Begin Again

Cardinal dorm is on the fringes of campus, nestled between a row of other dorms and the woods behind the school. The campus is every bit as stunning as all the brochures I’ve collected over the years promised, and the ache in my chest feels deep enough to bruise. It’s not just the faded red brick of the buildings and the idyllic tree-lined paths and the sweeping mountain views from the campus’s highest hill. It’s that I’ve seen them all before, in the background of pictures of my parents I found in a box under my dad’s bed. Blue Ridge State is where they met.

I square my shoulders. This is my story, not theirs. And seeing as I have an entire floor’s worth of new friends to make, an entire schedule of classes to wrangle, and eventually a dimpled soccer star to surprise, my work here is cut out for me.

An elevator takes me up to the fourth floor, where I’ve been assigned. I pass a group of students in the hallway, all of them carting sleek laptops and textbooks and laughing about something that happened at a finals party last semester. A few of them cast me a curious glance, but they all seem so at ease with one another that I clam up before I can remember which hand I’ve got the snack cakes in.

I take a deep breath, promising myself to give it another go later, and knock on the RA’s door.

“Nobody’s home.”

I laugh nervously. “It’s Andie Rose? The transfer student.”

There’s rustling on the other side of the door, which then opens to the more modern Blue Ridge State logo. I blink, then look up from the T-shirt into the eyes of an overly tall boy who must be the Milo Flynn I’ve been emailing with, blinking right back at me with the bewilderment of someone who clearly hasn’t slept in a week. He hovers in the doorframe, his shoulders slumped but his eyes considering mine so intently that my face burns from the unexpectedness of it. He clears his throat and we both glance away.Property belongs to Nôvel(D)r/ama.Org.

“Transfer student. Yes,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. He runs a hand through his dark curls. “Shit. Is it Monday?”

His voice sounds familiar to me, enough that I’m about to ask if he went to a school near Little Fells. But I’m immediately distracted by his room, which is littered with coffee mugs, the majority centered around a tiny, single-serve Keurig placed dead center in the room like a shrine.

“Yup,” I inform him. “You okay there, Milo?”

“Peachy,” he mutters, moving his hand to rub his thumb and pointer finger over his eyes like he’s trying to rub his face back to life. “Cool, okay. I got this. You’re with Shay.”

Now this is the one part of the whole Blue Ridge State experience I’ve actually been looking forward to—having a roommate. Especially considering my only past roommates, bless their hearts, both qualify for social security and spend most of their nights arguing over the division between the tomatoes and strawberries in the backyard garden. I squashed the hope my kid self had for siblings a long time ago, but I can feel the glimmer of it now—someone my age. Someone who doesn’t think that watching The Proposal eighteen times a month is a personality trait. An actual, legitimate peer.

Milo leads me down the hall on legs so long that I half jog to keep up, then knocks on 4A. There’s no answer.

“Shay’s probably in the shower,” he says, pointing vaguely down the hall. “So, uh—bathrooms are down there on the left. Just past them is a study room. End of the hall is the rec room.”

“Got it.”

“Rules. Uh . . . quiet hours start at nine. If you’re going to drink, please don’t do it in front of me, I don’t have the time or the will to write you up. This is your key,” he says, pulling it out of the back pocket of his jeans and pressing it into my hand. His own is warm in that way of someone who’s recently been asleep. “Don’t lose it, they’re expensive to replace.”

I close my fist around the key like a talisman. “Anything else?”

He takes an exaggeratedly long breath. “Probably. Sorry. Long night. Do you have any questions?”

“No, thanks.” I read through the student handbook so thoroughly that I probably know more about the rules than he does. I don’t do anything halfway.

“Good, because I’m not alive enough for them yet.” He gestures at the closed door. “You lucked out. Shay is my favorite person on this floor.”

“Why’s that?” I ask, eager to hear more about her. The only information I’ve been able to glean about Shay Gibbins is from the Bookstagram she runs, where you can scroll into an endless abyss of beautifully pastel-filtered books on bedspreads and shelves paired with coffee and knickknacks and cozy socks. I only know what she looks like because I managed to find pictures her sister and friends tagged of her—she has this close-lipped, conspiratorial kind of smile and full cheeks and a seemingly endless collection of knit sweaters that would make Gammy Nell proud.

