Begin Again

“If he dies, I had nothing to do with this,” says Shay.

“It’s for his own good,” I say decisively, opening the door to our room and heading into the hall. In my hands is several days’ worth of trial and error: a bag full of a ground half-caf blend that tastes so close to Eternal Darkness that maybe even Milo, despite confusing coffee for oxygen, won’t notice the difference.

Naturally, I needed Shay’s taste buds to help perfect the batch, because I’m pretty sure if I had more than a sip of it myself I’d go supernova. And while Milo did say he was fine with me helping get ahold of his coffee consumption, he did not consent to peeling me off the ceiling.

Milo’s door is open when we reach his room. Shay walks in the way she normally does and I follow, but the room is decidedly Milo-less.

Shay cranes her neck down the hall. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence—sometimes he’ll do a quick round of the dorm just to make sure nobody’s crying to the lo-fi focus beats playlist on Spotify, which has happened enough times in the study room that I’m more than a bit apprehensive about my GPA. But Shay and I don’t have time to wait around tonight.

“We can just find him later,” she says.

I sigh. “He’ll be on his ninth cup by then.”

I consider just leaving the bag in his room, but am unwilling to risk it being buried under the pile of mugs that say things like POSSIBLY TODAY, SATAN AND SCIENCE: IT’S LIKE MAGIC, BUT REAL!, and another that is an inexplicable collage of pictures of chickens.

Shay calls Milo’s name down the hall to see if he’ll appear, and I take a step back to take in the rest of his room. It’s all done up in cool navies and deep reds, with the kind of cozy look of things that were well-used and well-loved before they got to him. Things with a history to them, like a little hand-me-down home. I accidentally brush the down comforter with my knee as we make our way out, and the soft wear of it makes me wistful—a part of me has always wanted siblings, wanted to pass stories and advice back and forth with people who knew me inside and out.

I’m snapped out of it when Shay walks back into the room and jerks her thumb toward the door. “Leave it in the comment box.”

I follow her out, plopping the coffee grounds in the box, and use the notebook in my bag to fashion a note, propping it on the top of the box so he won’t miss it: “Semi-Eternal Darkness—try switching to this after 2pm!”

“I maintain that the word ‘semi-eternal’ makes no logical sense,” says Shay.

I pat her pale pink coat sleeve. “Save that big brain of yours for trivia tonight.”

It’s a high-stakes situation for us both—yesterday before the broadcast, Milo got word from the Knights’ Tour organizers that the blue ribbon hunt events were starting this weekend, and would run on random Friday and Saturday nights for the rest of January. You could either participate on campus in the dining halls or opt to go off campus to a few participating restaurants that had their own incentives. I was resigned to eating what Milo affectionately called “an insult to food” alone on campus each weekend to collect enough ribbons, but it turns out Shay’s book club already has a trivia team that meets at a restaurant near Bagelopolis, and was more than happy to absorb me into it—particularly because the prize for trivia night is always a fifty-dollar gift card to the bookshop in the historic part of town.

Shay heads out to meet up with them beforehand, which gives me enough time to go on a long walk and center myself. I head toward the arboretum, which I’ve wandered along the edges of enough times to have a few favorite spots. One of them is a bench half buried in an overgrown bush—I can see out to the lake and the edges of campus, but unless they’re really looking, nobody can see me.

Once I’m there I take a breath and pull out my white ribbon, skimming my fingers along the edges of it. It’s strange to feel it so light in my hand when it has such a significant weight in my heart. A weight I’ve been carrying so long that it feels strange to be here now, about to do something with it for the first time.

It sounds ridiculous, but I’m almost scared. Like I’ve spent my whole life anticipating this ribbon hunt, but it never once occurred to me that I might fail at it. That it might be as hard of an adjustment as so many other things here have been—the struggle with keeping up academically, the strangeness of trying to fit into this new world, the tension of not quite knowing where Connor and I stand. The ache of sitting in the studio and answering listener emails, trying to avoid my mom’s static gaze from the picture on the wall.

Most of the time I can bury it. The faster I move, the more I keep busy, the easier it is to ignore. Because it’s not just the thought that I might fail at the ribbon hunt—it’s the understanding of how fragile everything really is, when I try to account for it. How easily plans can come undone. I spent my entire childhood with dreams that got smaller as I got older, but I’ve held fast to them. Now with every little setback I can’t help wondering if they’ll get smaller still.

