Begin Again

Grandma Maeve doesn’t laugh. She cackles. And this particular cackle goes on for so long that I almost have to hold the phone away from my ear.Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.

“I had a feeling something would go topsy-turvy with your whole plan to surprise him.”

“We both did,” Gammy Nell chimes in.

I’m on speaker, which has informed me that despite threats from both grandmas to “find a place of their own” the second I was gone, they’re still very much living together in our house. I don’t even realize how worried I was about that until the relief of it is washing over me.

“Then why didn’t you say something?” I demand, crossing my arms over my chest to try to stave off the cold. It’s plenty freezing in Little Fells in the winter, but Blue Ridge State is just elevated enough to somehow make the bite even sharper.

I sit down on a bench on the borders of the lake in the arboretum, breathing in the freshness of the air. The lake is all frozen over right now, gleaming in the sunlight, looking prettier than it has any right to on this day when I may have unconditionally messed up my entire future.

Despite it all, there’s something grounding in being here, something calming. I’m glad Milo convinced me not to go home. Glad that I can feel the unfamiliar relief that comes with being alone and wandering at my own pace. It feels like there’s infinite space out here, enough that for once I don’t need to worry about making myself fit.

“Because, chicken. You were supposed to go there either way,” says Grandma Maeve.

“And I love that bagel place off campus,” says Gammy Nell. “Good for lunch visits.”

“You let me fly solo on the most monumental decision of my life for bagels?”

For once, Gammy Nell takes the reins on the conversation. “No, dearie. We did it because you’re a grown woman now, and you have to forge your own path.”

My chin feels uncharacteristically wobbly. I press the phone closer to my cheek, like I can use it to make them both closer to me. “It’s weird that you guys are so far away.”

Neither of them says the thing we’re all thinking, which is that I was going to have to move out sooner or later. But we sidestep it, and they tell me what I need to hear most instead.

“Andie Rose. You know we will zip up there any day to see you,” says Grandma Maeve. “Even days Deadpool is on cable.”

Gammy Nell hums in agreement. “And you can come home anytime you want. We’ll pick you up whenever you say the word.”

My eyes are stinging, but I don’t bother with my four seconds in and two seconds out. My grandmas are the only two people I’ve never had trouble crying in front of. They know me inside out and backward.

“Okay.” I’m too overwhelmed to say anything else.

There’s a pause then. The kind of pause so telling that I know exactly what Gammy Nell is going to ask before she asks it.

“Did you call your dad back yet?”

I fix my eyeline on a group of ducks waddling around the ice. “Oh,” I say, the sincerity so false that it hurts even my own ears. “I meant to. I just—forgot. In all of the pandemonium.”

There’s silence from all three of us then, but their silence is different from mine. Their silence is strategic, the two of them doing that grandma thing they do when they’re both trying to convince me of the same thing, but can’t agree on how to approach it. My silence, on the other hand, is strictly out of hurt.

See, my dad asked me a few months ago to send him clippings from my advice column, “Bed of Roses.” The one I’d spent most of high school hesitant to tell him about in the first place. And after I did—after I sent him the back catalogue of all the people whose questions I’d answered, each of the clippings painstakingly collected, printed, and put into an envelope—he never said a word about it. Not a single one.

“He’s so excited you’re at Blue Ridge State,” says Grandma Maeve, which is how I know for a fact he’s been calling the house about it. She isn’t the conductor of the Make Amends With Your Dad train, the way Gammy Nell justifiably is, being his mom and all. “It might make you feel better to talk it out with him.”

“You’re right,” I say automatically, even though I’d sooner try to figure skate on this half-frozen lake. And then, mostly just to move the conversation along, I ask, “How are your sourdough starters doing?”

Just as predicted, this launches them into a ten-minute back and forth defending the sanctity of their respective starters and which one they’re going to use for that week’s loaf (“Hers is too sour,” Gammy Nell complains, to which Grandma Maeve responds, “What, did you want dull dough?”), so the focus is squarely off the dad talk. By the time we hang up the whole thing’s all but forgotten.

I spend the rest of the day unpacking my stuff and staring at my phone, trying to decide whether to call Connor or wait for him to call. Eventually the question just chases itself in circles enough times that Milo’s advice to “take a breather” falls on the back burner. Desperate for something else to focus on, I start emailing potential leads for work-studies—I know full well there are no open positions on campus right now, but I figure emailing the heads of a few different departments won’t hurt. Once I’ve exhausted my options, I whip out the very large sketchpad I had tucked into the rolling suitcase, stare at Shay’s half of the room, and write down all the words I can think of. It starts with “books, candles, cozy sweaters, Instagram, pastels, coffee.” Then I do some light stalking of her Instagram and add “sister, bubble tea, sunflowers, hiking, rom-coms, horror movies, woozy face emoji, true-crime podcasts, Instagram-famous dogs, Janelle Monáe, photography.” By the time Shay comes back with a massive to-go box full of food, I’m so far into my idea boarding I realize I didn’t even notice the sun going down.

