Begin Again

On the way to my statistics exam, I call Milo. It goes straight to voicemail. I call a second time, and a third time, and a fourth.

“Unicorn cream cheese,” I mutter, shoving the phone back into my pocket.

I consider trying to make a break for it, running over to Cardinal to apologize to him face-to-face and risk being late for the exam and blowing it. But I know Milo. He’d be more upset with me for missing the exam than if I didn’t immediately try to make this right.

Still, I check the time just to do some mental math and see if I can swing it. If I sprint, I can—

“What the hell, Andie?”

I look up from my phone into the eyes of one extremely indignant Shay, who is waiting for me outside the psychology building in her sweaty, post-dance-party glory with both of her hands on her hips.

The moment I make eye contact with her, the anger softens. My face must look a heck of a lot worse than I thought it did.

“I can’t reach Milo,” I blurt.

Shay lets her arms go loose at her side, kicking at a stray twig on the sidewalk. “Yeah, no shit.”

I step closer to her. “Is he okay?”

Her eyes search my face, like she’s still trying to decide how to process what just happened. What she and Valeria must have heard out on the quad with half the student body.

“I don’t know,” she says after a few moments. “I can’t reach him either. But come on, Andie. After a whole year of keeping his identity under wraps . . .”

I basically put Milo’s big secret up in neon lights.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, the magnitude of it hitting me in waves.

“It’s not just that. It’s . . .” Shay glances past me toward the journalism building, as if she’s expecting to see Connor trailing behind me. Given my luck today, she just might. “You let us all think you broke up with him.”

It’d be easy to make excuses, but it wouldn’t change the truth. Shay doesn’t ask for an explanation, which somehow makes the whole thing worse. She doesn’t need one. She already knows why I did it, because apparently not only am I a sucker, but I’m a predictable one at that.

“I’m sorry,” is all I can say, is all I’ll be saying until the end of time.

“I know you are.” Shay presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “But now we’ve got a whole other host of problems to deal with, starting with the show.”

I hate to say it, because most of me is still hoping it’s not true. “He might be leaving anyway.”

“Oh, he’s definitely leaving.” Shay says it with this finality that somehow manages to jar me despite everything that’s happened today. “The sister he was meeting up with earlier? She works in admissions. I’m sure he was just . . . settling everything here before he left.” Her scowl deepens. “But even if there were a chance he was going to stay for our school’s program, I guess that’s out the window now.”

Then the full extent of Shay’s worry hits home. Now the Blue Ridge State broadcast program will know who was behind the mic of the infamous pirate radio show, and they might take none too kindly to it. Even if they still let him in, the other students will undoubtedly resent him for snapping up the best broadcast experience someone can get out of the school without actually majoring in it. I might as well have just bought Milo a one-way ticket to California.

My eyes flood too quickly to hide. Shay’s own eyes flit to the cement, unwilling to meet mine.

“I just don’t want things to change.” Shay sounds close to crying herself. “Before this semester it was like—my old roommate didn’t want to be here. People in our hall barely talked to each other. It felt really lonely, but we’re like a weird little family now. And I really like what we have.”

My throat is thick with a new kind of regret. When I crash-landed here in the middle of the year I was so worried about fitting in that at first I couldn’t see past it. I didn’t understand that I may have felt out of place with my weird upbringing and the loss that shaped it, with my shaky grades and my old fears, but I wasn’t the only one who felt like the odd one out. I wasn’t the only one looking for a place to belong.

Only now do I understand that we never found one. We worked together to build one. And now, thanks to me, it might just come crashing down.

“Me too,” I say softly.

Shay reaches out then to hug me. A quiet forgiveness. One that I don’t feel like I deserve.

“I hope it’s not too late to fix it,” she says.

It can’t be. It won’t be. I may not have the ability to do anything right now, but just as soon as I’m out of this exam, I will figure it out.

Shay lets me go, hustling me into the psychology building. I make it there with a minute to spare, the other students already seated and ready to go. There’s only one seat left—the very same seat I had on my first day. The one with the iconic “A” scratched into it. After a grim moment of acceptance, I start walking over, hoping nobody will comment on my near lateness.

That is, until I end up face-to-face with Professor Hutchison walking up the aisle, blinking at me as if she’s looking at a ghost.

“You’re here,” she says.

A hundred pairs of eyes turn to look at me. It’s that nightmarish first day all over again.

