember everything you tell me." I met her eyes. "You know that."

She looked at me for a long moment with that look I'd spent months learning, the one that meant she was letting something through rather than managing it back. "I'm proud of you," she said. "So proud of you."

We sat in the cafeteria and ate lunch and talked about Sacramento and New York and August and September and let it be real rather than hypothetical for the first time since March. It wasn't easy. It was also not as hard as I'd expected, because the thing about Mara was that she made difficult conversations feel like problems worth solving rather than things to survive.

After school I had practice and she had the lab and we went our separate ways with the easy certainty we'd built, which was its own kind of gift, knowing someone well enough that goodbye for now didn't require ceremony.

Dex jogged beside me at practice and said nothing for the first two laps, which was unusual enough that I looked at him.

"San Diego's official," he said.

"I know. You told me."

"Jess is going to Portland."

"Also know."

"Everyone's leaving," he said. Not sadly. Just as a fact he was processing in real time.

"That's what happens."

"Does it get better?"

I thought about Sacramento and New York and flights booked in January. "Yeah," I said. "Different. But better."

He nodded and we ran the next lap without talking and that was enough.

That night my mother made dinner and we ate at the kitchen table and she asked about Sacramento specifics, practical questions, move-in dates and equipment lists, the logistics of a new life approached with the same efficiency she'd applied to every transition we'd made together. Halfway through she put her fork down and looked at me.

"I need to say something."

I waited.

"I know this year has been about football and college and all of that." She folded her hands on the table. "But that girl changed things for you. I watched it happen." She held my gaze. "Don't lose that. Whatever September looks like. Don't lose what she showed you how to be."

I looked at my mother across the dinner table. At everything she'd done alone and quietly and without asking for recognition.

"I won't," I said.

She picked up her fork. "Good." She ate a bite. "She's coming for dinner Sunday. I invited her."

"You didn't tell me."

"I'm telling you now." She almost smiled. "Same thing."

I looked at my plate and thought about April light and endings that were also beginnings and a girl in a green dress who'd let me sit at her table and changed every room I walked into after.

Some things you hold carefully.

I knew how to do that now.

She'd taught me.