Chapter 6

It’s Ethan, in the end, who convinces me to stay. There are only two hours between my conversation with Camilla and our scheduled departure for LAX, and I spend the first one on hold with the Penn admissions office. It’s a stilted roulette of Yes, hi, I’m calling about the Pre-College Biomedical Sciences Intensive and Please hold, let me transfer you and Yes, I was enrolled, Audrey St. Vrain and Not seeing you on the roster, please hold and No, wait, I—

Anyways, my mother was telling the truth. My place at Penn has been filled. I’m sorry, sweetheart, someone named Yvette finally told me, her words carrying through the line on a big sigh. We’ve already got a wait list two pages long. I can add you to it, but with classes starting in just a couple days...

It didn’t occur to me that Camilla would do this, though I realize that was idiotic—wishful thinking I should know so much better than by now. When my mother told me about the tour, I said I’d take care of notifying Penn—which I didn’t do, because I wanted to hold my place there for a gigantic and likely-to-come-in-handy “just in case.” But she’d circumvented me to seal my fate.

And so I spent my remaining hour pacing the shoreline down the steps from the house, gaming this out. The one time I glanced up I could see all three of them watching me: Sadie Stone, Magnolia, and my mother standing in a line in the glass-cased living room. I moved closer to the ocean, away from them.

I had the UPenn syllabus pulled up on my phone. The maroon-and-navy logo beamed up at me like a swift kick to the ribs.

I wanted to reach two-handed into the bright rectangle of my phone and grab on for dear life. God, I wanted this. I’d worked so hard for it.

We’ll review the readings together every day, Ethan had told me, backpack in his lap as we sat in his parents’ car on our way to the Denver airport just a few days ago. And I can send you my lecture notes and give you the highlights from all the labs.

Getting the ghost of the Penn program over video chat is better than nothing, but it’s not what I want. I want to be where Ethan is. I want to work with professors who haven’t seen me in my pajamas. I want the summer I planned for.

So I pick up the phone, and I call him.

Ethan answers as a particularly breathy gust of wind buffets the side of my face, and I can barely hear him. “Audrey?”

“Ethan, hi.” I turn my back to the sea, pull up the hood of my sweatshirt. “Hey. Can you hear me?”

“Hardly,” he says. But even through the wheeze of the ocean, his voice has the tug of a magnet. He sounds like my real life—like the version of it that makes sense. “Where are you?”

“At my mom’s house,” I say. “On the beach. Look, this—”

“What happened last night?”

I hesitate, stare up the sloping lawn. There’s definitely a storm rolling in; the sky’s almost the same gray as the house’s concrete exoskeleton. The thing is, Ethan never would have done what I did at the theater last night—he’s a committer down to his toenails, through to his bones.

In the English class where we met he’d read the entire syllabus before the semester even started, then reread every book along with the rest of us. It wasn’t because he wanted to be better; it was because he didn’t want to miss a single thing. That’s how he does everything—completely. There are the world’s ideals, and then there are Ethan’s. He’d rather not do a thing at all than do it only halfway, and I don’t want to show him the part of me I can’t hold to that standard.

“I just realized that this is wrong,” I tell him, not exactly a lie. “I shouldn’t be with her this summer, talking about some self-help book; I should be at Penn. But I called them this morning and my place is gone. I won’t get off the wait list by Wednesday.”

There’s a pause. When Ethan speaks again, his voice is clearer, like he’s moved the phone closer to his face. “They didn’t hold your place ahead of applicants who were wait-listed?”

“I know.” I rub my forehead, wrap my sweater farther around myself in the whip of a wind gust. “Camilla pulled the tuition, apparently, so I’m back in the general pool.”

“Okay,” Ethan says. His voice is even; in all the time we’ve been together I’ve never seen him upset. “Okay. So it’ll have to be the tour, and studying with Dr. Stone, and we’ll talk through the Penn coursework together as we planned.”

“Or,” I say, drawing a breath, “I could come anyways.”

He’s quiet. I turn around to squint over the ocean. It looks angry, churning navy and gray.

“What do you mean?” he asks finally.

“I could rent an apartment.” It’s the plan I’ve cobbled together while pacing the beach for the last hour. “In Philadelphia. Maybe a long-term vacation rental? I could talk to my dad. And study with you between classes. Go through the coursework together, like you said.” I pause, tuck loose hair behind my ear. Swallow. “Or I could stay with you, even.”

“What about the ICU shadowing position at Hopkins?” Ethan sounds confused, but his voice is patient. Help me understand, he always says. When he’s tutoring at the student center. When we’re working as EMTs and someone’s hurt in a way we can’t see. And now, apparently, to me. “Isn’t the application due next week?”

“It is,” I say.

“If you come here but aren’t enrolled at Penn, how will you describe your work this summer?”

I close my eyes, feel the storm wind in my eyelashes, try to breathe around the truth. Which is that he’s right, like so many times before. When I don’t speak, he keeps going.

“I don’t think they’ll choose you without something tangible on your application. The physician visits you have planned along the tour with Dr. Stone make more sense—and, I mean, if they’ll write you recommendations?” I hear a rustle from his end of the line, picture him reaching for his computer. “I looked into Dr. Stone, too. Did you know she published in the New England Journal of Medicine? The research coming out of her lab is...”

I let his voice wash into the sea, the rising wind. Ethan is the one person in my life who consistently knows what I need and makes sure that I have it. If he thinks I should stay, I should stay.

I open my eyes. Wish for the ocean to swallow me whole.