Chapter Twenty-Four

twenty-four

All along the white quartz countertop, black plastic takeout containers drip with brown sauces and yellow curries, and greasy white to-go bags spill over with packets of soy sauce and crab rangoon. It’s not lost on me that the night before showings Mom got delivery from my favorite Thai restaurant, the authentic one she normally vetoes for being too spicy. Call it a peace offering after our blowup earlier this week, or call it an edible apology for selling my childhood home. Either way, as we load up our plates with heaping spoonfuls of comfort food, I’m the first to grab a paper towel and a bottle of all-purpose cleaner to erase any drips and drops. We’re nothing if not a household of silent apologies.

With full plates and extra napkins, we each claim our spot at the table, Mom and Dad at either end with me facing the living room. My mind instantly wanders to a sad place. How many family dinners like this do we have left? Less than a dozen at this table, but altogether, maybe less than a hundred? How often will I fly down to Florida? And will we opt to eat at restaurants when I do, the way you take visitors out to eat when they come to your city? I lift another bite of panang curry into my mouth, letting the spice burn against my tongue for a few extra moments before washing it down with water. The burn lingers, and so does the churning in my stomach.

“What time are we planning to be out of here tomorrow?” Dad asks, slicing a rice noodle with the side of his fork.

“Nine thirty should be okay,” Mom says. “Tom is getting here at nine, but showings don’t start till ten.”

Tom is another agent at Mom’s brokerage who volunteered to run showings. Having Mom show this particular listing felt, quite literally, too close to home.

“So we’ll do one last walk through with him and then…”

I tune out the real estate talk, just like I have all week. There’s no point in listening when I absorb so little of it, especially when what I do understand just gets me worked up. Picturing generic couples voting on whether my room should be the nursery or the office feels wrong, like strangers playing dress-up with my house and choosing all the wrong outfits.

“Are you good to be out by nine thirty, Murph?” Mom asks, and I jump back in at the sound of my own name.

“What? Tomorrow? No problem. My final’s at ten.”

My breath cements to the inside of my lungs at the reminder. I check the time on the stove clock—6:55. Just over fifteen hours until the test and only five minutes until Ellie said she’d be stopping by. The dense wall of real estate talk has allowed me to avoid the topic of tonight’s visitor, but I better have an explanation by the time she gets here.

Which, the doorbell announces, is right now.

Mom and Dad turn toward each other, each silently waiting for an explanation from the other. Meanwhile, my stomach threatens to reintroduce every bite of curry I’ve swallowed in reverse order.

“Grubhub guy again?” Dad speculates. “Or is Chess coming over for a final check before the showings?”

“Actually,” I say, pushing back from the table and onto my feet, “that’s for me.”

Mom and Dad perform a synchronized flinch routine.

“A friend,” I explain. “To help me study.”

“From class?” Mom asks, and I want to say yes. That would make the most logical sense and save me an explanation I don’t care to shape. But I haven’t rehearsed this lie.

“No, someone from high school.” I try to keep a casual this happens all the time air about me, but everyone at this table knows better. It’s not even that they’re leaping to romantic assumptions, although who’s to say that they’re not. The truth is that I haven’t brought over someone new, romantic or otherwise, since the spaghetti night before what turned out to be my last high school softball tournament. Back then, Mom made a point of shaking everyone’s hand and repeating their name to be sure she wouldn’t forget. Hi, Lauren. Nice to meet you, Lauren. There’s pop in the fridge if you want it, and let me introduce you to my husband. Honey, this is Lauren, she’s an outfielder. Hopefully we won’t see that same behavior tonight.

The long melody of the doorbell buys me a little bit of time, but it’s not enough for me to decide exactly how I’m going to play this. Maybe I should’ve thought this through earlier, but I was too happily distracted by the easy pace of texting that Ellie and I had fallen into, exchanging jokes and light teasing and flirty little comments that made me feel like I was floating an inch above the floor. Before I can explain any further, there’s a knock at the door, the quintessential fallback for an unanswered doorbell.

“Have they had dinner?” Mom asks the back of my head as I hurry toward the door. Points to her for the neutral pronoun. Maybe she’s woke or maybe she’s giving me the benefit of the doubt on the gender of tonight’s guest. I had male friends in high school. Not many, but a few.

