Chapter 89: Final Semester
Elias POV
Exams come and go faster than I expect them to, the way endings always arrive faster than the middle ever suggested they would.
I sit my last undergraduate exam on a Tuesday morning in a hall that smells like every exam hall I have ever sat in, the specific anxious quiet of two hundred people trying not to make noise.
I finish with twenty minutes to spare.
I spend most of those minutes rereading answers I already know I will not change and thinking, somewhat absurdly, about the first week of first year.
About a version of myself walking across the quad in red.
Knowing none of what was coming.
Ivy finishes her own final exam that afternoon.
We meet outside the hall.
Neither of us says anything at first.
Just stand there in the spring sunshine absorbing the fact that the structure organizing our lives for three years has suddenly ended.
"That's it," she says.
"That's it," I agree.
"I don't know how to feel."
"Neither do I."
We walk back slowly.
Taking the long way.
Neither of us in a hurry to arrive anywhere.
\---
Ivy's ending is taking a different shape than mine.
She has been accepted into a graduate art programme in a city two hours away from Northfield.
Meaning our years of shared rooms and shared late nights are ending in a way that requires its own grief.
Separate from anything to do with Noah.
"I keep forgetting we won't be doing this anymore," she says one evening while taping a box shut.
"Just existing in the same space."
"Available to each other constantly."
"We'll still talk every day."
"It's not the same."
"No."
I nod.
"It's not."
"But it's not nothing either."
She pauses.
"You've gotten very good at that."
"Saying the true thing without making it smaller than it is."
"I learned it this year."
"From watching what works."
"And what doesn't."
\---
Saoirse is staying in the city for postgraduate work.
Meaning whatever she and Ivy have become is changing shape rather than ending.
"I'm glad," I tell Ivy.
"That you have that continuing."
"Me too."
She smiles.
"I didn't expect any of this when I signed up for that seminar."
"None of us expected any of this."
"That seems to be the theme of the year."
\---
Noah's ending looks different.
Athletes finish things in stages.
Final meetings.
Last training sessions.
Captaincy handovers.
Coach eventually announces Marcus as next year's captain.
No one is surprised.
Everyone is delighted.
"Captain Marcus," Tyler says.
"We are doomed."
"I will be an excellent captain."
Marcus stands dramatically.
"I have been training for this my entire life."
"You have been annoying everyone your entire life."
"Different thing."
"Same energy."
"Different application."
Marcus remains entirely unbothered.
\---
On the actual last morning, while Ivy tapes the final box shut, I find myself standing in the doorway of our room for a long moment.
Looking at it the way you look at something you are trying to memorize properly before it stops existing in this exact form.
"You're doing the thing," Ivy says.
"What thing?"
"The memorizing thing."
"I can always tell."
"You go very still."
"And your eyes move slowly across everything."
"I didn't know I had a tell."
"You have several."
"I've had three years to learn them."
Eventually we sit down on the floor.
Boxes stacked beside the door.
Walls bare.
The room somehow feeling both larger and smaller than before.
"Three years."
"Three years," I agree.
"You walked in wearing a red skirt."
"Told me your name was Elias."
"And announced that you didn't care what anyone thought."
"I remember thinking this was going to be an interesting roommate."
"Was I right not to care?"
She laughs.
"You were exactly right."
"About all of it."
I look around the room.
At the empty shelves.
At the corners where posters used to hang.
At the mugs we somehow accumulated.
"I'm going to miss this."
"Specifically this."
"Not the building."
"This exact configuration of you and me."
"In a small room."
"With too many mugs."
"I know."
She finally looks up.
Her eyes a little too bright.
"Me too."
Then she stands.
"Now help me carry this box before I start properly crying."
"And then we're both useless."
I stand up.
Pick up the box.
And follow her out of the room we spent three years teaching each other how to grow inside.