“Uh-oh. Did I miss dining hall hours?”

“If you love yourself, you’ll never step foot in our dining halls. Here. I grabbed this for you,” says Shay, opening the to-go box and handing me a bagel stuffed to the brim with cream cheese.

The smell of it alone is beautiful enough to make me swoon like one of the characters on the covers of her romance novels. I take a bite and the bagel is so perfectly pillowy on the inside and toasted on the outside, with this sweet, tangy cream cheese unlike anything I’ve tasted in my entire human life.

“This is . . . otherworldly.” If this came from the same place Grandma Maeve was talking about, it’s no wonder she was so willing to sell out my future for carbs. “How much do I owe you?”

“I do my work-study at Bagelopolis, so I get them for free,” says Shay, unwrapping her own bagel. “They have like, twenty cream cheese flavors, but I guessed at cookie dough for you. Seems like you have a sweet tooth.”

“My blood is ninety-eight percent sugar,” I confirm. “Also, you can do work-study off campus?”

Shay jerks a thumb toward the hallway. “Talk to Milo. He has a zillion brothers and sisters, and they have all the best work-study connects.”

I’d thank her, but I take a bite so large I might need a backup mouth to accommodate it. Shay pauses on her way over to her bed, justifiably concerned.

“Sorry,” I say, wiping my face with the back of my wrist. It’s the kind of thing I try not to do often, especially considering how tidy Connor and his family are, but every now and then I get excited and manners go out the window. I get a few more vigorous chews in before I swallow. “We just have a lot to get through before tonight’s dorm catchup.”

“Catchup?”

“The one I saw the flier for in the hall.”

“Oh. People don’t actually go to dorm-sponsored events here,” says Shay. “Milo just puts up the fliers out of like, legal obligation. Sort of like that RA comment box outside of his room nobody actually uses.”

I furrow my brow. “Well—maybe I can fix that.” Shay opens her mouth, presumably to ask me how, but I interrupt her by putting my sketchpad of words in her lap. “May I present the idea board for your major.”

“Wow.” Her eyes comb over all the words I’ve piled on, taking a bite of cheddar bagel and letting it soak in. “This looks like you took a screenshot of the inside of my brain.”

“That’s the plan. Map out your brain.” I point at the blank area I left for her. “You can fill in whatever I missed, and then we can take a good long look at it, figure out what you’re meant to do with your life, and backtrack to find you a major from there.”

Shay sighs in that exasperated but affectionate way I know all too well from a lifetime of inserting myself into friends’ problems. When they would hesitate to come to me with them after my mom died, I’d usually have to take matters into my own hands when I wanted to help. I’d be discouraged if my track record for solving them weren’t near spotless.

“Listen, I appreciate this,” says Shay, trying to hand me back the sketchpad. “But the problem is, all I really want to do is read.”

“Oh.” I settle down on my bed, bagel still in hand. It almost seems anticlimactic for everything to get resolved so easily. “So English, then.”

“I only read books I want to read,” says Shay. “And Blue Ridge State’s English department is run by some geezer who only pushes books from dead white men anyway.”

I wince. As progressive as Blue Ridge State’s student body is, I suppose the same can’t always be said for the curriculum—even if it’s making progress with each year of students and new professors coming in, it’s nowhere near where it needs to be. Nothing like Shay’s Bookstagram, which she uses to post weekly roundups of new releases from queer, BIPOC, and marginalized authors on her stories while highlighting her favorites on main. She may review books across all genres, but she’s vocal in her captions about how important it is as a reader to see herself in the characters, for everyone to be able to see themselves in stories. People would get a much better education in literature from her grid than most college programs.

“Good point.” I mull it over, going back to those captions of hers in my mind. “Maybe you’re a writer,” I say, the thrill of a challenge reignited.

She shakes her head. “The only writing I do is book reviews.”

It’s unfortunate that I choose that precise moment to take another massive bite of bagel, because I nearly choke on it in my enthusiasm. “Oh! Journalism.”

Shay, to her credit, seems entirely undaunted by my theatrics. I’m glad that she’s acclimating to me quickly. People usually do in the end, but it takes a little longer for some than others.