I press the ribbon back into my bag and pull my coat tighter around myself. I’m not sure why I keep coming out here. Maybe I thought if I let myself feel it, the fear would go away. Or at the very least, become something I could better understand. But sometimes the longer I sit the more I feel like I’m in a tug-of-war with two versions of myself—the one who wants to face my fear head-on, and the one who doesn’t want to admit to having any fear in the first place.

Connor calls. For the first time I can remember, I consider not picking up.

“I am so sorry I missed our FaceTime date last night,” he says by way of hello. “I was totally slammed. My dad’s making me take on extra hours at his office.”

I wince, because I know how much Connor hates working part-time at his dad’s real estate company. Mr. Whit runs a tight ship, and when Connor’s on the clock, he’s no exception.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say, genuinely meaning it. I don’t bother telling him I was slammed, too. It feels almost rude to tell him too much about what I’m up to here, like I’d be rubbing it in his face—I’m here and you’re not. “How was it?”

“About as fun as a root canal. What are you up to tonight?”

For a moment I feel this stupid little thrill, certain he’s asking because he’s considering coming down here or asking me if I want to come up. But the last buses between Little Fells and Blue Ridge State leave midafternoon, so he can’t mean that.

“Actually,” I say, pressing the phone closer to my face, “the first blue-ribbon event is tonight.”

“Oh, shit. You’re still grabbing them for me too, right?”

“Right,” I say, a fresh panic hot in my throat.

I’ve planned for that since I got here, but only now am I starting to understand how much of a wrench it’s going to throw into my life. We won’t know where or when on the weekends the ribbon-hunt events are until the Friday before. So if I’m really dead set on getting to as many as I can for both of us to have enough, I’ll never be able to make solid plans ahead of time.

“Just—you know it’s not going to work without a white ribbon, though?” I remind him.

I’m expecting him to blow out a breath, but instead I can practically feel the charm of his smile in the words: “I’m not worried. I’m sure it’ll work itself out.”

I stiffen a bit. For the most part, it’s unspoken, but there’s always been a bit of a divide between Connor’s situation and mine. His family is better off than most in our small town, and between that and his boyish good looks, he’s not someone used to hearing the word “no.” I don’t think he realizes just how hard the rest of us are paddling under the surface to stay afloat with him.

Or how hard other people work to keep him afloat. Because if he’s not worried, that probably means he’ll let the worrying fall to me.

“I wish I could be there,” says Connor, his voice so earnest that I feel myself softening. “I really miss you.”

I get up from the bench, heading in the direction of the restaurant, an idea forming in my head. “You only have one class on Fridays, right? We could do something for Valentine’s Day. Shay is already going to spend the night at her sister’s, so we’d have the whole dorm room to ourselves.”

“Ah, I wish I could, but . . . I’m doing this big open house with my dad. You know how it is.”

“Of course.” I clear my throat. “Well, I’ll be back in the next few weeks.”

I’m not sure which week, though, and Connor doesn’t ask. Instead we talk about what our old high school friends are up to, and some spoiler that dropped for a show we used to watch together. The conversation falls into such a familiar, simple rhythm that if it weren’t for the bustle of Main Street jolting me back to campus, I might have thought I never left Little Fells at all.

By the time I reach Barb’s, a tiny restaurant not too far from Bagelopolis, Shay is there and waving me over to a table she secured in the back. It’s already overflowing with a mountain of cheesy nachos, a plate of mozzarella sticks, and a pile of wings with enough dipping sauce options to drown in. Connor happens to get an incoming call from one of our friends just then, so we say our goodbyes just before I get close enough to the table for my jaw to hit the floor.

“Is this all for us?”

“Barb likes me. And my good-for-nothing book club friends who just ditched for yet another Jane Austen movie marathon,” Shay grumbles, plucking a nacho off the mountain and sinking her teeth into it. “They think trivia’s going to be too loud with all the extra teams competing for the ribbon hunt, but we can’t compete unless we have four players.”

I glance around. “Maybe another team will absorb us?”

Shay narrows her eyes at the other clumps of students, and only then am I aware of the heightened tension of pre-competition in the room. It’s like the beginning of one of Connor’s soccer games, except with a lot less Gatorade and a lot more underage kids trying to pull out fake IDs for cheap beer.

“Team Bad & Bookish merges with no one.”