“Yes,” I say warily, sliding my bag off my shoulder.

She shakes her head, rattling herself out of some thought. “After what just happened on the radio show, I thought . . .”

My stomach drops. The hundred pairs of eyes all lean in a little closer, hanging on her every word, watching me for my reaction. And then somehow it gets worse—a low mumbling ripples through the room.

I can’t hear much, but I hear plenty. “Squire.” “Radio show.” “Fucked up.”

I’ve been so terrified about outing Milo that it never occurred to me that I might have outed my own self. Connor said my name out loud. If a professor immediately made the connection that I was the Andie he was with, who’s to say other people didn’t, too?

I’m on autopilot, stepping closer to her. “Is this the exam?” I ask too loudly, trying to drown the class out.

“Yes. Yes, here,” she says, handing me one of the stapled sets of papers and a Scantron.

“Thanks,” I say as cheerfully as I can manage. I try to whip out the syndicated-talk-show smile, but it turns into something else—steelier, and more defiant. It’s aimed at all the students trying to get a better look at what’s going on in the back of the room, but to my surprise, Professor Hutchison’s eyes widen at it in something that looks almost like recognition.

I dismiss it as I sit down, trying to focus my attention on the exam. But the moment I sit, it’s like some kind of cue to my body. The adrenaline stops rushing. My heart stops beating in my throat. There’s just the hush of the lecture hall, and too many of my thoughts to fill up the silence, thoughts that spiral faster than any statistical anomaly on this test possibly could.

Professor Hutchison knows. Which means anyone could know. Which means not only did I blow Milo’s cover, but everyone knows precisely who did it. I’ll go down in infamy as the girl who ruined The Knights’ Watch; the girl who took her own mother’s creation and set it on fire fast enough to blaze everything else in its path.

I stare down at the questions on the paper. I will myself to focus. But my eyes just drift to the swirling, swooping “A” carved into the desk until it’s all I see.

“Okay, you lot. Time’s up.”

My head jerks up to see that I’m one of the last twenty or so people in the lecture hall. My exam is just barely filled in, and I can’t even remember most of the questions.

I don’t even have it in me to feel anything about it. All the studying I did with Valeria, the pages I pored over in the dorms and at Milo’s, the office hours where I ran Professor Hutchison’s unsuspecting TAs ragged with questions. All of it was for nothing.

As I lay the exam down on the pile with everyone else’s, it occurs to me that if I fail this exam, I’ll fail the entire class. I won’t be able to take all the other psychology courses that this is the pre-req for; all the other courses I’m supposed to take next year and beyond. It’ll set me back an entire semester, likely make me graduate late, and accumulate even more debt than I’ve already accounted for.

I can handle that, though. I’ve never gotten emotional over money issues. They’re just a fact of life.

It’s something deeper than that. It’s the rejection letter I bawled over in my senior year of high school, when no amount of Grandma Maeve’s anecdotes or Gammy Nell’s peanut butter marshmallow pie could soothe me. It’s Connor asking me if I feel like I really belong here. It’s the Blue Ridge State mug my mom drank out of every morning, her fingers tracing the little map, taking me places in our minds that she’d never get to take me herself.

Professor Hutchison’s gaze is heavy on mine as I set the exam down. It’s all I can do to nod at her, pivot on my heels, and book it out of the lecture hall as fast as I feasibly can.

The next thing I know I’m knocking at Milo’s door, the pit in my stomach wide enough to become a crater. When he opens it, he looks just about as tired as I feel, his eyes just as red-rimmed and weary as they were the day I first met him, his dark curls in disarray.

“Milo.”

He opens the door a little farther. Jerks his head toward his room, letting me in. I’m weak with relief until he uses the door-jamb by his desk to leave the door wide open, checking up and down the hall before he lets me in, clearly worried we’ll get spotted alone together.

I close my eyes. Of course. I forgot the other layer of this—the part where he’s my RA, and even the idea of one of his charges having a crush on him is bad news, let alone a crush literally broadcast to the entire student body.

He leans against his desk, those green eyes sweeping over me with gentle caution.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Something in my heart splinters. “Are you?”

Milo blows out a breath, leaning against his desk. “It is what it is.”

“I’m so sorry, Milo. Exposing you—you know how seriously I take The Knights’ Watch. I hate that I did this to you. I’m so, so sorry.”