“I’ll ask,” I call over my shoulder, then unlock the door.

Outside, Ellie is dressed just the same as she was at Sip this afternoon, plus a few familiar layers for warmth. In her camel-colored coat and heather gray Carhartt beanie, she looks a lot like she did the first time she came over, only much more sober. Her hands are a worrying shade of blue, though—the color of a ripe vein. The cold sure has set in early this year.

“Hey.” Ellie twirls her keyring around one blue-painted pointer finger, and when she steps inside, I stop short of kissing her. Our halfhearted side hug is deeply unsatisfying, but also deeply parent friendly. Just like last time, Ellie steps out of her Doc Martens and pairs them neatly by the door, revealing a pair of those fuzzy socks that grandmas and great-aunts always get you for Christmas, the same kind Kara was wearing when I swung by after the reopening. Like mother, like daughter.

“My parents are here.” I tilt my head back toward the kitchen. “If you don’t mind saying hi. And there’s plenty of Thai food, if you want some.”

“Of course.” She slips off her coat, draping it over one arm. “I’m not super hungry, but thanks. If you have tea or something, that’d be good.”

She follows close behind me into the kitchen, where Mom and Dad are openly demonstrating the horrible acting genes they passed on to me. They’ve very loudly and obviously picked up in the middle of a forced conversation, playing the role of “definitely not eavesdroppers.”

“Mom, Dad, this is Ellie. Ellie, this is my mom and dad.” I box up my leftover curry and stow it in the fridge, exchanging it for a can of lime LaCroix. “We’re just going to study up in my room, if that’s okay.”

“You have a lovely home,” Ellie says, and I realize she’s slipped back into actor mode, pretending this is her first time standing in this ready-to-sell kitchen. To her parents, we’re a couple; to mine, near strangers. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

“Nice to meet you, Ellie. Murph, remember, showings start tomorrow.” Mom tries to cover her nerves with an extra dose of excitement in her voice. “I’m not sure if Murphy mentioned that we’re selling the place.”

Ellie nods, jutting a thumb back toward the door. “I saw the for sale sign in the yard but…”

“It’s fine, Mom,” I interrupt. “We’re just studying, not finger painting.”

I pull one of a dozen identical light-pink mugs from the cabinet, fill it with water, and pop it into the microwave, prepping Ellie’s tea. Maybe it’d be classier to get the teapot out, but I don’t see a need to spend more time in the kitchen than we absolutely have to. We can discuss the whole moving fiasco upstairs, I guess. I can’t wait until I don’t have any more urgent, dramatic news to fill anyone in on.

In the drawer beside the coffee maker, I find a small collection of tea bags organized alphabetically. “Caffeinated or decaf?”

“Decaf,” Ellie says. “But I don’t care what kind. Thanks.”

“So you’re in Murphy’s accounting class? Or no?” Mom asks, propping her chin in her hand with feigned curiosity. She already knows she’s not in my class. She’s just digging for dirt.

“No, but my mom…” Ellie’s eyes widen and dart toward me.

“Her mom is my professor,” I explain. No more lying, if I can avoid it. Only exclusion of specific details from here on out.

“Oh?” Dad sets his fork down with a clatter, suddenly intrigued. “So you’ve got the inside scoop, huh?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Ellie admits, adjusting her septum ring. “I’m just trying to help.”

When the microwave beeps, I take out the mug, tear open the little paper packet housing the tea bag, and drop a pouch of lemon ginger tea into the steam. I set it on the counter next to Ellie’s hands, which are slowly returning to a normal color. “We’ll be upstairs studying if you need us.”

With beverages of choice in hand, I tip my head toward the stairs, urging Ellie to follow.

“Nice to meet you both,” Ellie says, waving to my parents with a tiny wiggle of her fingers.

“You too,” Mom says with a genuine smile, then turns to me with that same smile, plus a hint of warning in her eyes. “Don’t mess up the staging, please.”