“You could be a book critic!”

“In this economy?” she asks, wrinkling her nose.

Fair point. “Chunky Monkey,” I mutter in frustration. “Okay. I’ll keep thinking.”

“It’s nice of you to get this invested in my collegiate future and all,” says Shay, “but please, save your energy for literally anything else. I’m a lost cause. A cute one. But lost nonetheless.”

If anything that just makes the fix-it urge even more powerful. “I’ve got this thing about solving problems,” I tell her.

Shay lowers her chin. “You don’t say?”

“I’ll totally stop if you want me to, though,” I say, lifting up the small fraction of my remaining bagel like a white flag. “I know I’m a lot.”

My mom’s general rule was that you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. So even though I am aggressive about offering it, I try to make sure it’s actually wanted before I take off with it. Otherwise trying to help is like yelling at a boulder to move, or trying to convince my grandmas to watch movies without Ryan Reynolds in them—a fruitless effort in the end.

But every now and then I’m so full of ideas I get ahead of myself, and I have to double back.

Shay considers me for a moment. “I mean . . . I do have to figure this out before the end of the semester. So. Definitely let me know if you have thoughts. But don’t like, waste too much time on it,” she says with a shrug.

Before the end of her sentence I’ve already started mapping out a four-month plan to get her in the right major by the end of the semester, complete with a vision board, several personality quizzes I’ve vetted online, and internship options in the larger Blue Ridge State area.

“Sweet.”

Just then an alarm goes off on my phone.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” Shay asks, frowning curiously at it.

“Yup.” I adjust the headband Connor’s mom got me to wear for my graduation photos, shaking my hair back so I can get just the right amount of volume on top, the way she taught me, then reach for the absurdly large bag of snack cakes Gammy Nell dropped off with me this morning. “The dorm catchup.”

Shay follows me to the door as I’m yanking it open. “Look,” she says. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. Cardinal dorm’s not exactly known for its fraternizing.”

I digest this, but also commence my two-point plan by steadily knocking on all the doors I pass. Step one: Get everyone’s attention. Step two: Lure them into the rec room with an abundance of snack cakes. If I still have a shot at a fresh start here, I’m going to have to rip off the Band-Aid now, before anything else can happen to psych me out.

“Everyone just . . . studies, mostly,” says Shay, at a light jog to keep up with me. “And Milo’s not kidding about quiet hours.”

“We’ve got one more hour,” I say, making a point of knocking loudly on Milo’s door, too.

I can hear his muffled response as I make my way up the floor. “Has anyone lost a limb?”

“No,” Shay calls back.

I continue zigzagging back and forth between the doors on either side of the hall, knocking just firmly enough that people start poking their heads out.

A boy with a textbook the size of a toddler opens his door first. “Hello?”

“Did you leave your key in the door again?” another girl asks her roommate.

“I have cake!” I say, thrusting the grocery bag over my head.

They look justifiably startled, but within a minute I have a small trail of undergraduates following me to the end of the hall like a sleep-deprived parade. Shay wasn’t kidding about the fraternizing thing—the lights aren’t even on in the rec room. I find a table and dump the contents of Gammy Nell’s bag, pleased to see the whole gang is here: we’ve got Ring Dings, Hostess CupCakes, Kandy Kakes, Twinkies, Donut Sticks, Yodels, Moon Pies, Zingers, Cosmic Brownies. It’s enough sugar to make a dentist feel faint.

I stick my hands into the pockets of my dress, a thrill running up my spine. As unfamiliar as I am with it, I really do love meeting new people. I’m pretty sure I was a labradoodle in a past life. “Do you mind introducing me to the people you know?” I ask Shay.

Shay edges closer to me, talking out of the side of her mouth. “Uh. I don’t really know anyone.”

“Huh,” I say, waving at the confused faces on the other side of the glass door approaching. “I didn’t peg you for an introvert.”

“I’m not,” says Shay, eyeing the cluster of people who followed us here. “All my friends are from book clubs and the school literary magazine.”

By the looks of things, I’ve lured just enough people in here to know that by the end of the night, we’re going to change that. I grab a chair to prop the door and drag it over, yanking the door open with a merry “Hello!”

“Hi?” says one of the boys, adjusting a Blue Ridge State baseball cap and blinking at us in confusion.

“Help yourself,” I say, gesturing at the very unstable mountain of cake I’ve created. “I’m Andie, by the way. If you want to head back to study, that’s fine, but if you want to stick around I have a fun game we can all play.”

