Begin Again(88)

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.”

“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.”