Milo’s brows lift in surprise. “Andie . . . I’m not worried about the radio show.”Content bel0ngs to Nôvel(D)r/a/ma.Org.

“You’re not?”

He shakes his head, gripping the edges of his desk like he’s anchoring himself there. “I mean, I know what it means to you. I get why you think that’s why I’m upset, but . . .”

His eyes meet mine fully for the first time since I walked into the room, and it almost feels like a collision. Like I’m not just feeling the full force of what I feel for him, but what he feels for me.

“I’m upset that you’d stay with him,” he says quietly. “Not—not because of anything to do with me. But because you deserve better than that. And you know you do. Your friends know you do. You wouldn’t have let us all believe it was over last night if you didn’t know that.”

I’m still so unused to this layer of him—this deeper, solemn layer under the sarcasm and the rebuffing and the occasional sleep deprivation. This part of him that cuts to the core faster than I ever imagined it could.

“I was never going to stay with him,” I say. “I was just wrapping my head around what happened, and I needed time. Everything’s just—been up in the air, for a lot of my life. But not Connor or his family. They’ve always been this one constant thing.” I make myself hold his gaze as I confess it. “I worked really, really hard to make myself fit into their world. And now it’s just gone.”

None of this is a revelation, but saying it out loud is the thing that makes it real. Not just the years I spent fixated on it, but the future I have to face on the other side.

“You shouldn’t have to make yourself fit, Andie,” says Milo. “That’s not a constant. That’s you changing all the time for other people’s sakes.”

I bow my head, staring down at my feet. For all my changing, I’ve never felt more grounded, more separate, than I do right now. It’s freeing, but it’s terrifying. A burden has been lifted, but a strange responsibility has taken its place—my choices, and the consequences, are wholly my own.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from you aggressively inserting yourself into my business and making me socialize against my will, it’s that there are going to be all kinds of constants in your life,” says Milo. “And I know you. You have plenty of them. Your grandmas. Valeria. Shay.”

There’s a beat where Milo’s breath seems to stall. I close my eyes, steeling myself, then open them.

“But not you,” I say, so he doesn’t have to.

Only then does Milo look up, his eyes so immediately on mine that it’s arresting. Like someone flicking on a light when you’ve slept in total darkness; like looking up from a long, lonely walk in the woods to see someone directly in your path. “Why’s that?”

I try to smile. For once, I can’t manage it. “Shay said you’re leaving.”

When his gaze falls away from mine, the room is noticeably colder. “Yeah,” he says, his hand gripping the edge of the desk so tightly his knuckles go white. “I guess you’re right.”

I didn’t mean to confirm it like this. If anything, I was hoping to float the idea of him leaving so he could tell me I was wrong. It’s like Shay said. We’re a family. As prepared as I’ve been for him to leave, it does nothing to stop the ache in my chest from widening, knowing I was wrong. Embarrassingly, ridiculously wrong.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, my voice small. “I know you said you’re not worried about the show, but—but I am. So I need you to know, I really am sorry. For that and for everything else.”

“I’m sorry, too,” he says. “I mean, you and I . . .”

I hang on the end of that sentence even when I understand he’s not going to finish it. He’s giving me an opening here. But no matter what Milo wants me to say, I can’t take it. Not when I know he’s about to cross the country. Not when his future is on the line.

I spent half a lifetime feeling held back from a relationship. And if there’s one thing Milo and I have in common, it’s that we both want the other to soar.

“I’ll miss you,” I say.

Milo just nods, more to himself than to me. An acceptance. “I won’t disappear, Andie,” he says. “We’ll always be friends.”

I don’t want his friendship. I want to shut the door. I want to cross the distance between us and put my hands on the back of his neck and pull him down toward me, want to feel the heat of his body against mine again, want to know what yesterday’s almost-kiss will feel like when it isn’t a “what if,” but a “what now.”

“Of course.” My voice doesn’t waver. My hands don’t shake. “Always.”

I turn to leave, but not before his expression sears into my memory—it’s not acceptance, I realize. It’s resignation. I unlock the door to my room, fishing for the light when my phone lights up for me, a notification from the student app popping up on the screen. I swipe, my heart already sinking even before I see the exam grade. It’s a big, unrepentant D.

Do you really feel like you belong here?

This time the doubt feels different—brutal and sour. This time when I sweep my eyes out the window to the campus below and let the doubt seep in, I don’t have anybody but myself to blame.