I lead Ellie up the stairs and to my room, which doesn’t look much like mine anymore. Chess pushed my bed to the opposite wall and dressed it up in an ultrabright white comforter quilted with small olive-colored pom-poms. An old teddy bear from the depths of my closet sits in the center of the bed, cozied between two slate and pale-green throw pillows. I move one of the pillow tassels out of Teddy’s face. I wouldn’t want to block his view of Ellie, who is trailing her fingers along my desk. It’s one of the few elements of the room that still truly feels like mine, and a shudder rolls through me just watching Ellie’s fingers trace the width of it. “This is so bizarre,” Ellie murmurs, barely choking back her judgment. She lingers on the faux-watercolor print above the bed. It’s a baby elephant spraying water into the air from its trunk. Adorable, but hardly my style. “Are you sure this is the same room I saw the other day?”

“They had it staged for showings,” I explain.

“Right.” She nods slowly. “And since when are you moving?”

“Since my parents came back from Florida with a new condo and a mission to complicate my life.”

Her brows knit together. “You’re moving to Florida?”

“ They are moving to Florida,” I correct her. “I’m moving…somewhere else.”

“Around here? Or around Champaign? Or are you gonna just jump straight to Chicago?”

“Try option D: not yet known,” I say. “I’m focused on the test and not regressing back to third-grade Murphy while living in this eight-year-old’s room.”

“It could be worse,” she says. “They could’ve staged it with bunk beds.”

“That would’ve been fine,” I say, “because I’d have dibs on top bunk.”

Ellie sits on the edge of the bed, and I’m a little fonder of the unfamiliar comforter just by its proximity to her. “Green. Gender neutral. Love it.” She pinches and flicks one of the pom-poms in a way that probably isn’t supposed to be sexual. Probably. Every bone in my body is begging me to sit down next to her and pick up where we left off in her father’s garage. The days of buildup between then and now make having her here— in my bed —feel all the more intense. I want to know how it feels to lie beside her—on a real bed, not an air mattress—without liquor or second-guessing in the way. But as bizarrely turned on as I am by the way she’s rolling that pom-pom between her fingers, I’m equally turned off by the thought of failing this class two semesters in a row. I shake my head to clear it and focus my energy on organizing my flash cards. “Are you down to quiz me?”

Ellie’s brows pinch together momentarily before settling into a look of sheer disbelief. “Oh, we’re actually going to study?” she asks. “I thought that was like…code.”

I swallow. “For?”

“You know.” She smirks and flicks a pom-pom again. Of course I know, and she’s not helping me shake the thought.

“Tempting,” I admit, “but my parents are downstairs.”

“We can be quiet.”

I can feel myself go red. “I believe your end of the deal was to help me pass this class.” I shuffle my note cards like a classic fifty-two-card deck. They snap and thwack against one another in that satisfying way that as a kid I practiced forever to achieve.

“Buzzkill,” Ellie grumbles.

“I’m no happier about this than you are. Now pick your poison: flash cards or study guide?”

I join her on the edge of the bed, keeping a healthy distance for both of our sakes, but I can still feel my heartbeat in the arches of my feet. I run her through all of my study methods—mind mapping, online quizzes, the audio recording on my phone. Each has brought me varying levels of success. “You’re working really hard on this, huh?” Ellie says, sounding impressed. “Did you do all this stuff last semester?”

I shake my head. “None of it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I would’ve needed over a hundred on the final to pass,” I explain. “There was no point.”

“You could’ve done it and asked for extra credit,” she points out.

“Which is what Kat did,” I remind her. “But as you may remember, your mother plays favorites, and she isn’t a fan of mine.”

“ Wasn’t a fan of yours,” she corrects me, scooting farther back on the bed and lying down so she’s ear to ear with the teddy bear.

“Right.” I scoot up next to her, simultaneously wishing for more and less space between us. I pass off the stack of note cards. “I actually think she might’ve bumped my grade.”

“Yeah?” Ellie lifts a brow. “Why do you think that?”

“I thought I needed a ninety-eight on the final, but then I talked to her and she said I needed an eighty-nine. So either she likes me and she changed it, or I miscalculated and I’m bad at math.”

“The second one,” Ellie says flatly. “You’re definitely bad at math.”

