Chapter 31

Chapter Thirty One

MARA

May came and everything accelerated.

Senior week, finals, the particular velocity of a school year arriving at its own conclusion. The hallways had a different quality to them now, something looser, the social architecture that had held everything in place for four years visibly softening at the edges. People who had never spoken were suddenly friendly. Old grudges were being quietly retired. Even the teachers seemed to be holding things lighter, grading with a generosity that hadn't been available in February.

I moved through it and let it be what it was.

My finals went well. I knew they would — I had spent the year building toward them and the foundation was solid. Calc, bio, English, the rest. I sat in each exam room and worked through the questions with the clean focused certainty of someone who had done the preparation and was now just doing the work. Kamali's final was the last one, Thursday afternoon, and when I turned it in and walked out into the spring corridor I stood still for a moment and felt the specific silence of something completed.

Four years. Done.

Outside Jess was waiting on the front steps with two drinks from the coffee cart and the expression she had when she'd been patient for exactly long enough.

"Well?" she said.

"Good." I sat beside her. "Really good."

She handed me a drink. We sat in the afternoon sun and didn't say much and that was its own kind of perfect, the two of us having arrived somewhere together without either of us having planned to.

"Portland," she said after a while.

"New York," I said.

"We're going to be terrible at staying in touch."

"We're going to be excellent at staying in touch."

She considered this. "You're probably right. You're very disciplined about things."

"And you're nosy enough to want updates."

She almost smiled. "Accurate." She looked out at the front steps, at the seniors moving in and out, this last week of something. "I like who we both ended up being this year."

I looked at her. Jess said real things plainly and without warning, which I had come to love about her. "Me too," I said.

Cole found me after. He'd had his last practice of the regular season that afternoon and he came across the parking lot in his practice clothes with his hair still damp and the easy post-practice looseness he had, and he sat beside me on the steps and Jess gave him a look that meant she was leaving and stood up and went without ceremony.

"Last final?" he said.

"Done." I turned to him. "All of it. Done."

He looked at my face for a moment. "How does it feel."

"Strange. Like putting down something heavy you've been carrying so long you forgot it was heavy."

He nodded like he understood exactly, which he did. "My last practice was today. Not the last ever. Just the last one here."

"How was it."

"Coach said some things at the end. About what he hoped for us." He looked at his hands. "He's not a sentimental man but he tried. You could tell he meant it even when the words didn't quite fit."

I looked at him in the afternoon light, at the person he'd been quietly becoming all year, the one who noticed things and said them plainly and showed up. "What did he say."

"He said the game teaches you how to get back up. That everything else in life is just variations of that." Cole paused. "Then he told us to eat something because we looked terrible."

I laughed. "That's good advice."

"It really is." He reached over and took my hand. "Walk with me."

We walked the school perimeter, the long way around, something I'd done alone a hundred times in two years and was doing now with him. The fields, the gym entrance, the science wing where a light was still on in Kamali's lab, the parking lot and back to the front. The whole circuit of a place that had been the geography of four years and was becoming the geography of something you carry rather than something you move through.

He was quiet for most of it. I was too. It was the good kind.

At the front steps we stopped and he turned to look at the building, the whole face of it, brick and windows and the Westbrook banner above the entrance that had been there since before either of us arrived.

"I used to think this place was the whole world," he said.

"So did I."

"It's not even close."

"No." I looked at the building beside him. "But it was where we were."

He turned to me. "I need to tell you something."

I waited.

"I've been thinking about what my mom said. About what you showed me how to be." He held my gaze. "I want you to know that I know what that means. Not just the bio grades or the test scores. The rest of it. The paying attention. The showing up for things even when it's inconvenient. The deciding something matters and not flinching about it."

"Cole—"

"I learned that from watching you. All year." He said it plainly, without asking for anything back. "I just wanted to say it out loud."

I looked at him in the late afternoon, in the May light that was doing the April thing still, gold and specific. I thought about October and the milk carton and fifty dollars an hour and every distance between then and this.

"You already knew how," I said. "You just needed a reason."

"You were a very good reason."

I held his hand on the front steps of Westbrook High and thought about New York and Sacramento and September and everything September meant. It was there, the weight of it, not gone, not manageable exactly. Just held. The way you hold things that matter.

"Graduation's Saturday," I said.

"Five days."

"My mother has already cried once and we haven't even gotten to the ceremony."

"My mom has a new dress." He smiled. "She bought it in March."

I leaned my head against his shoulder on the front steps while the afternoon went gold around us.

Five days.

We had five days of this specific thing.

I was going to be present for every single one.