It’s why I’m always asking her where she and Dad met, or what her dissertation was about, or other pieces of her life I want us both to hold on to. It’s not only that I want to check on her recall. It’s that I want to know she’s still the person she was the day before, and the day before that. Because when she can’t remember those things, she won’t be her.
With my mind running over the daily list of worries, I watch Lewis fit the sheets to the futon. Hours later, I’m staring out the window overlooking the river. The lights of the city are undimmed, despite the late hour. Instead of falling asleep, I’m awake and wondering—wondering if Mom’s okay, wondering if tomorrow’s the day things start to go downhill.
Every day I wait. And one day the waiting will be over, and I don’t want to lose the good years she has left because I’m away at college.
Mom said change is hard. Well, yeah. Every change I’ve ever experienced was for the worse. My parents’ divorce, my dad’s move to Canada, my mom’s diagnosis. Even Lewis leaving for school and effectively removing himself from our lives. Going to college, especially going to college far from home, is a huge, fundamental change, and, honestly, I’ve had enough of change. I’m not eager for the upheavals and uncertainty it’ll bring, not when I know exactly how not okay change can be.
It’s why this trip is a waste of time. Everyone puts unnecessary emphasis on the noneducational parts of college—the city, the “feel” of the campus, the perfect “college experience.” I only want the degree and the opportunity to learn. The rest is white noise. Instead of drowning in it, I’m focusing on where I’m truly needed.
This tour is nothing but an opportunity to observe everything I’m not interested in—while being forced into a car with the one person who should understand, who should share some of my fears and apprehensions, and who instead appears focused on getting me laid.
I look out the window and wish I were home.
Juniper
I HEAR MATT’S even breathing beside me. It’s eleven p.m. but the lights of Boston haven’t gone out. While Matt dozes, I watch the view from the window.
I can’t figure out how to be in the moment after sex. Not because of Matt, who is a perfect gentleman. But I envy him for how completely his mind goes clear, how easily restful he becomes. He’s utterly relaxed.
Not me. My mind’s a tornado. It churns forward, picking up fragments of the future as if they were playgrounds and patio furniture. Hopes, dreams, plans. They rush forward abrupt and unbidden. It’s as if the feelings of sex unquiet everything, rushing me into tomorrow’s tour and this week’s itinerary and the year’s exhilarating and enormous decisions.
Matt brushes my temple with his fingers. “Hey, where’d you go?” he asks, no doubt noticing I’m distracted.
“Just thinking about tomorrow,” I reply.
He reaches up, pulling me closer, and I notice the sheet slip down his chest. Of course, he notices my noticing. I flush, even as I smile—knowing how moments like this go to his head—and just as I suspected, he grins. This boy. I let myself curl up next to him.
“College is going to be just like this,” he says in a low voice.
I laugh into the smooth curve of his neck. “I don’t think our dorms will be quite this nice.”
“Not the room. This,” Matt says. He traces his finger down my arm. “Us. No more sneaking around our parents, finding places to park.”
His words bring back memories of circling parking lots and playing Ten Fingers until the final car leaves, fumbling on the seats. I pull away a little. “We’ll have roommates. And, you know, studying?”
“Oh, is studying something a person does in college?” he asks playfully. “I had no idea.”
I shove his shoulder lightly. “Hey, have you thought about that yet? What you might want to study?” I seize on the new subject, not entirely feeling like discussing our college sex plans.
Matt shuffles up onto his elbows. He considers the question for a second. “I’m feeling like something in the arts,” he says.
I sit upright, pulling the sheet over my chest. “The arts?” Matt’s passionate about a lot of things. I’ve just never seen him pick up a paintbrush or play an instrument or write a haiku. When we play Pictionary, his entries are worse than cave paintings.
“Yeah,” he says evenly. “I was thinking . . . the art of seduction.”
I wrinkle my nose as Matt smirks, obviously delighted with himself. “I can’t believe you just said that.” While he props himself up, hands behind his head, I get out of bed and open my suitcase. I rummage for my pajamas and pull them out, my striped bottoms and the UMass Amherst shirt from when I did a college prep day program there my sophomore summer. “For real, Matt,” I say, tugging them on. I sit on the edge of the bed and begin to brush my hair. “When you picture yourself in four years, it’s leaving college to go do what?”
“Whoa, leaving college?” Matt asks. “We haven’t even gotten there yet.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s just exciting. Our futures are out there.” I find myself staring from the bed out the open window, onto the lights of the city, unblinking and incessant, each of them a life in motion. I swear I can see every light stretching all the way to Virginia.
Matt’s fingers interlacing with mine pull my concentration from the view. On his face when I turn back to him is a rare vulnerability. It’s the expression he gets when he’s really thought something over—the one I recognize from the day he told his dad he’d decided he wouldn’t play college baseball, and the morning he asked if he could meet my family. “My future and my past are the same, Juni, and I’m looking at her.”
I feel myself soften at his words. Okay, maybe he could major in the art of seduction. It’s one of the wonderful contradictions of Matt. Baseball jock though he is, he’s melt-your-heart-into-a-little-puddle romantic when he wants to be. In this moment, the city lights become a little less inviting, like they’re watching us now, not the other way around.
