Begin Again

The next morning is so familiar in its rhythms that I could almost forget that my life capsized faster than that ill-fated kayak on the lake. Almost, if it weren’t for the way I suddenly don’t know how to safely look at Milo, the same way you’re not sure how to look at an eclipse. I want to look. I have to look. I just know that it’ll be bad news if I do.

Apparently yesterday I opened the floodgates to something, and now it can’t be stopped. I gave an inch and my body took a mile. Suddenly I can’t hear Milo’s laugh on the air without thinking about how when he held me yesterday, I could feel his voice in his chest. I can’t look into his eyes without my brain conjuring words like “seagrass” and “springtime” and “mint.” I can’t hold a conversation with him without staring at his lips and thinking about how close mine came to them. The almost of it all.

The feelings are so intense that they should be a full-body shock. I should be WebMD-ing “sweaty palms” and “complete inability to rationally function in front of a person you mutually friend-zoned months ago.” But that’s the telling part—it isn’t a shock. It’s almost a relief. Like I’ve just been waiting to let myself feel it, and now that I do, it’s clear I’ll never be able to unfeel it again.

Just in time for Milo to transfer, and me to be stuck in the kind of limbo with Connor that my brain is unhelpfully refusing to process right now. Cherry chocolate jam, am I done for.

It doesn’t help that Milo’s in top form during the broadcast, even while Shay and I are blinking our post-rosé selves awake. Whatever it is that happened with Harley, it looks like some kind of weight has been lifted off his shoulders. I don’t know if anyone else would notice, but it seems like he laughs a little more readily. Like his wry remarks are 10 percent less grim. Like he’s more excited for the day and less bracing himself for it.

Because the universe has decided to show me one mercy in this very confusing time, Milo immediately has to duck out for a shift at Bagelopolis, leaving me and Shay to deal with packaging the radio show into podcast form before we start our shift an hour later.

“So,” I say, sidling up to Shay at the computer. “How was Valeria’s cat?”

I don’t miss the dimple puckering on Shay’s cheek as she tries to bite down a smile. “Darcy’s a brat. I’m gonna cat-nap him.”

I twist a strand of my hair innocently. “Before or after you change out of yesterday’s clothes?”

Shay swats at my shoulder. “Andie Rose,” she scolds me with a grin. “It wasn’t like that. It just got late, is all.”

“Yeah, well. With her ex extremely out of the picture . . .” I shudder, an image of her and Connor arguing in the quad still just as jarring in my mind as it was in real life. “Eh. Sorry. Too soon for jokes.”

Shay focuses back on typing and I assume the subject is dropped. That is, until she stares at the screen for a few moments and says, “I think . . . I mean, last night was really fun. It’s like I said. I’m glad we can just be friends.” Her lips pucker thoughtfully. “Actually, I think after yesterday, I kind of . . .”

The drop in her tone is uncharacteristically self-conscious, even cautious. Like she wants to say it, but doesn’t want to put whatever it is on me.

“Kind of what?” I press, making it clear I don’t mind.

Shay shakes her head. “I mean, no offense, since he’s your ex and all. But Connor’s a tool. That’s the guy she was so hung up on that she didn’t know whether or not to date me?”

I bite down the reflex to defend him, embarrassed at how readily it comes. “I don’t know if I’d look at it that way,” I say, both for Valeria’s sake and for mine. I hate to admit it, but Connor has always had a magnetism to him. The confidence, the small-town charm, the way he makes me—well, makes people feel special when he takes the time for them. When you know everyone in the room wants to be at his side, but he only has eyes for you.

I will the two pangs in my heart to just go away, but they don’t. One of them is aching from losing Connor; the other may be tiny, but it’s still wild and desperate, reminding me that technically it isn’t over, that I don’t have to let this go.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t even be—I mean, I can’t even imagine how you’re feeling about the whole thing right now,” says Shay. “Breaking up with him after all this time.”

I let out a weird hiccupping laugh. “Well.”

“Anyway. I know what’ll take our minds off all the bullshit,” says Shay, tapping the notes Milo was using as a script for today’s broadcast. “The dance party in the quad.”

I tilt my head at the screen. It’s a dance party, sure, but also billed as a surefire way to get ribbons—the upperclassmen organizers legitimately throw every color of them into the crowd. The whole thing is perfectly timed out, too. I know the exact playlist for the event, because one of the organizers set it up to play from our station and taped it up on the booth for everyone’s reference. It’s one of the rare times anyone who isn’t one of the three of us ever comes in here, but the dance party being broadcast from here instead of someone’s playlist on a loudspeaker is a nod to the ribbon hunt’s roots.

