Page 5
“You’re crushing my lungs.”
“Worth it.”
I laugh — actually laugh, the kind that comes from somewhere below the performance, and hug her back properly. Over her shoulder, Wren appears in the doorway carrying two suitcases with the same focused efficiency she applies to everything. June follows, a coffee cup in one hand and a paperback in the other, wearing the expression of someone who has been trying to finish a chapter since before they left Boston.
For a moment I just look at them.
There is a thing that happens when the people you’ve chosen are all in the same place at the same time — a rightness that I don’t have better words for and have given up trying to name. I know what it is not: it is not family, not the way I understand that word, which carries weight I don’t always want to carry. It is something I built myself, which is different. Which costs more. Which I’m not going to think about right now.
The four of us collide in the driveway in a chaos of hugs and luggage complaints and everyone trying to talk at once.
Then Margo leans back, holds me at arm’s length, and squints.
“You worked too much this summer.”
“I really didn’t.”
“You have stress eyebrows.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It is absolutely a thing.” She looks to the others for confirmation.
Wren nods without hesitation. “She’s right.”
June points with her coffee cup. “You look tired.”
I stare at all three of them. Betrayed. “I hate you.”
Margo beams. “No, you don’t.”
She’s right. I don’t.
Two hours later, the kitchen table is buried under takeout containers and four months of accumulated updates, and I have eaten more Thai food than I strictly needed.
Margo, who processes information through cross-examination, is working through her mental agenda item by item. She has already covered: the Boston internship (exhausting, excellent, her boss was a tyrant she deeply respects), the state of the dining hall (unchanged, still an existential threat), and the situation with Theo Mercer, which she summarizes as “nothing, absolutely nothing, I barely think about him at all” in a way that suggests the opposite.
Then she refills her water glass, sets it down, and looks at me with the focus that means she has arrived at a topic she’s been saving.
“How’s Evan?”
The table goes quiet.
Not dramatically quiet. Just the kind of quiet that happens when three people who’ve discussed something among themselves already want to hear the answer directly from the source.
“Fine,” I say.
“Mm.” Margo tilts her head. “You went on a break.”
“I needed space. We went on a break.”
“In July.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
I drag a piece of pad thai through the sauce at the bottom of the container. “He texted last week. Asked me to come over for dinner.”