“Are you our new RA?” a girl in a Spider-Man onesie asks.

“No, no, our RA is Miley,” her friend, carting around a half-finished embroidered shirt of a dumpster on fire, corrects her.

Shay sighs deeply enough to power a windmill, but sticks close by me and grabs a peanut butter Kandy Kake, so I know I have at least one taker.

“It’s called Werewolf,” I say. “Everyone gets randomly assigned to be a werewolf, an angel, or a villager. After everyone closes their eyes, the werewolf chooses a victim and—”

“Oh, sick,” says the boy in the baseball cap. “I played a version where vampires could randomly attack and kill werewolves, if there was more than one.”

“Love that,” I say, handing him a Ring Ding. “Let’s do it.”

The girl in the Spider-Man onesie immediately snaps to attention, clearly besotted with baseball-cap boy. “I’m in.”

The girl with the dumpster-fire embroidery smirks at me, her lip ring glinting. “We called it Mafia, where I’m from. And there was booze.”

“Well—I have cake?” I have a feeling Milo would not take too kindly to me helping intoxicate half the freshmen on his floor the first day of the semester.

“Fair enough. I’m Tyler, by the way,” says baseball-cap boy. “Hold up. I’m gonna grab the guys.” He pauses. “They’re in Bluebird dorm, is that okay?”

“The more the merrier!”

Tyler ducks out, leaving a dazed Spider-Man-onesie girl in his wake. Dumpster-fire embroidery nudges her to snap her out of it.

“I’m Harriet. The pajama-clad arachnid here is Ellie. And we need more players,” she says, glancing back at the three other people who are starting to wander in. “I’ll round up more of the floor. But only because I’m a Cosmic Brownies bitch.”

Harriet uses some fear-based tactics to round up a few more people hesitating in the hallway and Tyler brings half a floor’s worth of Bluebird, along with several half-eaten party-size bags of tortilla chips and a massive tub of salsa someone clearly snagged from the dining hall. We sit in a big circle on the floor, quickly learning one another’s names to avoid any confusion and launching right into the game, adding mismatched, ridiculous rules from everyone’s childhood version of it as we go.

The longer the night goes on, the more I start to get the lay of the land in Cardinal. There’s Harriet with her cuttingly hilarious commentary on the status of everyone’s mortality throughout the course of the game. There’s Tyler with his booming laugh and his army of friends who keep the energy mounting all through the night. There’s Ellie with her shy smiles and her little squeals every time Shay and I declare that yet another villager has “died,” and the way she scoots over to Tyler when they’re both eliminated from a round. There’s Shay, who gets caught up in it so fast that she takes over narrating duties, stringing elaborate, ridiculously creative stories behind the deaths of every villager at the hands of the werewolves and vampires. For a little while, it’s like we’ve all entered some separate realm—some place where all our worries are so far gone that we can just forget them.

And for a little while, I forget, too. I forget I was apprehensive about making new friends here. I forget I messed things up with Connor. I forget about my ribbon burning a hole somewhere in Professor Hutchison’s desk. I forget that I’m in over my head here at this school full of overachievers who were probably all in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. I forget that I’m away from home for the first time in a real, semipermanent, non-summer-camp way.

I don’t forget the bone-deep things—the things so far buried in me that they’re just there on a dull, constant hum—but I forget the scary ones. The immediate ones. For an hour or so, they aren’t pulling at the edges of me, and I’m laughing and yelling and swapping embarrassing stories with everyone else.

That is, until the door to the rec room opens, and one very tall, very sleep-deprived RA says groggily, “What on earth is going on in here?”

The recently murdered villagers are closest to the door, so Ellie lets out a “Ruh-roh” and Tyler jokingly tries to hide behind the hood of her onesie. Shay, whose arms were fully extended in a theatrical depiction of Harriet’s death at the hands of a vampire who lured her backstage at the school’s production of Mamma Mia! and used a pair of prop overalls to tie her limbs together before suffocating her with glitter and draining her of all her blood, clears her throat and leans back against a chair. The kids from Bluebird look at Milo with total apathy, but the kids from Cardinal all clear their throats and glance around the room like they’ve been busted mid–bank robbery.

Milo takes all of this in while blinking like he thinks he might have sleepwalked into it and is waiting to wake up from an odd dream.

“It’s past quiet hours,” he says lowly.

I offer a half wince, half smile. “Were we being too loud?”

Milo zeroes in on me so fast that there’s no doubt he knows I’m the responsible party. “I heard someone yell ‘Avenge me!’ from eight rooms away.”