I wait for the clench of my stomach, the same one I’ve felt worrying before every ribbon event. Instead there’s just a flood of relief. An anticipation that isn’t dread, but excitement—the idea of going out with my friends and dancing for the fun of it, without any other goals or plans in mind.

“It starts at three,” Shay reminds me.

That’s just in time to get back from our shift, if we go straight there from Bagelopolis. Plus it ends at five, which gives me plenty of time to get to the statistics exam I spent all the time at Milo’s studying for.

“Do you think it’s okay if I just leave my stuff here for the day?” I ask, knowing full well that a shoulder bag will only hinder my ability to jump up and down while shouting lyrics at the top of my lungs.

Shay glances over at the mound of stuff the sound engineer and DJs left in the corner. “Knock yourself out.”

“Given my dance skills, that’s a real possibility today.”

Shay pats me on the arm. “We’ll protect you from yourself.”

I’m expecting the rest of the day to grind as painfully as the day before did, for the shadow of what Connor did to cast everything in ugly colors. I ready my syndicated-talk-show smile and throw myself into work, hoping if I keep moving fast enough, I won’t have to think.

But at some point I stop willfully forgetting what happened; I just forget. It’s a busy day at Bagelopolis, the kind that marks a difference between who I was in January and who I’m becoming now. The Andie who isn’t just tethered by the idea of this place, but the people in it. By Shay, who spends the entirety of our shift making me giggle by inventing horrific bagel combinations for famous book characters (Peeta Mellark’s won with “a bagel inside of a bagel with bagel-flavored cream cheese, because bread”). By Valeria, who shows up during our lunch break to bring Shay a book and drill me on a few extra stats questions before the test. By Milo, who is in the back for most of his shift, but still manages to make me laugh out loud with a new name tag that reads andie rosé in deference to our mild hangovers.

By the time we’re all released for the dance party, I’m already in absurdly high spirits, buoyed by friendship and cookie dough cream cheese and the thumping bass of a Beyoncé song in the distance. Milo waves us off to go meet up with one of his sisters on campus, and Shay and Valeria and I head straight into the maelstrom of Blue Ridge students getting dangerously amped by the key changes to “Love On Top.”

“Andie,” says Shay, jostling my shoulder in an up-and-down motion. “You have to dance.”

“I am dancing,” I protest.

Valeria shakes her head at me. “You’re doing the a cappella bop.”

Shay snickers, not unkindly, and I ask, “The what?”

“That thing where you . . .” Instead of explaining, Valeria demonstrates, doing an all-too-accurate impression of me shifting my weight between my feet and vaguely moving my arms with them. “That bop.”

I stop my bopping. “Well, I can’t dance.”

“Bullshit,” says Shay, yanking me by the elbow with one hand and yanking Valeria by the elbow with the other. “Dancing isn’t a skill, it’s a goddamn right. And you’re a single woman now. Nothing to hold you back.”

I feel the press of bodies against us, the sound of the music nearly drowned out by people whooping and shouting and singing along to the words. My heart starts beating like it never has before, so high in my chest it feels like it might burst. I glom onto Shay and Valeria, equal parts thrill and terror, feeling less like I am walking into a crowd of strangers and more like I’m walking into a new version of my life. Something I couldn’t fully see on my own, but is all too clear with two of my best friends on either side of me, pulling me through.

“Now dance like you mean it,” Shay yells over the noise.

I grin back at her, pinching my nose with one hand and making a sea-diving gesture with the other as I lower myself to the ground.

“Still counts!” says Valeria, letting out a hoot of approval.

Shay’s laughing hard enough that she’s doubled over, almost as low to the ground as I am. “What else have you got, Andie?”

I jokingly pretend to drive a bus with one hand and use the other to open an invisible bus door and welcome a passenger in. Valeria enters my “bus” without missing a beat, getting into the back seat and grooving right alongside me in a manner decidedly more graceful, but dorky nonetheless. Shay groans and knocks on the invisible bus door until we let her in and starts grooving beside us.

“Where is this godforsaken bus going?” she asks.

“The Kingdom of Lumarin!” I exclaim.

I can practically feel the heat of Valeria blushing next to me, but it’s as if now that we’re in the middle of this crowd, all our usual self-consciousness has worn away.

“Then you’d better fasten your seat belts,” she says, “because there’s a whooole lot of witchcraft and confusing romantic shit ahead!”

Shay unsheathes a fake sword. “Bring it on!”