Milo leans down to meet me at my level. He’s just awake enough now that I can see the celery green of his eyes, and the absolute resolution in them. “She respects quiet hours. Quiet hours are very, very sacred to me. Understood?”

I laugh. Milo does not.

“Understood,” I say, saluting him.

He straightens himself back up to his overly tall self, so I have to crane my neck to look at him. “Good,” he says. “And, uh . . . godspeed with the whole midyear transfer thing.”

“Thanks?”

“Anytime,” he says, and then stops himself. “Except during quiet hours.”

There’s a pink-robed, flip-flop-clad Black girl walking down the hallway that I instantly recognize as Shay. She and Milo high-five each other without breaking their strides, then Milo disappears back into his room, and Shay pulls her key out of her robe pocket.

“You must be Andie,” she says, her smile just as warm as it is in pictures.

I hold myself up straight, trying to project the same warmth even as my stomach does a quick backflip. “And you’re Shay.”

“For better or worse,” she says, twisting the key in the lock and opening the door. “Sorry in advance—my side of the room is kind of, uh . . .”

“Whoa.”

I have no idea how she meant to end that sentence, but I’m so swept up by the aesthetic that I probably wouldn’t have heard it anyway. Her half of the room is littered from wall to floor with candles and books and pillows, with glossy Blue Ridge State stickers from the school’s literary club and Campus Pride, with framed and hanging pictures of herself with friends and her parents and sister. Everything is so personal and cozy that I don’t even want to cast my eyes at my bare side of the room and wreck it. I make a mental note to head to the craft store down the road and see if I can curate anything half as cute as her setup.

That is, if I have any money left over after the school’s work-study program comes to collect. Tuition does not come cheap.

“Yeah. Well. You’re welcome to the bookshelf anytime,” says Shay.

“Holy guacamole,” I say, peering closer to look at the titles. It’s a mix of everything—romance, young adult, historical accounts, sci-fi, fantasy, horror. I only look away because there’s a zombie skull on the binding of one of them that rattles me. “You must read like, an entire book a day.”

“Sometimes two,” she confesses.

“In this place?” I ask, setting my bags down on the bare mattress of my bed.

She shrugs. “I don’t have a major yet, so. Things aren’t super intense for me.” She pulls off her shower cap, revealing her intricate pattern of zigzagged cornrows cinched in a ponytail, and plucks a book with a very steamy cover from her bedside table. “How about you? Picked your poison?”

“Psychology,” I say, hoping she doesn’t take one look at me and know that the only two books I own are celebrity-authored hybrid cook- and lifestyle books.

Shay looks up at me from the pages of her novel, wincing. “Well—good, I guess. Makes sense for you to be here, since the psychology program is so intense. Nearly knocked my older sister off her ass, but she’s in grad school now and glad for it.”

I try not to wince back, focusing on unpacking the backpack I put all of my essentials in.

“Yeah. Not looking forward to that.”

Shay shrugs. “If you managed to elbow your way in as a mid-freshman-year transfer, I’m guessing you’ll be fine. That’s basically unheard of.”

And this time I do wince, pivoting on my heel before she can see it and turning my attention to the overflowing snack-cake bag. It’s not basically unheard of. It technically is unheard of. According to the registrar, not only am I the only freshman transfer they took, but the first one in years.

It’s not that I didn’t get good grades. I worked my tail off in my first semester, wrote fifteen drafts of my application essay, and got glowing recommendations from my two most favorite teachers. But I can’t help suspecting that a huge part of why I got in is because—well. For lack of a better phrase, the “dead mom” card.

See, when you have the “dead mom” card in your playing deck, everything in your world is just a little bit tilted sideways. The kids you were close to growing up suddenly hesitate to talk about their own moms in front of you, or even the rest of their problems, like they’re worried to bother you with them when they think it doesn’t compare to yours. The adults in your small town are extra nice to you, sneaking you gumballs at the grocery store checkout line, showing up in full force whenever you host a car wash fundraiser. And eventually you get a little older and look around and realize that there’s a mark on you that’s followed you around, some shadow that’s colored everything that’s happened to you since. Marked you as an “other” with your friends, so you can never quite relate to them the same way you did. Given you little boosts with everyone else, like they could ever make up for the worst thing that ever happened to you.

