Chapter 38

Chapter Thirty Eight

MARA

October in New York was its own education.

The city changed with the season in a way San Francisco never fully did, the trees along the streets going amber and gold and occasionally a red so specific it looked like something had been lit from inside. I walked to campus through it every morning and still hadn't gotten used to it, still looked up at the trees the way a tourist would, which I allowed myself because being unmoved by that particular display would have required active effort.

The program was serious and I was grateful for it.

Dr. Chen, who led the honors science cohort, had the teaching style of someone who believed the highest respect you could show a student was to expect everything from them. She did not simplify. She did not soften. She assigned reading that required reading and asked questions in seminar that required thinking you hadn't already done before you arrived. I went home from the first three sessions with the specific tiredness of someone whose brain had been running at a higher gear than usual.

I loved it.

I loved it in the way I'd loved Kamali's lab after hours, the clean demanding pleasure of work that required all of you. I stayed late in the library. I found a study corner on the third floor near the window that I'd claimed with the same territorial instinct I'd applied to the Westbrook corner table, and I worked there most evenings with coffee and the ambient sound of a building full of people doing the same.

I'd found two people worth knowing.

Priya was in the cohort, biochemistry focus, from Chicago, with the dry precise humor of someone who had been the smartest person in most rooms and had decided to find that funny rather than isolating. We'd started sitting next to each other in seminar by the second week without discussing it. By the third week we were getting dinner after Thursday sessions at a Thai place two blocks from campus that had become ours in the way things become yours through return.

Noah was in two of my other courses, a literature elective I'd taken for balance and an unexpected statistics requirement. He was from somewhere in Vermont and had the quality of genuinely listening when people talked, which was rarer than it should have been, and he'd become someone I ate lunch with twice a week in the way that happened in new places when people recognized something useful in each other.

I told Cole about both of them on a Wednesday call.

"Priya sounds like Jess," he said.

"She's not like Jess. She's funnier and meaner."

"So exactly like Jess."

"Don't tell Jess I said that."

"I'm telling Jess." A pause. "What about the other one. Noah."

There was something careful in how he said it. Not accusatory. Just careful in the way people are careful when they're paying attention.

"He's good company," I said. "He listens properly. It's useful when you're figuring out a new place to have someone who's also figuring it out."

"Yeah." A beat. "Is he—"

"Cole."

"I'm just asking."

"He's a friend. A new one. I'm allowed those."

"I know you are." His voice settled. "I'm not—" He stopped. Started again. "I trust you. I just haven't learned how to not notice."

"Notice what."

"That you're there and I'm not. That there are people near you that I don't know." He said it plainly, the way he said difficult things, without dressing it up. "It's not about trust. It's just a thing I feel sometimes and I'm telling you because we said we'd do that."

I held the phone and felt the honesty of it like something warm. "I feel that too," I said. "There are games I can't see. People in your life I'm constructing from descriptions. It's strange."

"Yeah."

"We're doing it right, telling each other."

"Yeah." A pause. "Thirty-six days."

November fifteenth. JFK at three PM my time.

"Thirty-six days," I said.

We talked for another hour. He told me about a play he'd run in Saturday's game, a coverage decision he'd made in real time that Coach had pulled up in film review on Monday and called instinctive, which from Coach apparently constituted high praise. I talked about Dr. Chen's seminar question that week, about whether scientific observation could ever be fully separated from the observer's framework.

"Can it?" Cole said.

"No. That's the point."

"So the observer is always part of the data."

"Exactly."

"That's how I feel about watching film," he said. "What you're looking for changes what you see."

I sat with that for a moment. "That's actually a very good analogy."

"I'm full of good analogies. Someone taught me to think properly."

"I taught you enzyme kinetics."

"Same thing," he said, and I could hear the smile in it.

After we hung up I sat at my desk and looked at the photo on the windowsill. The overlook, the city light, the two of us. I'd taken it without telling him and printed it at the pharmacy on Clement Street before I left and it had been the first thing I'd put up in this room and it would be the last thing I'd take down.

Outside the New York night was doing its thing, continuous and vast, and somewhere on the other side of the continent a boy in Sacramento was watching film or already asleep or lying in the dark the way I was now, carrying the same thirty-six days.

Tomorrow I had Dr. Chen's seminar. Thursday dinner with Priya. A stats assignment due Friday that I was seventy percent through.

The life I'd come here for was happening. It was full and demanding and nothing like before and it was mine in the way I'd wanted it to be mine, earned rather than inherited.

I turned off the desk lamp.

Thirty-six days.

I could feel every single one of them.

I closed my eyes and let New York do its thing outside the window and held the distance like the temporary thing it was.

Thirty-six days.

Then his hands on my face again.

Worth every one.