“Well . . .” I do another glance and spot a curtain of thick, shiny dark hair catching the light near the exit. “Val!”

She stops at the door, turning around with one of those beaming, close-lipped smiles of hers. “Andie,” she says warmly. “Good to see you outside of a library for once.”

“Are you here for trivia?”

“Oh, no, I was just finishing a tutoring session,” she says, gesturing to the back.

“Do you want to be here for trivia?”

“Oh,” says Val. “Um . . .”

“You can split the gift card to End of Story if we win,” Shay calls from the table.

Val raises her eyebrows by just small enough of a fraction that I know we’ve got her. “You have my attention,” she says, shifting her purse off her shoulder and heading over.

One down, one to go. I whip out my phone for an SOS text to the Cardinal dorm group chat I made earlier in the week. Ellie answers with no less than ten emojis that she’s visiting relatives, Harriet’s at a movie, and Tyler is finishing an out-of-class assignment in the astronomy tower.

Just when I’m about to pivot to plan C and accost strangers, my phone buzzes.

Remove me from your godforsaken group chat, Milo writes.

I roll my eyes. Only if you come to trivia.

He starts to type an answer back, then stops and starts again. Tell Shay she owes me.

I swing by the registration table to put Milo’s and Val’s names next to ours. By the time I return, Val and Shay are in such a heated conversation about the protagonist of a recent romance novel that neither of them notice me approaching.

“That’s just the thing, though, it’s the 1867 version of a Hallmark Christmas movie,” says Shay. “If she didn’t have to go back to her small town—”

“But in this case, New York really was all wrong for her,” says Val, the two of them leaning in so close that they might literally butt heads if they’re not careful.

“It’s a reverse Little Women, is what it is,” Shay insists. “Jo March is rolling in her grave.”

Val gasps. “Jo March is immortal. How dare you.”

Shay laughs so loudly she has to abandon the nacho she was aiming at her mouth. “I’ll give you that. But not much else, since it looks like we’re disqualified.”

“I texted Milo,” I say, planting myself in the seat across from them.

Shay laughs again, this time hard enough to shake the table. “Oh. Andie.”

I tilt my head at her. “What?”

“You could threaten Milo with his mortal life, and I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get him into Barb’s on a Friday n—” Shay’s jaw drops. I follow her gaze, whipping around to see Milo walking gingerly into the establishment, dodging a drunk co-ed with a pint of beer sloshing in his hand. I yank up my arm to wave him over just as Shay mutters, “Well I’ll be damned.”

I turn back to her, smug. “See? He’s got your back.”

Shay raises her eyebrows. “I sincerely doubt he is doing this for me.”

Before I can protest, the mic at the front lets out a sharp whine and the trivia host steps up to get us all started. Milo sits down so gracelessly that half his limbs brush mine, unwrapping his scarf and yanking off his hat to reveal red, wind-whipped cheeks.

“Did you teleport?” I ask.

“I was with my brothers in the Bagelopolis lot.”

I suspect by the way he says this more to his coat than any of us that there’s more to the story, but just then trivia night kicks off in earnest. I’m about to confess that I’m borderline useless at trivia when the host announces, of all things, that the first category is vampires in pop culture.

“Shit,” says Shay, burying her head in her hands. “I haven’t read Twilight in at least five years.”

“I . . . have a box of Count Chocula left over from Halloween,” Val offers.

I pull up my sleeves. Connor and I marathoned our way through True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not to mention watched every film adaptation of vampire novels from Dracula to Interview with a Vampire.

“You better hold on tight, spider monkeys,” I say under my breath.

Thanks to my alarming vampiric knowledge we dominate the first round, which then leads into another round, this one on geography. Milo runs a resigned hand through his curls before telling us that his sister Jeanie started her career as a high school geography teacher, then casually crushing everyone in the bar around us down to the capital city of Cyprus.

“Cheers,” says Milo, holding up his Coke to my hot chocolate, “to the masterminds of team Bad & Bookish.”

I knock my glass with his, returning his satisfied half smile with a grin of my own. Luckily the two of us peak right then and there, before our smugness can become our downfall. We are utterly useless for the rounds on obscure dog breeds (Shay’s wheelhouse), celebrities’ real names (Val’s specialty), and Broadway musicals (both Val and Shay nearly knock their own arms out of their sockets raising our whiteboard up with their answers).

