Chapter 36

Chapter Thirty Six

MARA

New York was nothing like I expected and exactly what I needed.

The cab from JFK moved through Queens in the early afternoon and I sat with my face close to the window and watched the city arrive in layers — the expressway giving way to surface streets, the buildings gaining height and density, the whole place asserting itself with a confidence that didn't ask your permission or your comfort level. San Francisco was a beautiful city. New York was something else. Something older and louder and completely indifferent to whether you were ready for it.

I was ready for it.

The dorm was on the lower east side of campus, a building that looked serious from the outside and was functional on the inside in the specific way of places designed for people who were there to work. My room was small. The window faced another building. The radiator against the wall looked like it had opinions and would share them loudly at three in the morning.

I stood in the middle of the empty room with my bags around me and looked at it.

Mine.

All mine.

I unpacked the way I unpacked everything, methodically, with a system, and by six PM the room looked like somewhere a person lived. The bioluminescence book on the desk. A photo of my mother on the windowsill, one of Jess and me from the formal, one I'd printed from the overlook night, Cole and me in the city light, which I'd taken without him knowing and he'd never seen.

I called my mother. She answered before the first ring finished, which meant she'd been holding the phone.

"I'm here," I said.

She exhaled. "Tell me everything."

I told her everything. The cab, the building, the room, the radiator with its apparent personality. She asked the right questions and laughed in the right places and when we hung up twenty minutes later I felt the distance for the first time, properly felt it, the three thousand miles as a physical thing rather than a number.

I sat with it for a while. Then I got up and went to find dinner.

The dining hall was full of people doing what I was doing, navigating newness with various degrees of composure. I got food and found a table near the window and ate alone and watched the room and felt something that wasn't loneliness exactly but was adjacent to it, the particular feeling of being somewhere that didn't know you yet.

New York didn't know me.

That was the whole point.

Cole called at nine. I was in bed with the NYU orientation packet and the radiator was already confirming my suspicions about its character.

"How is it," he said.

"Loud. Small room. The radiator sounds like it's arguing with itself."

"That tracks."

"The campus is serious. Everyone looks like they came here to do something specific."

"So do you."

"I feel like I'm pretending."

"You felt like that at Westbrook until you didn't." His voice was easy and certain. "Give it two weeks."

I looked at the ceiling. Different ceiling. No water stain. "How's Sacramento."

"Good. First full practice tomorrow. Coach runs a different system than I'm used to, more motion pre-snap. I've been studying film for three days."

"Of course you have."

"You'd like it. It's actually interesting when you break it down."

"You're going to make me interested in football formations."

"I'm going to try." A pause. "Marcus made food tonight. Said it was his grandmother's recipe. It was genuinely excellent and I'm annoyed about it because now I have to be nice to him."

I laughed. "You were going to be nice to him anyway."

"Probably. Don't tell him." Another pause, warmer. "Tell me something about New York."

I thought about it. "From the cab I saw a man walking three dogs, a cello case on his back, eating a slice of pizza. Just going somewhere. Completely normal apparently."

Cole was quiet for a second. Then he laughed, the real one. "Only there."

"Only here."

We talked for another hour about nothing specific and everything actual, the way we'd been talking since October in the kitchen with the textbooks between us, the vocabulary of two people who had learned each other well enough to mean things without laboring over the translation.

When we hung up I turned off the light and lay in the dark of my New York room and listened to the city outside, which was doing things at eleven PM that San Francisco reserved for special occasions. Horns and voices and a siren somewhere and underneath it all the deep low thrum of a place that didn't stop.

I thought about my mother in the house on the street I'd grown up on. I thought about Jess in Portland starting her own new room. I thought about Cole in Sacramento watching film and learning a new system and being genuinely annoyed about Marcus's cooking.

I thought about everyone I loved doing the hard brave thing simultaneously, all of us in our separate new places, all of us figuring out who we were when we weren't standing in the geography of who we'd been.

I had wanted that. I had wanted to find out what I was when nobody had pre-decided it.

It was happening right now. This was it. This small room with the opinionated radiator and the photo on the windowsill and the bioluminescence book on the desk and the window facing another building, this was the beginning of what I'd sent every application for.

Seventy days until November fifteenth.

Seventy days and Cole would walk through JFK and I would meet him and the distance would fold back into the shape of us standing in the same place again.

I could do seventy days.

I had done harder things than seventy days.

I closed my eyes and listened to New York doing its endless thing outside the window and felt the size of the life ahead of me, enormous and unwritten and entirely possible.

It was everything I'd asked for.

I was ready to meet it.