And then for a long while, the rest of the world just falls away. We’re goofing off and jumping and dancing and yelling, three people in a crowd of hundreds, ribbons flying everywhere but none of us even bothering to reach for them. We’re just sweaty limbs and ridiculous cackling and breathless energy, like there isn’t a past to worry over or a future to account for. The kind of moment that forms a tattoo in your heart before you even fully understand how much it means to you, living in it and outside it at the same time, making it a part of your story before you know how the story ends.

There’s a brief scheduled pause in the music so the upperclassmen can do a recap of this year’s ribbon hunt, which I know from asking around that they do just before they unleash a bunch of ribbons on the crowd. I reach out and hug Valeria and Shay, the three of us sticky and grinning and smushed against one another.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I tell them.

Valeria points to the other end of the quad. “I’m gonna grab us some water bottles.”

Shay glances to the left. “And I gotta pee. Meet back here in a few?”

“Sounds good,” I say, pulling out my phone before I even reach the end of the crowd. I’m all buzz and adrenaline and bass, but it’s grounding. Clarifying. I don’t know if my thoughts have ever been so clear, if I’ve ever felt so certain about anything.

It will be brutal. It will hurt for longer than I can say. But I can’t put it off anymore—I have to break up with Connor.

Once I can hear my own thoughts instead of the chattering of the crowd, I press the phone to my face, letting it ring. It rings and rings and rings, my heart still beating so hard I can feel it in my ear, my jaw, every part of the screen against my head.

I’m about to get Connor’s voicemail when instead I get Connor’s voice.

“Andie?”

I pull the phone away, trying to figure out why he sounds like he’s right in front of me. Then I realize that he is, in fact, right in front of me.

His hair is mussed, his eyes practically bruised from lack of sleep, his clothes all wrinkled. I’m so stunned to see him that it barely registers, my brain trying desperately to catch up to what’s right in front of me.

“I, uh. I didn’t leave last night,” he explains. “I stayed with some soccer buddies.”

I hold up my phone. “I was just . . .”

Calling to break up with you, is what I should say.

But Connor gives me a rueful smile. “Even now we’re on the same wavelength, huh?”

I’m not the one saying the words, but somehow they still leave a bitter taste in my mouth. I step farther away from the quad, like I don’t want Connor’s presence to taint the magic I’m still coming down from. Connor follows one step behind, his eyes trained on me.

We reach the outside of an academic building where the crowd has thinned out and I stop. “Connor, I’m sorry, but . . .” It feels so weird to say. The finality of it. The way a few small words can finish something bigger than I can measure. “I’m done.”

His expression crumples so quickly that I can’t help the way my heart sinks—like watching him fall during that soccer game where he screwed up his knee, or when we were little kids and someone made fun of his slight stutter. There’s this urge to comfort him, to wipe the hurt from his face, that feels too loud to ignore.© 2024 Nôv/el/Dram/a.Org.

“Andie. Andie, please,” he says, tears already clogging his throat. “Just . . . is there somewhere we can talk? I have so much I need to say. Things I should have said a long time ago.”

I glance down at my phone, willing myself not to waver. “I have an exam. You can follow me to the studio to get my stuff. But after that, I have to go.”

“Of course,” says Connor, his head bobbing. “We can talk there?”

I blow a breath out through my teeth, surprised at my own impatience. “Yeah. Sure.”

We walk over to the studio without another word, Connor slouching with his hands in his pockets and watching me closely, me shooting a quick text to Valeria and Shay not to wait up for me before picking up the pace. I need this to be finished.

I’ve spent too much time worrying about my future with Connor. I don’t think I even understood how much until I spent most of this day not worrying about him at all. I’ve always had space for him the way I have space in myself for everyone I love—but after today, after feeling so light and oddly free, I realize his space had its own weight. I’ve been pulling it for ages, and it’s only gotten heavier this past year.

I can’t hold on to it anymore.

If Connor senses the finality of the conversation we’re about to have, he sure doesn’t show it. The instant the door to the studio closes he takes stock of the place like this is a social visit, like he’s expecting me to give the whole tour. Music from the dance party set list is playing lightly from the booth, and Connor even tries to jokingly dance to it, like he can lighten the mood. Then he spots my backpack in the corner, sees the ribbons poking out of the front pocket.

“I can’t believe how hard you must have worked to get all of those,” he says, the waver in his voice undermining all his bravado.

My own voice is unyielding. “Yeah. Maybe someone else will want them.”

Connor takes a step toward me and I take a step back, so quickly that he startles.

“You mean it, huh?” he asks, deflating again. “After all this time, you’d really just give up on us.”

There’s this sweeping tone in his voice, romantic and tragic, the kind that might have made my heart skip a beat in some other circumstance.

