Begin Again(42)

I can feel my common sense slowly returning to me—that “get your body off of your RA” voice starting to clear its throat in the back of my head—but my phone pipes up before it can, blasting “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin.

“Connor,” I gasp, rolling off Milo so fast I end up in the snow with yet another frosty thud. I yank the phone out of my coat pocket and swipe open the call as fast as I possibly can. “Hello?”

“Hey, Andie.”

“Hey,” I say back. “How are—”

“Wow, it’s—can you hear me? I can’t hear you—”

“Yes, I can—sorry, I’m just in the middle of—”

“Andie?”

I scramble to my feet, looking for the quickest exit out of the quad I can find. It’s easy enough, only because it’s the path that Milo’s taking. He’s already far enough away that I can barely see him through the fresh snowfall that just started coming down.

“Yeah, hold on,” I say, readjusting my soaked coat and pants. “Just a second, I’ll . . .”

I try to follow Milo out of the maze, but when I look back up, he’s already gone.





Chapter Fourteen


If I had a superpower, it would be avoiding math.

“So . . .” I lean into the library table, subtly pushing the statistics textbook to the side. “Kingdom of Lumarin was meant to be a romance, but the heroine doesn’t actually end up with the love interest in the end?”

Valeria sighs, her dark hair skimming the table as she lowers her chin into her hands. Her fingernails are a delightful shade of pink for Valentine’s Day, with little heart-shaped gems in the middle that twinkle in the early morning light streaming from the windows.

“The ending is ambiguous,” she says. “You don’t know if she ends up with her or not.”

I point a finger at her. “But Shay told me romance has rules. And that your ending between the heroine and the enemy sorceress she teams up with to save the kingdom . . .” I try to remember the indignant words that followed her equally indignant look upon finishing Valeria’s manuscript, which she devoured faster than a Bagelopolis special. “‘Goes against the genre.’”

Valeria’s lips purse in an adorable little frown. “I should never have let her read it. I don’t even know what possessed me. We just—sang so much that night we went to karaoke that I must have been drunk on the ABBA of it all, and she asked to read it, and I just . . .”

She makes this loose gesture with her arms as if her 350-page manuscript fell out of the air instead of an email attachment.

“So how do the characters end up? In your head, I mean.” I haven’t read it, but I got the gist from Shay, who has been launching into conversations about it apropos of nothing every other hour.

Valeria winces. “Honestly? I don’t know. It just felt like there was too much pressure to tie up the romance with a pretty bow at the end.”

“Huh. So are you going to change the genre or the ending?”

“I don’t know.” She yanks her purse up on the table and plants it there with a thud, rifling through it to find a calculator. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. Nobody else will ever read it.”

Her phone buzzes on the other end of the table. I’m about to open my mouth to tell her I don’t mind if she takes it, but she waves me off. “It’s probably just my ex again. He’s been texting all day.”

“He’s still bothering you?”

“It’s the weirdest thing. He did this whole ‘let’s be friends’ thing and didn’t answer my texts for like a month after we broke up, but now he’ll randomly text me or watch all my Instagram stories. I’ve had exes get back in touch before, but never ones that seemed to go off and on like this.”

“You could always block him.”

Valeria pushes a TI-84 toward my end of the table, but her eyes are in some far-off corner of the library, clearly mulling something over.

“I would. But I mean . . . a part of me is relieved. He ended things so abruptly that I wondered if he cared at all. But the other part of me is just so mad. At him, of course, and at myself for caring in the first place.” She runs a hand through her hair, fingers bunching around the thick strands. “And for letting it mess with my head about this stupid story.”

“Understandably,” I acknowledge.

Then I don’t say anything at all. Usually the big truths about people’s feelings come in the quiet. Sure enough, Valeria pulls in his heavy, shoulder-raising breath, clearly about to go on, when we’re interrupted by the sound of cheering in the corner of the library that snaps her out of it.

“Right. Chapter five,” she says, squaring her shoulders. “You said you were having an issue with . . . oh, whoops.”

When she pulls the case off the calculator, a white ribbon falls out and flutters to the table.

“Is that one of the starter ribbons?” I ask immediately.

“Yeah,” says Valeria, looking at the ribbon and then down into the depths of her purse. She carefully zips it shut.

It takes every fiber of my being not to just take it and run. “Aren’t you a sophomore?”

“I, uh, found it the other day. Nobody claimed it though.” She glances up toward the trash cans in the cafe. “I should probably just toss it.”