“The next four years are about you and about enjoying college,” Matt continues. “We’re going to make memories there. Memories we’re going to hold on to the rest of our lives. That won’t change depending on a job, or a degree.”
I get up and walk to the window. “I’m going to study architecture.” I say, scanning my mind for anytime Matt mentioned liking a class or finding an assignment interesting. “What about history?” I suggest. “You were really good at it. Remember?” I face the bed, where Matt’s stuffing his legs into his sweatpants. “In April, you got a ninety-five on five US tests in a row.”
Climbing under the covers, Matt yawns. “No, I don’t remember, Juniper. That class was pretty boring.”
I quell a small wave of irritation. I’ve had to learn not to be surprised when people don’t remember things the way I do. Because to me, they’re vexingly obvious. Forgetting something like that feels to me like forgetting my class schedule or who my English teacher is. When I was younger, I used to get in fights with my family over what they could and couldn’t remember. The times they promised us extra hours of TV or ice cream for dinner, then claimed they hadn’t. Disputed recollections of who said what or whose idea was whose. It took years to learn to let those things go.
Matt flips off the light near the bed. He nods toward the window, where the sleepless city still lights our room.
I draw the curtains.
Folding open my half of the covers, I crawl underneath, the hotel linens stiff and unfamiliar. They’re comfortable, but not comforting. Within minutes, I hear Matt drift into sleep.
I want to close my eyes and have tonight become tomorrow. But I don’t want to ignore my family. Reluctantly, I grab my phone from the bedside table.
Marisa’s message is first. I grudgingly agree to be her chauffeur on New Year’s Eve. Then Callie, who I tell to look for her phone charger in Mom’s car. I throw in a text to let Mom
know we got into Boston fine, and I even offer Walker use of my computer when there’s a parent in the room.
Finally, there’s only Tía’s text. Don’t forget your family needs you and you need your family. This is the difference between Tía and my parents. My parents, my practical and even-tempered mother in particular, understand there’s tension between how connected they want me to the family, emotionally and logistically, and knowing I need space to grow up. It’s why they deflect Tía’s guilt trips, when they remember to. But Tía has an uncompromising zeal for the hope I’ll never really leave home.
I reply without giving her an inch.
Glad you’re figuring out texting. It’ll be great for communicating when I’m in college, xoxo.
Before I even hit the pillow, my phone illuminates with new messages.
I turn the phone over with a long breath through my nose, wishing on every light in the skyline for just one week to myself. One week without obligations, without expectations, with my family’s permission to live a future outside the four walls of home.
I know what life would look like if I did what they wanted and went to college closer to home. First, living in the dorms would be a debate. They’d want me home. Then, every weekend would be a battle. Whether I had to be home for dinner, whether I was obligated to come to this family event or that. Whether I made enough time for Marisa, Callie, Anabel, or Xan and Walker, no matter whether I’m in finals or rushing a sorority or running for student body president. I’d be fighting to write my own answers to things they didn’t think were questions.
My family would have me believe there’s nothing worthwhile outside the role they’ve handed me. But when I look toward the window, imagining everything beyond the curtains, I see a different view. Every idea, every world, every possibility is out there waiting for me.
Fitz
I WOKE UP in a terrible mood. The blanket Lewis tossed to me yesterday, monogramed with the name of a consulting firm, barely covered me through the night on my brother’s creaky black futon. The fabric bore disconcerting stains, and I tried hard not to speculate on their origin.
By eight in the morning, when my phone chimed on the coffee table, I’d woken up twice before in the night. Once when Lewis inexplicably left the room close to midnight, then once more when he returned hours later with two roommates and they protractedly discussed FIFA 19 for PlayStation. I don’t know how Lewis got used to this indeterminable cycle of emails, random hookups, and nighttime video-game talk. But if forced nocturnality is a fundamental of dorm living, it’s one more tick in the not interested column.
Things did not improve when I went into the bathroom to shower. They’d left the roll of toilet paper on the floor, and I’m pretty certain it’s because none of the guys know how to replace it. The cramped cubicle of the shower wasn’t completely covered by the flimsy curtain. One glance and I knew nobody had cleaned this room in a while. Needless to say, I took a quick and to-the-point shower.
Following a breakfast of dry cereal—the milk in the fridge was profoundly expired—I grab my backpack and head for the elevator. I don’t cross paths with my brother, which is fine by me. The folder my mom prepared says I have the BU information session at ten this morning. No way Lewis will wake up before noon. I know Mom will call later wondering how the session went. But I have thirty minutes before I’m due at the admissions building, and I plan to spend it not thinking about college and Lewis and next year.
I rub my eyes in the elevator, my disbelief having not entirely faded over how nice this place is. The doors open, and I wander into the foyer filling with students holding textbooks and thermoses. I’m going to read in a coffee shop. I helped myself to the copy of Henry James’s The Bostonians on Lewis’s bookshelf, the crisp pages evincing it was clearly unread. The choice felt fitting. I walk through the glass double doors into the breath-catching cold of the gray morning.
Halfway to the curb, I hear someone shriek.