“You cheated on me, Connor,” I say, shattering the spell of it. “And lied to me and to everyone we know about your transfer in a way that made me look like the biggest jerk in Little Fells.”

“And I’ll never not be sorry about it,” says Connor. “You know how much pressure I was under. I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want you to know the truth.”

“But I suppose it was okay for your other girlfriend to know it,” I say.

“Everything with Valeria happened because I was so ashamed. She was tutoring me. She already knew, and I just—It’s not an excuse,” he says quickly, when he sees my scowl deepening. “I just needed to explain.”

He runs a hand through his hair, taking a seat in the chair by the sound console. Shay’s chair. He glances at the chair next to it, clearly expecting me to sit down next to him. But if I let myself get settled, he’ll have more time to try to talk me out of this, and that’s the last thing I need.

“I mean, I know I can’t expect you to forgive me right away . . .”

He leaves the sentence hanging like I’m going to set terms, or give some timeline for that forgiveness. “Connor, you’ve been the one saying over and over how difficult the distance was,” I say instead. If I can’t appeal to the fact that he’s hurt me, I might as well remind him what it’ll do to him, too. “That’s not going to change. You’ll be in Little Fells and I’ll be here.”

“About that.”

I tilt my head sharply, narrowing my eyes at him.

“Uh—so my dad has a friend. It’d be a big favor, but . . .” Connor takes a breath, a shaky smile forming on his face. “He might be able to get me back into Blue Ridge next year.”

My jaw goes tight enough to chip a tooth.

“Good for you,” I say tersely.

Connor is earnest. Insistent. Like this blow to his pride is something he’s doing for my benefit, and nobody else. “We’d be together.”

“No. We wouldn’t,” I say calmly. “I’m breaking up with you.”

“After everything we’ve been through? Just like that?”

Connor leans back on the console, trying to seem confident, like he knows exactly what to say next. He looks more like his father than he ever has.

“I know you, Andie. Past, present, future. I’ve been there for everything. Do you think we’ll ever find other people who know us half as well as we know each other?” He sits on the edge of the seat, pressing a hand to his chest. “I know how to make you happy. I want to make you happy.”

I say it as gently as I can, even though I’m saying it through my teeth. “I don’t think either of us has been happy in a long time.”

Connor just continues on like he hasn’t heard me, not even giving the words a chance to land. “This is all just—it’s growing pains. Or maybe it’s being away from Little Fells so long. I mean, maybe this place is the problem. We weren’t supposed to be in a place like this.” He gestures out at the campus beyond these walls. “Do you really feel like you belong here?”

“Excuse me?”

Connor recognizes the edge in my voice and tries to recover. “What I mean is—we have so many friends in Little Fells. We were so happy. We never had problems before then.”

“You created the problem, Connor. Not me,” I say clearly. “And now on top of everything, you’re going to sit here and imply I’m not good enough to be here?”

“Well. Andie. You didn’t even get in the first time around.”

It takes a lot to make me angry. And up until now, I didn’t even think I had it in me to kick it up a notch to actual rage. But it comes swarming through me anyway, this roaring, fiery blaze that starts in my core and rushes through me so fast I’m almost dizzy with it.

“I didn’t get in because of you, Connor.”

I’m not yelling, but the way Connor’s jaw drops in surprise, I might as well be. I’ve never seen myself this riled, so of course, neither has he.

But it’s been years of holding this in my heart. The anxiety over my grades and the heartbreak from the rejection and the exhaustion of doing everything, anything I could to find my way back here to my mom. To the dream I had for myself long before I knew she wouldn’t be there to see it.

“I spent our entire sophomore year focusing on your classes and your pressure from your parents and I ended up with a bunch of Cs,” I say. “You asked for my help. You asked and asked and asked, and I gave it. And I never held that against you because that was my choice, but—” I have to pause, only because I’ve never felt this kind of fury before. I don’t know how to hold on to it, but I need it. I need to say this here and now, to let it out of myself so I never have to carry it again. “How dare you bring that up. When you should know full well why I didn’t get in the first time. Why I had to work twice as hard to get in on a transfer.”

“But—it’s not like I wanted you to fail at my expense,” Connor says defensively. “I mean, come on, Andie.”

I shake my head. He knew I was skipping out on my own work to study for his back then, the same way he’s known about it this whole semester. For a moment I’m back to Valentine’s Day, sitting on my bed, Connor’s voice low in my ears: You’d still give up all this time to make this happen for me?

“And now I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” I say, letting out a strangled laugh. I felt so lost here in the beginning that I relied on something that I knew I could do: help Connor. All this work scrambling around to get his ribbons when I should have been studying, or exploring campus, or spending more time with my friends—I was so worried about keeping my place with him, with his family, that I barely let myself find a place here.

