Chapter 54

BALTIMORE

Rana hands me her notebook, open to a grid-lined page filled edge to edge with her precise handwriting.

“I mean, have at it,” she says. The door to Mergenthaler Hall whooshes shut behind her, heavy wood over scuffed stone floor. “But I doubt I got anything from that you didn’t—I think it was just confusing as fuck.”

I swing my backpack over one shoulder anyways, tucking her notes inside. “Well, just in case.”

Our exam is on Tuesday, right after Halloween. Rana is the smartest person I’ve ever met—if her notes can’t decode that statistics lecture for me, nothing can.

“You going back home?” she asks, pushing dark hair behind one ear to look up at me. The breezeway to Wyman Quad opens up behind her as we move toward the library—all marble steps and fall trees changing color. The heels of our boots click over the brick walkway in tandem. “I have that whack-ass freshman seminar at one but was thinking of hitting a nap first.”

“Room’s all yours,” I say. Rana and I are in a quad in Wolman Hall—two bedrooms and a bathroom and a kitchenette so small there’s hardly room for her electric teakettle. Our quad-mates, Keely and Wren, already left to spend the weekend in New York. “Si should be here soon.”

“The elusive Silas Acheson,” Rana says. When I cut my eyes at her she laughs—this deep, throaty sound that’s always filling our tiny dorm room in a way that’s started to feel like home. She waves a hand at me. “I can’t wait to meet the guy who signed up for all of this.”

“Uncalled for,” I say, and she laughs again. The truth is Rana’s the best roommate I could’ve asked for, after Fallon. We share half the same classes, and she always makes extra tea for me, and sometimes she even comes to watch my Saturday-morning swim lessons at the rec center. For moral support. Afterward we get bagels, my hair in a chlorine-reeking bun, and sit on the quad with our coffee.

Oh—and Rana’s gone all day every Monday, which gives me plenty of quiet studying time. Because she spends those days at Hopkins Hospital, as the only freshman with a shadowing position in the ICU. The worst part is that I like her so much I can’t even stay mad. She deserves it. I did, too. But at least I get to hear about it, every Monday night when she collapses back into our room in crinkled scrubs with stories to tell.

“I’ll see you guys in Fells Point tomorrow, right?”

“I think so,” I say. We pass the library and start down The Beach, a sloping circle of grass that separates campus from North Charles Street. It’s busy with people on blankets with textbooks open beside them, guys in Greek letters throwing Frisbees, dogs with clusters of cooing students huddled around them. The air is crisp and clear and perfectly October. “We don’t have costumes yet, but Silas is good at that kind of thing.”

“I’m wearing a red dress and horns and calling it a day.”

“Perfectly reasonable,” I tell her, and then I see him.

Silas is standing at the corner of North Charles and Thirty-Fourth, leaned against a silver hatchback with Puddles’s leash looped around his wrist. His hair’s tied back—dark, familiar curls, a few strands falling into his face when he stoops to run a hand over Puddles’s head. She’s staring up at him from the sidewalk. He’s wearing jeans and sneakers and a Johns Hopkins hoodie I bought him in August—thick and fleecy and soft on my cheek every time I’ve fallen asleep with my face pressed against it.

I haven’t seen him in a month. Since I took the train to DC in September to spend a weekend with him and Mick and Cleo. He lifts his head, scanning the street and the crosswalk and the red-bricked edge of campus. For me, I know. I want to drop everything I’m holding and dead sprint through traffic to get to him.

“That guy?” Rana says, and I realize we’ve both stopped walking. “With the man bun and the dog?”

I glance at her and follow her gaze back to Silas. “That guy,” I say.

Rana smiles, nudging me with her elbow. “Not what I expected your type to be.”

I hear Silas’s voice, soft in that tree house in Colorado. Pressed against my ear in the dark at Lady June’s. Not that type of person?

And I know Silas isn’t my type, or any type at all. He’s just himself. He’s just who I want to launch myself at, bury myself against. I know none of us are types—we’re just people, who can change. Who can feel differently.

“I’m going to—” I break off, already stepping away from Rana.

She laughs one last time. “Yeah, you go. I’m going to grab something to eat anyway.”

I nod, only half listening, taking the rest of the slope down The Beach so quickly my knees ache. When I hit the crosswalk I shout his name and Silas looks up, his entire face illuminating in a grin. He lets go of Puddles and she runs for me—a slow, creaking lope that’s so pure and good and familiar I could cry. My knees hit the sidewalk and I wait for her, catch her when she gets to me, squeeze her tight into my chest. When I carry her over to Silas, he wraps us both in his long arms.

“Hi,” he says. I draw a deep breath against his throat. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” It’s a muscle I’m building—saying it to Silas, and Fallon, and my mom. Being brave enough to put those words in safe places. It’s one part of a nebulous whole I’ve been working through in that office a few blocks off campus, where I spend every Thursday afternoon talking about what happened with Camilla and Sadie, about all the stories I tell myself about myself, about the way I hurt in Nashville. About my anxiety—not a possession but a part of me, and one that I’m learning to be kinder to.

I thought once that the kind of doctor I want to be is realer than the kind of doctor my mother is—that the physical of our bodies holds more weight than the intangible of our minds. But in that, as in so much else, I was wrong. And the more I come to understand myself, the more I realize how much I don’t understand. It feels good, even when it feels bad, to be getting closer.

“I missed you,” I say.

“I still miss you,” Silas says, carefully lowering Puddles to the sidewalk and then taking my face in his hands. “And you’re right here.”

He kisses me—his lips October-cold and soft and searching. I tip him against the car, spread my fingers over his ribs through the thick fabric of his sweatshirt. When his mouth opens under mine, the whole world hazes out—I’m heat and I’m hunger. I’m an infinite ache. I love him so much it could end me.

“Sadie says hi,” he murmurs, lips in the hollow behind my ear.

I swallow. Lift a hand to hold his head, feel the curls at the nape of his neck. “Okay.” I talked to Sadie just a few days ago; I’ll talk to her next month, when we’re all in LA for Thanksgiving. “Hi, Sadie.”

Silas pulls back, his eyes tracking over mine. We smile at each other and Puddles darts a lick against my ankle and I want to freeze this, just as it is. This suspended moment, with a full weekend ahead of us—fleeting and precious and finite. But how, standing here, it feels hopeful and enormous. Like it’s endless enough for now.

“Where to first?” Silas asks. His eyes are golden in the autumn light. “I have a few ideas.”

“Anywhere,” I say. I slide my palm into his, thread our fingers together. And then I ask him to do what he’s done all summer and all fall, what he’s done every moment since that first night I met him. “Surprise me.”