“And yet not one of you has,” Tyler mutters pointedly.

Milo’s nostrils flare, but he doesn’t break eye contact with me. I gesture back at the mountain of cake, which is more like a small hill now that we’ve collectively dug into it. “Snoball?” I ask.

Milo narrows his eyes, but does take a few deliberate steps toward the table. The room is still utterly silent, all parties transfixed as he scrutinizes the table, picks up a package of Tastykakes, and opens it while looking at all of us in turn.

“If this is going to continue, I need it to be at least eighty decibels quieter. Am I clear?”

“Crystal,” says Shay, before I can answer.

Milo nods at her solemnly, and it’s clear he’ll trust her word over mine, so I keep my mouth shut. Then he takes a very large bite of Tastykake and points himself toward the door, leaving the room as ominously as he came.

There are a few beats of silence and then some muffled laughter.

When Shay speaks again, her voice is only slightly above a whisper. “We’ll just . . . be super quiet, okay?”

Harriet sighs. “You’re literally killing me softly, huh?”

I muffle my own laugh, giving Shay the “one sec” gesture before ducking out of the rec room and following Milo down the hall—no easy feat, considering every one of his steps makes up about two of mine.

“Hey.”

Milo doesn’t stop walking, but does significantly decrease the length of his tall-person steps so I can keep up. “You again,” he says, without turning to look at me.

“Me again,” I confirm. “So—first of all—sorry about the noise.”

He takes another large bite of Tastykake. “Apology mostly accepted.”

“Good. Um. But the thing is, Shay mentioned you might be a good person to talk to about work-study?”

Milo stops walking, but sure does take his time chewing. For a few moments it’s just the two of us standing in the hallway, me craning my neck to watch him, Milo considering me like we’ve both walked into a high-stakes business negotiation.

“How about this,” he says. “I help you get a good work-study, and you agree to stop causing ruckus in my dorm.”

I bite my lip. “I can agree to try?”

Judging by what little I know about Milo I’m not expecting this response to work, but he’s evidently too tired to push back. He looks into my eyes, then at the half-eaten pack of Tastykakes in his hands, and then back at me.

“Are you a morning person?” he asks.

I perk up so fast that he raises a hand to interrupt me. “Why did I ask,” he says, more to himself than to me. He extends his arm out, only hesitating for a moment before he pats me on the shoulder again. “Be at Bagelopolis at nine A.M. tomorrow.”

“Really?” I ask, two times louder than I meant to. “You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

I want to take him up on it, I do—it’s just that it feels like a pretty big favor, and aside from snack cakes and keeping the dorm quiet, there’s nothing I can offer him in return.

Milo must see some of it playing out on my face, because he pauses at his door, running a hand through his curls. “Look, new kid. This place is overwhelming enough, and the work-study program is a mess. Might as well get through it all as easily as we can.”

I wonder if the next moment catches him by surprise, too. The moment when our eyes connect, and something else does, too. A sadness. An uncertainty. The kind that I only see for a flash, but recognize too fast for it to be anything else—it looks just like mine.

Whatever his hurt is, it’s none of my business. But if he stands here with me for another three seconds, the fix-it urge is going to be too much for me to resist.

“Well, thanks,” I say, squashing it down. “See you tomorrow, then.”

Milo cuts a glance down the hall, his face so neutral I might have imagined what I saw, if I still didn’t feel the shadow of it. “Only if you promise me I won’t wake up to any more werewolf howls tonight.”

“I will.” I salute him. “Swear-wolf.”

Milo groans in response, then eats the last bite of Tastykake before disappearing behind his door.

I head back down the hallway to rejoin the group when my phone buzzes in my back pocket. It’s not a text, but a voicemail from Connor. The kind you leave when you bypass calling so you can go straight to the voicemail box. I know because my dad used to do it when he first moved away, and when he did call there wasn’t much I wanted to say.

I hold the phone to my ear, listening to Connor’s voice on the other end. He’s calm. Composed. Like he practiced it in his head before calling.

“Hey. So I’ve been thinking. Let’s just—do the best we can this semester. Maybe I can transfer back. We’ll see how we feel at the end of the semester and figure it out.”

We’ll see how we feel. Meaning it’s not just school that’s up in the air. We’re still up in it, too.

The message doesn’t say anything else, and I don’t call him back. I take a breath, doing the only thing I can to soothe myself, and start mentally sorting through everything I’m going to have to do in the next few months to make this right.

Whatever goes down between then and now, I know the next chapter of my future memoir just got a whole lot more complicated.