In the end we win by a landslide. We’re such a force to be reckoned with that we decide to reconvene next week and let Shay’s book club friends off the hook, calling ourselves the “All-Knighters” (inspired in part by Milo’s utter disregard for sleep). I’m so relieved to have a built-in team for the month of this ribbon hunt that I’m almost dizzy, and Shay and Val are so overjoyed by the gift card that they entirely forget about the food at our table. Someone hands us two to-go boxes, which Milo starts shoving leftovers into for breakfast tomorrow morning.

In the meantime I go up to the host’s makeshift podium and show her my white ribbon and collect a blue one, along with the participating players in the teams that came in second and third. I wander back to the table in a daze with it pinched between my fingers, waiting to feel something other than relief, or the thought that immediately chases it—one down, so many more to go.

“Hey,” says Val, grabbing my arm. “You guys wanna go to karaoke?”

“A bunch of other teams are going to the place down the street,” says Shay, her eyes shining from the high of the bookstore gift card.

I shake my head apologetically. “If I try to sing I will put every dog in a mile radius in pain.”

Milo is already halfway to the door. “I don’t acknowledge the word ‘karaoke’ as a noun or a verb. But godspeed.”

It takes me a minute to put my coat back on and secure our portion of the leftovers in my bag, so I’m not expecting to see Milo waiting outside the restaurant, leaning against the exterior of the building with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets. I catch sight of him before he sees me, seeing a rare moment of his face at rest—the thoughtful set of his brow, the keenness of his eyes, the slight weariness underneath them. It makes my chest warm in this familiar way, like when you spot a face you don’t just recognize, but have started to know well.

“Are you meeting your brothers?” I ask him.

Milo shifts himself off and falls into step with me, and I realize he was waiting so we could walk back together. I press down a smile, knowing he’ll say something to rebuff it if he sees.

“Eh, I think they’ve seen enough of me this evening,” says Milo.

I notice his eyes flit over to the Bagelopolis sign, unlit for the night now that it’s closed. We both hear a clang from the back that can only be someone taking out the garbage, and Milo picks up his pace enough that I have to go into overdrive on my short-person legs to keep up.

“What are they up to?” I ask.

“Oh, nothing new. Just another bimonthly attempt to get me and Harley to bury the hatchet.”

It’s as close as I’ve gotten to an invitation to butt into this situation, but I’m not sure whether I should take it. It’s not just me worrying about overstepping. Milo actually seems willing to talk about it. But judging from the look on his face, I’m not sure if he should.

“Are you alright?” I ask instead, giving him the option to dig into it or deflect in that Milo way of his.

He goes for option B. “As alright as a person whose blood is surging at half its usual caffeinated rate can be,” he says wryly.

The immediate skip in my step makes it easier to keep up with his absurd pace. “You tried my blend!”

“I tried your . . . concoction,” Milo concedes. “And it’s not bad for only being semi-eternal.”

I shrug. “I considered ‘Light in the Dark,’ but that seemed too off-brand for you.”

“Well, so is being this tired at ten o’clock at night.”

“I think that’s called a circadian rhythm,” I say, with just enough slight sarcasm that I can tell Shay and Milo are rubbing off on me. “Anyway, if you like it, I’ve got the rest of the test batch in the kitchen at Bagelopolis. Also, I did some quick research, and apparently there’s a roasted tea that has the same consistency of coffee you could try.”

I wait for Milo to take a cheap shot at tea drinkers like he usually does, but he’s gone quiet, his pace slowing. Just as we’re about to hit the part of campus where the tree line hides the main road from sight, Milo casts another glance toward Bagelopolis, then back down to the ground.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.

We stop at the crosswalk, and instead of answering, he looks me directly in the eye. “Shay said you have a fix-it thing.”

“Oh,” I say, my cheeks burning. She’s not wrong. It’s been so ingrained in me that I can’t remember a time I wasn’t like that. One of my earliest memories was petitioning the teachers to lower the tire swing in the recess yard so the pre-K kids could play on it, too. “I mean, yeah. That’s fair.”

“So I’m warning you right now, this is the kind of thing that can’t be fixed.”

I nod carefully. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth talking about, if you want to.”

The walk signal comes on, but it takes a moment for either of us to move. Milo slouches against the cold, but his eyes are still on me as we trudge onward.

“Why do you care so much?”

He doesn’t ask it out of annoyance, but genuine curiosity.