I’d push her off the bed if it wouldn’t mean cleaning up all my note cards. At least it’d be an excuse to touch her. My fingertips go hot, begging me to thread them into her hair and pull her close. But I shouldn’t. “I’m still not sure I’ll pass,” I say, clearing the stubborn, needy feeling from the base of my throat. “Eighty-nine is still tough.”

“But you can do it,” Ellie waves the stack of note cards in the air like a cheerleader rooting for Team Murphy. “You’re going to pass, and everything’s going to be fine.”

“No, everything’s not going to be fine,” I argue. “Even if I pass, I can’t transfer till next fall, remember?”

Ellie rolls onto her side, propping her head up in her hand. It’s very Draw me like one of your French girls , and it’s not helping my focus. “So you transfer next fall,” she says plainly. “You’ll still get a whole year with Kat. That’s good, right?”

“Well, yeah.” I chomp down on my thumb, getting a good taste of hangnail. “But I’m not going to have a home in a month or two, so long as tomorrow’s showings go according to plan, and I’ll be staring down the barrel of a twelve-month lease here in Geneva that I’ll have to buy my way out of just to transfer to U of I.” The words pour out like water, a river of worry flowing between us. I thought I knew how much anxiety was bottled inside me, but now that it’s spilled out, I feel like I might drown in it. Quietly and with as much steadiness as I can muster, I tack on one additional thought. “Plus you won’t be there next year. Which sucks.”

“What if we just focused on one thing at a time?” Ellie suggests with a calmness I instantly tether myself to. “One flash card.” She plucks a card off the stack and holds it up. Diversification is scrawled across it in black ink. An easy one.

“Diversification. That’s when you spread your assets around into different investments to lower risk,” I rattle off.

Her mouth ticks up. “See? One down.” She sets it facedown on the bed, then holds up another card. This one I get wrong, along with the next three. My fingernails dig tiny little crescent moons into my palms.

“One at a time,” she reminds me, straightening the small stack of cards I’ve gotten wrong. “You can manage that, right?”

“Right,” I say. After all, I’m talking to the woman who convinced me I could pull off an elaborate lie in front of her entire family. If anyone can fool me into believing in myself, it’s her.

We work our way through the stack of flash cards, gradually shifting closer together as we do. If my answer isn’t letter-perfect to the definition on the note card, the whole thing goes in the “wrong” pile. I swallow my arguments and keep going. Ellie is slow and deliberate and committed to the details, just like she was while making puppy chow. One card at a time. One vocab word. One practice question. One inch closer to her on the bed as I resituate, shifting a pillow beneath my head or reaching to move the teddy bear out of the way of the expanding “right” stack, not so subtly brushing my hand against hers as I do. Maybe no one is flicking each other’s pom-poms, but just being close to her like this is magic in its own right. Whether or not we’re close next year, whether or not we’re living in the same state or on the same wavelength as to what we are—friends, girlfriends, somewhere blurred in between—I like taking it one thing at a time with her.

Somewhere between midnight and morning, I blink out of a sleepy haze to the sound of gentle snores and all the lights still on. I don’t remember drifting off or whether we got through the full stack of flash cards before I slipped away to dreamland, but beside me, Ellie sleeps soundly, her mouth hanging open an inch and a flash card still pinched between her thumb and forefinger. I breathe the smallest laugh through my nose. Not even in my dreams could I imagine something as perfect and downright wholesome as the two of us studying until we both fell asleep. Slowly, I peel myself off the bed, but I pause before my feet hit the floor. I don’t want to risk waking Ellie up before I get a chance to fully soak in this moment—the flutter of her lashes while her eyes stay closed, the pinch of pink on her cheeks that shades in the space between her freckles, and most of all, the warmth of knowing that, of all the places she could choose to be, she’s right here by my side tonight. I press every detail between the pages of my memory, then tuck this moment away for safekeeping. I’m not sure when—or if—she and I will have another one like it.

