Begin Again(16)

“How about this,” he says. “I help you get a good work-study, and you agree to stop causing ruckus in my dorm.”

I bite my lip. “I can agree to try?”

Judging by what little I know about Milo I’m not expecting this response to work, but he’s evidently too tired to push back. He looks into my eyes, then at the half-eaten pack of Tastykakes in his hands, and then back at me.

“Are you a morning person?” he asks.

I perk up so fast that he raises a hand to interrupt me. “Why did I ask,” he says, more to himself than to me. He extends his arm out, only hesitating for a moment before he pats me on the shoulder again. “Be at Bagelopolis at nine A.M. tomorrow.”

“Really?” I ask, two times louder than I meant to. “You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

I want to take him up on it, I do—it’s just that it feels like a pretty big favor, and aside from snack cakes and keeping the dorm quiet, there’s nothing I can offer him in return.

Milo must see some of it playing out on my face, because he pauses at his door, running a hand through his curls. “Look, new kid. This place is overwhelming enough, and the work-study program is a mess. Might as well get through it all as easily as we can.”

I wonder if the next moment catches him by surprise, too. The moment when our eyes connect, and something else does, too. A sadness. An uncertainty. The kind that I only see for a flash, but recognize too fast for it to be anything else—it looks just like mine.

Whatever his hurt is, it’s none of my business. But if he stands here with me for another three seconds, the fix-it urge is going to be too much for me to resist.

“Well, thanks,” I say, squashing it down. “See you tomorrow, then.”

Milo cuts a glance down the hall, his face so neutral I might have imagined what I saw, if I still didn’t feel the shadow of it. “Only if you promise me I won’t wake up to any more werewolf howls tonight.”

“I will.” I salute him. “Swear-wolf.”

Milo groans in response, then eats the last bite of Tastykake before disappearing behind his door.

I head back down the hallway to rejoin the group when my phone buzzes in my back pocket. It’s not a text, but a voicemail from Connor. The kind you leave when you bypass calling so you can go straight to the voicemail box. I know because my dad used to do it when he first moved away, and when he did call there wasn’t much I wanted to say.

I hold the phone to my ear, listening to Connor’s voice on the other end. He’s calm. Composed. Like he practiced it in his head before calling.

“Hey. So I’ve been thinking. Let’s just—do the best we can this semester. Maybe I can transfer back. We’ll see how we feel at the end of the semester and figure it out.”

We’ll see how we feel. Meaning it’s not just school that’s up in the air. We’re still up in it, too.

The message doesn’t say anything else, and I don’t call him back. I take a breath, doing the only thing I can to soothe myself, and start mentally sorting through everything I’m going to have to do in the next few months to make this right.

Whatever goes down between then and now, I know the next chapter of my future memoir just got a whole lot more complicated.





Chapter Seven


I never set an alarm because my entire life I’ve been wired to wake up at 7 A.M. on the dot, like a human sundial. I laid out all my shower stuff and an outfit the night before so I wouldn’t wake up Shay, but when I look over at her side of the room, it is distinctly Shay-less; the bed is already made with its mountain of fluffy pillows, and her coat isn’t hanging by the door.

In the quiet of the early morning there’s this new kind of potential, like maybe the sun just needed to come up and reset yesterday. I breathe a little easier in the steam of the shower, walk a little bit lighter when Ellie plugs in her hair dryer next to me at the mirrors and asks if we can make Werewolf a weekly thing.

The sting of yesterday is still raw enough that as I’m packing my bag, I scrap my usual routine for the second day in a row and don’t listen to the episode of The Knights’ Watch recorded earlier this morning. It’s only going to stress me out if they reference any ribbon clues, knowing I’ve already blown my chance at playing. I allow myself one indulgent moment of self-pity, thumbing through my mom’s old ribbons where I splayed them out last night on my desk, then square my shoulders and tighten the scarf around my neck to leave.

Bagelopolis is only about a mile from Cardinal, just off the main road that divides campus from town and nestled within a bunch of other small shops—a bakery, a toy store, a local artisan’s shop, a mini grocery. The sidewalk is wide with cobbled brick, with lots of space for outdoor tables and chairs, even if nobody’s sitting in them in the January chill. It looks like a quaint little painting, and for a moment I feel like part of the scene. Like someone would paint me in here on purpose. Like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

“Andie!”

I turn my head and see Shay poking out of Bagelopolis, gesturing for me to come in. “We need reinforcements.”

I hustle into Bagelopolis, which feels like getting hugged by a very large, warm loaf of bread. The smell of fresh oven-baked bagels hits my nostrils and the warmth of it goes straight to my chest and all the way down to my fingers and toes. The space is small and cozy, with just a few cushioned chairs and tables scattered throughout, but the bright, rainbow-color-coded menu is large enough to take up most of one of the walls. The display case at the register has at least two dozen cream cheeses and infinite bagels in all different colors and cheeses and salts. I skim some of their names, my mouth watering: Everything Pretzel, Chocolate Chip Sourdough, Peanut Toffee Crunch, Strawberry-Streaked Rainbow Pride, Cheese-Crusted Salt.