“You’re my . . .” “RA” seems too clinical, but “friend” seems too presumptuous. At least when it comes to Milo, who seems to put a lot more stock in action than words. “I care about you.”

This time Milo’s the one to look away. “I meant the rest of it,” he says, pulling one of his hands out to gesture vaguely at the air in front of us. “The whole fix-it thing.”

I clear my throat.

“Oh—I don’t know.” I flash him a smile, giving an answer that feels safely general, pulling myself out of it as far as I can. “We’ve all got stuff we’re going through. Seems like we could all use an extra friend now and then.”

Milo tilts his head at me, his curls picking up with the slight breeze. “Huh.”

I tilt my head back. “Huh?”

He shifts his gaze back to the sidewalk. “That . . . smile you did just there,” he says, gesturing at it without looking at me. “It didn’t look like your usual one.”

It was, in fact, my syndicated-talk-show smile. I suppose I haven’t had a reason to pull it out in front of Milo before—I’m happier squeezed into that recording closet with him and Shay than I am anywhere else.

I rub my chin with my wrist, scratching some invisible itch as the smile slides off my face. “Well. Offer still stands, if you ever want to talk brother stuff.”

Milo reaches up and rubs the back of his neck. “I appreciate it. But this thing with Harley—our dad died a few years back. Car accident. So. That’s kind of tangled in this whole mess, too.”

My heart reacts before I do, pinching in my chest and stopping my breath. “Oh.” I look up at him, and when our eyes connect, I am taken back to how familiar he seemed when we first met. Maybe it wasn’t just that I knew his voice. There’s a specific kind of grief that comes with losing someone you love, the kind that is always skimming just under the surface; the kind so universal that you can’t help recognizing it in someone else, even if you don’t know what you’re seeing yet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

His tone is cautious. “But you get it.”

I suck in a breath to deflect or change the subject, the way I’ve done whenever parents come up since I got to campus. But this isn’t like that. For the first time, I don’t worry about the distance it might put between us, telling him about my past. I worry about the distance it will put between us if I hold it back. If I swallow down the words that I want to tell him, knowing he’s one of the few people here who can understand.

I let the breath go. He’s trusting me with his own hurt. I can trust him with mine.

“Yeah. My mom died when I was eleven. Cancer.” I almost shrug, trying to ease some of the bluntness of it, but there’s something about this walk—the quiet in the chill, the way we seem so separate from everything else—that takes all of the tension out of me. “And my dad . . . just never really dealt with it. Put away all her stuff. Got a job two hours away, so he didn’t really have to deal with me. My grandmas raised me, mostly.”

My jaw tenses, waiting for some shift between us. For something to change in the dynamic, now that we’ve both laid out the worst things that ever happened to us.

But Milo just knocks his arm into my shoulder, so gently that I feel a faint smile trying to curl on my lips. “I’m sorry, too,” he says.

I don’t say “thanks,” because we both know by now it’s a word that never quite makes sense. I just knock my shoulder back into him. A quiet give-and-take.

He’s quiet for a few moments, but there’s nothing uncomfortable about it. Just thoughtful, his eyes still on me, like he’s waiting for me to go on. When I don’t, he says, “And that segued into solving everyone else’s shit because . . . ?”

“Because . . .”

The ache is back, but it isn’t just an ache anymore. It’s sharp and demanding. It knows I’m changing shape here, and it’s changing, too. And what it wants is for me to meet Milo’s watchful gaze and tell him the truth—a truth I didn’t know existed until he just made so much space for it. A truth I don’t understand well enough to explain.

Because there is a part of me that genuinely enjoys giving advice and helping where I can. Not just because it feels like a natural progression of what my mom did with her own career, but because it’s something I feel good doing. Something that most of the time, I excel at.

But in the past few years, it’s become more than that. Not just a passion, but a crutch. And if I think too long about exactly what it is I’m using it for, I might look all the way down to the bottom of something I don’t want to see.

I settle for part of the truth, if not the whole of it. “It just makes me happy, knowing there are things that can be fixed. That I might be able to help take a problem off someone’s plate.”

“Oh. So my messy love triangle is just a serotonin hit for you, huh?” Milo teases.

I let out a breathy laugh, relieved to pivot. “You caught me.”