It’s why I loved writing the anonymous advice column for our high school paper so much, and why I’ve kept doing it long after graduation. Nobody has ever known who I am. It was a way to help friends with their problems, once half of them felt too uncomfortable about my situation to keep coming to me with them. And I know the reputation I’ve built with it is all my own, and not because I’m Amy Rose’s daughter.

Blue Ridge State, on the other hand, I’m not so sure about. My mom was just as well-loved here as she was back at Little Fells. As happy as I am that it all worked out, there’s some part of me that’s wondered exactly whose merit I got in on—mine or hers.

“Got any friends here?” Shay asks.

I clear my throat, securing the smile back on my face. “Yeah. My boyfriend, Connor,” I say, a little more brightly than I meant to.

“Your boyfriend?” says Shay.

“Yeah. Of three years. But we’ve been friends for like, ever.” I put down the shirts I was pulling out of my suitcase and take a step closer to the edge of her bed. “Actually, my being here is kind of a surprise. I haven’t been able to tell him yet. Still brainstorming the most romantic place to go about it.”

Somewhat unhelpfully, my thoughts keep straying to the arboretum, a huge chunk of woods on the edge of campus full of trails to explore and hidden spots with bridges and gazebos and a whole tree grove full of birdhouses. There’s a lake smack-dab in the middle of it with a trail that goes all the way around, one just as picturesque as the big lake my parents used to take me on nature strolls to as a kid. On a whim I even unearthed my old hiking boots, only to abruptly realize upon seeing the Hello Kitty pattern on them that I no longer had ten-year-old feet and they wouldn’t do me any good here.

But Connor’s always been too restless for that kind of thing. If he’s outdoors, he wants to be competing in soccer matches or training, doing something “productive.” Considering all the times he dodged my attempts to take him hiking back in high school, I doubt he’d appreciate getting dragged all the way out there when I could have just as easily met up with him somewhere less muddy.

Shay watches me curiously. “Huh,” she says. “Well—as long as you don’t ditch me to join the cast of a reality show like the last roommate did.”

I flip my ponytail over my shoulder. “I’ll try to keep MTV’s casting directors at bay.”

Shay lets out a small snort and we share a cautious smile. We’ve messaged back and forth the past few weeks, but it was mostly about moving arrangements. But as nervous as I’ve been to make friends here, I can already tell that Shay and I are going to get along just fine.

“Zebra Cake?” I ask, pulling one out of Gammy Nell’s bag.

Shay’s eyes widen. “Um, yeah, always.”

I toss one over to her and she catches it with ease, tearing open the wrapper. I grab one of my own, then walk over to cheers it with her.

“To new roomies.”

My phone buzzes on top of my mattress. I apologize quickly before turning around to answer it.

“Hey, Andie. Sorry I missed your call.”

Just hearing Connor’s voice makes the world feel a little smaller again, a little easier to manage. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. Sometimes his voice sounds just as familiar to me as my own.

“No problem. Um, are you at your apartment? Or on your way to class?”

Connor lets out that easy laugh of his, the one I can feel in his whole body when my hand is pressed against his chest. “Funny you should ask . . .”

“Tell me where you are,” I say, grabbing my key off the mattress. “And stay put.”

“I’m outside your psych building.”

I stop at the door. I can feel Shay’s eyes on me. “Like, the psych building at Blue Ridge State?”

“No, Andie, your psych building.”

The key suddenly feels so heavy and bulky in my hand that I nearly drop it on the dorm room’s linoleum floor. “Why would you be . . .”

“I transferred to Little Fells Community College. To be with you.”

My eyes sweep up to Shay’s, knowing she just heard every word through my old tinny phone. My jaw drops, and so does hers, just before she lets out a low, sympathetic “Holy guacamole.”