I whip my head in the direction of the sound. The source isn’t difficult to find. In the middle of the courtyard, I see a girl examining the fresh coffee stain seeping into one corner of her cream-colored cardigan. Her parka is unzipped, and the coffee trickles from her exposed sweater onto her jeans. The person with whom she presumably collided watches sympathetically, holding his Starbucks cup with lid half off.
Coffee. My mom and dad’s story flits through my head. I wonder if this is the beginning of something life-changing for this girl and Starbucks guy. If I’ve just witnessed a real-life meet-cute. If—
The thought evaporates, because the guy continues on his way, walking hurriedly like he’s late. The next instant, a hulking blond guy walks up behind the girl. He’s like a fourth Hemsworth brother. While he inspects the stain with a dire expression, he places one hand on the small of her back. Boyfriend, I immediately read in the gentle gesture. Definitely not a meet-cute, then. The way the guy is watching her holds an intimacy, a familiarity drawn from considerable time together.
I’m close enough to hear their conversation.
“Asshole,” the Hemsworth-boyfriend mutters, eyes fixed on the Starbucks guy’s retreating form.
“It was my fault,” the girl replies immediately. Despite myself, I notice she’s strikingly pretty. Her heart-shaped face frames dark eyes, with freckles dusting her light brown skin. Errant flyaways of her wavy chestnut hair escape from her ponytail. “I was distracted. Too busy looking at the dorms.” Even as she’s speaking, her eyes return to the campus surrounding us. Her fascination radiates the kind of intensity I thought only existed in fiction. She studies everything with enraptured eagerness—everything except the sidewalk. I now understand how the coffee incident happened.
“Well,” Hemsworth says, “we should go back to the hotel so you can change.”
“No!” Her eyes dart to him. “We’ll be late.”
“But your sweater—”
“It’s fine,” she interrupts. “I’ll just take it off when we’re inside.”
“You sure?” he asks doubtfully. “It’ll stain if you leave it too long.”
“I’m sure,” she says. Excitement comingles with decisiveness in her voice. “I’m not missing this.”
He rolls his eyes affectionately. “Yeah, I know, Juniper.” They walk down the street in the direction opposite me.
Juniper. I wonder what having her momentum would feel like—literally running into someone because she’s intently focused on what interests her, then charging on to whatever she can’t stand missing despite the coffee. It’s enthralling, her indefatigable energy.
I fight for a moment to imagine having her curiosity, her hunger, for college and the possible futures it represents. I fail, of course. But it’s possible I’m briefly better for having put in the effort.
I’m staring, I realize, watching Juniper and her boyfriend. I don’t want to become that guy. Remembering plans of reading, I divert my eyes from the couple. There’s still twenty minutes before the information session begins. Plenty of reading time.
Except I don’t want to read. I want to wander. Not the campus, necessarily—I figure I’ll just explore in one direction and take in whatever I find until I have to return for the information session. I’m going to have nights in hotels not talking to Lewis to read James if I want.
I follow the road until I reach a tree-lined lane of brownstones. They’re grandiose and imposing, fire escapes curling over their curved stone windows. This street’s quiet. I hear only the hushed whisper of the wind through the icy branches of the trees, even though I’m just blocks from Commonwealth. For a moment I think I’ve finally escaped the reach of the campus, until I notice plaques for student living on the doors. Is every dorm here insanely nice?
I check the time, finding I have only five minutes until the information session. Grudgingly, I pull up the campus map on my phone and double back toward the admissions office. Befo
re I’m even near the building, I find I’m slowing my pace. The prospect of sitting through the session, enduring details of the campus life I’ll never live dispensed by stock-photo-ridden PowerPoints, taking the tour guided by an overzealous freshman . . . It’s too much. Lewis won’t know if I ditched. The only way Mom will know is if I tell her.
I have better things to do than this presentation. Find a decent breakfast, for one.
I’m lingering outside the building, searching for the nearest Panera on my phone, when I hear familiar voices.
“In here,” Juniper says, walking quickly toward the door next to me.
“I’m coming,” her boyfriend replies. He races in front of her and opens the door with a dramatic flourish, earning a laugh from Juniper. She doesn’t notice me. As she passes him in the doorway, he pulls her to him, giving her a quick kiss.
My earlier thoughts of breakfast and exploring dissipate. Resolve fading, I follow them in.
Juniper
IT DIDN’T FEEL real until now. Well, not this real. I can’t deny that every time I’ve thought about college or the idea of leaving home, it’s felt like a new version of real, like a developing photograph.
But my first on-campus information session definitely is one of the most real versions. I hold on to every statistic, every detail, even the ones I know won’t figure into my decision. The percentage of students coming in nationally and internationally, the number of graduates in government and in science, the well-regarded journalism program. The information flows comfortingly over me. This is exactly where I want to be right now.
Even if I’m increasingly conscious of the smell of espresso wafting up from under my seat, where I stored my cardigan. Marisa’s cardigan, if I’m honest. I’d hoped I could stuff it into her wardrobe when I got home without her noticing I’d stolen it. But as soon as she sees the giant coffee stain, she’ll know what happened, and she will retaliate.
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