Milo’s quiet for a few more strides. “That’s rough about your dad, though,” he says. “I feel like my mom did the total opposite. She’s like, aggressively involved now. Which you’d think would be harder with seven kids.”

“Seven kids,” I marvel.

Milo kicks a stray twig off the sidewalk with his boot. “Honestly, it’s a miracle I even remember my own name.”

“It must be nice, though. I always wanted siblings.”

Milo lets out a derisive snort. “Yeah, well.”

I stop in my tracks. Milo stops a beat later, his expression quizzical.

“I’m gonna level with you, Milo.”

He sizes up all five foot one of me. “Uh, good luck with that.”

I square my feet on the pavement and look up at him. “I probably do have a fix-it thing. And I am trying very hard not to inflict it on you and your brother. So hard that I have at least eight abandoned coffee cups of failed ‘Semi-Eternal Darkness’ blends in the trash can behind Bagelopolis that should never see the light of day.”

Milo’s lip quirks. I gravitate a little closer to him, lowering my voice.

“And maybe I can’t fix anything. But maybe it would help just to talk about it.”

Milo leans back on his heels, staring out at the quad behind me. “I mean, you already know the details.”

“Kind of.”

I know that Milo had a girlfriend, and their relationship also had a strong Andie and Connor vibe to it—they’d been next-door neighbors and grew up together, so the whole thing was just kind of fated. I also know that in October of last semester Milo caught her and his brother Harley making out in the back row of a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas a few towns away from campus, which is why he now hates both that movie and the idea of true love.

I also know he hasn’t talked to either of them since.

“Look, new kid. The long and short of it is the same anyway. Family’s complicated.” Before I can say anything, he adds, “Like, this thing with your dad. You know the score, right? And it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t undo what happened.”

I’m not used to being caught off guard, especially this many times in a row.

“I guess . . .” I can’t lie. Not to Milo, or anybody, really. “I mean, he’s been trying to fix things, I think. In his defense.”

Milo shrugs. “So has Harley. Doesn’t mean things are fixable.”

That’s not true, I want to say, but I don’t want to get into the pots and kettles of it all. I can’t argue that Milo should try to fix things with Harley without digging myself into a hole where I’d have to be open to fixing things with my dad, too.

“Maybe . . .” I find myself saying, just to fill up the silence before my conscience can. “Maybe it’s just a matter of being ready.”

“Well, let me know if you ever are, because I’m sure not.”

I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep back the tidal wave of guilt, and the irritation that follows it. I don’t want Milo to be right. But I also don’t want to feel obligated to fix things with my dad, either. I wasn’t the one who left.Content (C) Nôv/elDra/ma.Org.

“Hey.” Milo settles a hand on my shoulder. Only when I glance over at him do I realize my entire face has twisted into this not-quite scowl, something so far from the syndicated-talk-show smile that I don’t know how to categorize it. “Doesn’t mean either of you are the bad guy or anything. There are just some things beyond help.”

We’ve reached the dorm. Milo uses his ID card to let us in, and we make small talk in the elevator that I know we’re both only half paying attention to. Underneath the banter about the cafeteria menu we’re both raw and uncertain, like coming in from the cold slammed us back into reality—the mom-less, dad-less, uncertain reality that we just shared with each other, for better or worse.

We reach my room first and come to an abrupt stop.

“Well—g’night,” I say, my throat tight.

“Semi-night,” Milo corrects me.

I let out a laugh that borders on a wheeze, leaning closer to him. Or maybe he leans closer to me. All I know is that one moment we’re both hovering uncertainly in my doorway, and the next his arms are wrapped around me, and mine around him. The hug is quiet and firm, and as I lean into the warmth of it, into the familiar citrusy, clean smell of him, I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve really hugged anybody. An even longer time since I hugged anybody and felt this kind of mutual understanding in it—that sometimes words might not fix things, but this can make them hurt less.

We’re just starting to pull apart when we’re interrupted by an ear-piercing wolf whistle from down the hall. The noise is so loud that I stumble backward, and Milo steps back and lowers his arms so quickly that it almost seems impossible that they were the same ones that wrapped around me a split second ago. I follow his eyes down the hall to the student who catcalled us, ready to glare, but they’ve already ducked into the bathroom.

“Well,” I say, putting my hands on my hips, “that was rude.”

But when I glance up at Milo, his head is bowed so I can’t see his face. He just mumbles a “good night” at me as he turns and lets himself into his room without looking back.