But I don’t need that crutch anymore. I’m not lost. And I can tell Connor knows it when he suddenly stands up, not quite matching my anger but coming close. “You’re acting like I’m the only bad guy here.”

“Oh yeah?” This time I’m the one who takes a step toward him. He has half a foot on me, but I’ve never felt taller in my life. “And what did I do?”

“You clearly fell for another guy.”

My skin feels hot enough to ignite. “Be careful what you say next, Connor, because there’s only one cheater in this room.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t have some dumb crush on your RA.”

The guilt is so immediate that for the first time, I know it’s true. I do have a crush on Milo. It’s been simmering for months, and only now has it started to boil and burn.

But that’s just it—the difference between me and Connor. I never would have acted on it. I know myself, and I know Milo. I would never cheat on anyone, and he never would have let himself be a part of it.

Connor takes my stunned silence and rolls with it. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, you just dragged me into a windowless room with his picture mounted on the wall; who knows what you’ve been up to in—”

“This is a recording studio. He’s the Knight,” I spit back.

“And you’re in here all the time because . . . ?”

It’s not like I mean to say it. But seeing the way his eyebrows raise in this suggestive, accusatory way makes my stomach roil, both on my behalf and Milo’s.

“Because I’m the Squire,” I tell him.

Connor lets out a laugh that borders on mean. “You’re the what now?”

“Forget it,” I mumble. Given the state of this conversation, it’d be a waste of breath to explain. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. I know you. And yesterday you weren’t going to break up with me. You were going to give me another chance.” He gestures at Milo’s picture on the wall, unintentionally also gesturing right at my mom. He doesn’t even notice her there. Somehow that stings worse than everything else he’s said so far. “Tell me if that Milo Flynn guy didn’t exist, we wouldn’t still be together.”

I open my mouth to tell him how wrong he is, but the door crashes open. A very wide-eyed sound engineer stares at the two of us with undisguised panic before diving toward the console behind Connor and flicking off a switch. A light turns from green to red. I stare at it like it’s something unholy, the realization dawning on me before the engineer even opens her mouth.

“Um,” she says, “so—you were broadcasting live.”

Connor must have knocked it on when he was leaning on the console. And we’re both too close to the mic for it not to pick us up.

“The dance party in the quad,” I say, my voice flat with horror.

The engineer winces. “I got here as fast as I could. But the whole thing played over the music.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Those are apparently the only two words left in my vocabulary, because when I reach into my brain, that’s all I can seem to think, too.

“Great,” says Connor, blowing out a breath and clearly not recognizing the magnitude of what we just did.

I’m not sure if I can even recognize it myself. I’m rooted to the spot, my brain replaying our conversation like some kind of horror-movie film reel as the engineer backs out of the studio like she just walked in on a crime and doesn’t want to be implicated in it.

“We just revealed the Knight to the whole school.”

I don’t say it to Connor so much as to the room. It feels like he’s not even here anymore. It’s just me and my complete and utter self-hatred, me and the knowledge that I’ve let both Milo and my mother’s legacy down.

“Why do you even care so much?” Connor asks.

I turn to look at him. This boy I’ve known and loved. This boy I folded up paper fortune-tellers with and kissed in school parking lots and shared a blanket with at homecoming games and picked out wedding songs for. This boy who knew me with my mom and without her; this boy who has shared his parents with me for years, even when I could never fully feel like I belonged; this boy who shaped so much of me that he’ll always be there, even when he’s not.

And still, I never told him the truth about my mom being the Knight. I used to wonder why it was so important to me that the secret be just mine. But now in this moment, I think I understand—it’s not that I don’t belong at Blue Ridge. It’s that I never really belonged with Connor. I might have been able to convince myself in every other way that I did, but the memory of my mom was the one thing too precious to put on the line.

“I have to go,” I tell him.

Connor has the nerve to look bewildered. “So that’s just . . . it, then?”

All the anger is blown out of him now. There’s just Connor, eight and eighteen at the same time, looking so lost that it feels like I’m going against every instinct not to guide him.

Maybe someday we can be friends again. Once we’re both untangled from the pressure and the hurt that brought us here, and can find some new kind of baseline to meet each other. But for now all I can say is, “That’s it.”

He hangs his head. There are a few beats of quiet. Of acceptance. “I really fucked up,” he finally says.

I don’t deny that. I walk over to the chair where he’s still seated and put a hand on his shoulder. “Tell your parents what happened last semester, Connor. They love you. They want to help.”

He’s shaking under my palm. He nods without looking back up at me. I walk out, closing the door on him and so much else in my wake.