I clean up the flash cards, then tiptoe across the bedroom to flip off the lights. Feeling my way through the dark is a lot harder now that the furniture has been rearranged, but by the time I’m back in bed, my eyes have adjusted enough to make out the outline of the woman beside me. I can’t resist pressing a kiss against her cheek—one small, delicate kiss, but it’s enough to stir her. Ellie groans and drapes one sleepy arm over me, pulling me against her until I’m nested in the curve of her hips. She’s the smallest big spoon there ever was, but we fit like this. My breath hitches for a moment; then I align the rhythm of my breathing with hers, each inhale and exhale in perfect synchronicity. I’m certain she’s drifted back to sleep until I feel her lips brush against my neck, and my heartbeat quickens. I can feel hers speed up, too, knocking against my back like a visitor asking to be let in. I answer with a tilt of my hips, rocking back into her in time with our breaths.

“Mm.” Her low, sweet hum of approval vibrates through me. “Mm-hmm.”

“Mm-hmm?” I ask. A question posed wordlessly.

“Mm-hmm,” she replies, and her fingertips find the button of my jeans just as I misplace my breath. It crosses my mind that I should stop falling asleep in all of my clothes, but the thought evaporates the moment my button gives way to her fingers. There is no should. Not now. There’s just me and Ellie and the warmth of her touch sweeping against the sensitive skin above where I want her most. I rock into her again, hoping the tilt of my hips will guide her hand lower. Her throaty laugh hums against my shoulder. “Yeah?” She whisper-asks. “Can I?’

“Yes.” My voice flutters. “Please.”

When her hand slips behind my zipper, I close my eyes, and all I can see is blue. Blue like her eyes and the nail polish on her fingertips, stroking and circling and exploring how to best make me tremble. Blue like the first sign of morning in the sky, which creeps up the horizon with the promise of a damp new day. It’s blue when she touches me, but what color am I for her? There’ll be time to find out later; for now, Ellie asks the questions.

“Can these come off?” She tugs on my belt loop like she’s done a dozen times, but this is different. More eager. My heart tugs back as I jolt upright and start working my jeans over my hips. Midshimmy, I catch the early glow of sun warming the edges of the curtains, and for a moment, I hesitate. The responsible thing to do would be to cut this short and go back to sleep so I’m well rested for my test tomorrow—or rather, my test today—but I’ve been responsible all week, and I’ve got a dozen different study methods to prove it. I bite my cheek and bargain with a better version of myself: a few more hours of sleep won’t make or break my grade, and my grade won’t change the transfer deadline or keep my parents from selling the house. I can feel my priorities shifting like tectonic plates migrating toward a certain earthquake. As they collide, I yank my jeans over my feet and fling them somewhere into the dark.

Ellie giggles, then pulls me by the forearm back onto the pillows and into a long, dizzying kiss, the kind that makes me shudder and confirms I chose correctly. We’re not in her father’s garage anymore, sneaking victory lap kisses before dinner. This is fervent and frantic, open-mouthed and honest. Ellie kisses me like she needs to, and thank God, because I need it too. I need her palm on my jaw and the cool bump of her septum ring against my upper lip. I need her soft hair tickling my cheeks, even when I have to pull away to pinch a stray blonde strand off my tongue. We laugh and pick up where we left off, just the way I need us to. As long as Ellie is touching me, I have proof she’s here with me, and that’s what I need the most.

Ellie’s fingers wander between my thighs again, and she falls into a gentle rhythm, tracing slow, sleepy circles that pick up speed each time I gasp. She touches me so sweetly, so expertly, that I almost forget my body is new to her. A moan spills like warm honey from my mouth into hers.

“Shh.” I feel her smile spread over my lips as her fingers drift back north, cuing my hips to buck without my permission. I’m not choosing anymore, only reacting. My body tenses and rolls against hers in waves that match the rhythm of her fingers, and I don’t notice I’m approaching the edge until I’m gazing out over it, trembling and triumphant as I dive into the blue.

A good amount of time elapses before I can find a normal breathing pattern, but Ellie’s still holding me when I do. She kisses my nose and forehead before landing on the top of my head, nuzzling into my hair. “So that’s what I had in mind when you invited me over to study,” she murmurs.

I trace my lower lip with my tongue. My room isn’t quite as dark as when we started, but I’d barely call it morning. My exam is still hours away.

“Take your pants off,” I say. “We’ve got a lot more studying to do.”