Begin Again(101)

She may be smirking, but by now I’m full-on grinning. As hard as it is sometimes to imagine my mom at my age, it’s not at all hard to imagine that.

“She came back to me. Asked if I had any more information. I didn’t, really,” says Professor Hutchison. Her eyes cut to the door, toward the hall beyond it. “But she wanted a way to get back on the air, and I had my original office.”

“The studio,” I realize. A cramped little space that twenty years ago could easily have been an office for one of Blue Ridge State’s newest hires.

Professor Hutchison nods. “I wasn’t involved in the ribbon hunt or anything. It all just took on a life of its own, the same way it always has with each Knight. But she asked me when she graduated if I could help keep it up by tapping other people for it, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”

She waves a hand like she never meant to get emotionally invested in the whole thing, but the way she blinks hard before she turns to her laptop screen gives her away. So does the way her voice lowers when she says, “Amy was a force to be reckoned with.”

I smile. “Yeah. She was.”

There are a few beats where Professor Hutchison takes a breath like she is going to add something else. It’s usually the part where people tell me they’re so sorry about what happened to her; how they can only imagine where she’d be today if she were still alive. I see her decide not to. It’s not that she doesn’t think it. It’s that we both knew her talent well enough that it goes without saying.

She clears her throat. “Anyway, I called you in here to talk about your grades. You and I both know you’ll have to repeat the class with a grade like that.”

I stare down at my lap. There’s still candle wax in my nails from last night’s shenanigans with Valeria. “Yeah.”

Professor Hutchison leans forward at her desk, making rare and deliberate eye contact. “Which is why I’m telling you something I don’t tell most. I drop the lowest exam grade at the end of the semester.”

My insides feel like they might liquefy with relief. “Really?”

“So with your other failed score dropped and this D, you’d be on track to pull through. So long as you keep going to tutoring sessions and coming to office hours.” She pushes a piece of paper toward me. “There are a set number of hours I’m usually here without the TAs. You’re welcome to come by then, too.”

“Thank you,” I say sincerely. I worry on my bottom lip. I don’t want to ask it, but I know that the relief won’t last for long if I don’t get a clear answer right now. “But you’re not—this isn’t just because you liked my mom, right?”

“It may have taken me a few months to realize you were the Squire, but I knew you were your mom’s kid the minute I saw you with that silly ribbon in your bag,” she says, leveling me with her usual no-nonsense expression. “If I were going to give any special treatment it would have started then.”

I sit up a little straighter, embarrassed and pleased at the same time.

She taps on the paper again. “The grade drop is still a secret, though, so don’t let anyone know I told you.” She pointedly doesn’t look at me when she adds, “I figured I owed you a solid.”

At some point in this conversation I connected the dots. We don’t get a lot of non-student callers, and hers stuck with me. “It worked, then? You going to the conference.”

She still doesn’t quite meet my eye, even if I can see a trace of amusement in hers. “We’ve started getting more involved in each other’s interests, yes. And it’s been helpful.” She presses her lips together and raises her brows just enough for me to know that’s all she’s willing to say on the subject.

“I’m glad.”

She smirks. “Also, I wash my hands of whatever you and Milo decide about the radio show. But you have my blessing either way.”

All things considered, it may be the closest I’ll ever come to my mom’s approval about my involvement with The Knights’ Watch. But oddly—comfortingly—it doesn’t change much. I don’t need it anymore, the way I thought I did at the beginning of the semester, when I felt all this pressure to live up to the legacy she built.

Now it finally feels the way I’m sure my mom would have wanted it to—like I’ve been working toward my own legacy all along.

Professor Hutchison shoots me another pointed look. “So long as you kick yourself into high gear on these grades.”

“Absolutely,” I say without missing a beat. “I won’t let you down.”

The moment I step out of her office, I know I’ve avoided yesterday’s radio show long enough. If I ever want to come back—whether as the Squire or Milo’s replacement or even just as the person who answers emails—I need to listen and own up to the aftermath of it.

But first I duck out of the campus, off the little windy path that leads into the gazebo in the arboretum. It takes me through sun-dappled trees and new spring blossoms, a world so colorful and so far removed from the thundersnow incident that it feels like I’m stepping into another reality. Stepping carefully, of course, because the last thing I want to do is interrupt Valeria’s plan.

Once I finally catch sight of them, though, it’s clear that a meteor could fall out of the sky without either of them noticing.