Page 27

“I’m sorry I missed it. Send me the videos?”

“Okay, but Mom did something weird with her phone so it’s all fuzzy.”

For some reason, this fact of my mother not being great with technology hits me squarely in the heart. “Sounds like her.”

A pause. A shuffling sound. “Christopher’s getting out the Dominion expansion sets, and I might be able to stay up past my bedtime if I play my cards right. Literally. Gotta go.”

A new kind of ache settles in my chest. My friends and I taught her how to play that game, and then Natalie and I taught our mom, and we all got a little too obsessed. I always vowed not to take my father’s place as any kind of surrogate, but I’ve wanted to be there for my sister in all the ways a sibling could be.

Now I wonder if I’ve broken that silent promise by moving away.

“We miss you!” my mom says, and then to Natalie: “Don’t think I didn’t hear that.”

“Bye, Neil! Don’t study too hard!” Christopher calls in the background, and then the line goes quiet.

A CARE PACKAGE:

One shrink-wrapped bag of New York City bagels

A mug with a map of Greenwich Village

A gently used guide to backpacking Europe purchased from the Strand

A gray-and-navy-striped scarf

And a note, written in calligraphy:

A little piece of NYC

for my Seattle girl

in Boston.

Yours,

Neil

9

ROWAN

NEIL’S CARE PACKAGE gets there at the perfect time, right after I’ve gotten feedback on my next creative writing assignment and am in desperate need of a distraction. The best part: that the striped scarf, the one I’ve seen him wear on Seattle’s coldest days back when my feelings were wrapped in animosity, still smells like him.

“Eventually you’ll have a whole outfit and won’t even need me,” Neil says over video chat. We’ve been attempting to study together, but the amount of studying we’ve done so far is questionable, especially because he’s wearing one of my favorite shirts: the black one with QUIDQUID LATINE DICTUM, ALTUM VIDETUR printed on it.

Also questionable: the way Paulina breezed out of the room once again when I said I was about to video chat with my boyfriend, as though interpreting it as me telling her to leave—which I wasn’t. I’d be more offended if I had a sense of what I’d done wrong. I haven’t touched her succulent again, and when I found one of her penguin-patterned socks under my bed, I put it in her hamper. I’m trying to be a decent roommate, but she’s barely giving me anything to work with.

“Yes, I have all your clothes laid out on my bed and I cuddle with them whenever I’m lonely.” I angle the camera toward my bed where, incidentally, I tossed Neil’s hoodie earlier. And because the heat in here is garbage, I grab it and zip it up. It’s the softest thing I semi-own, and I hope he’s prepared to never get it back. “Seriously. Thank you. I swear the temperature dropped about thirty degrees in the past week—I’ve already been worrying that I might not survive the winter. Eighteen years in Seattle did not adequately prepare me for seasons.”

“Our poor, weak Pacific Northwest bodies.” Then he thinks for a moment, seems to type something. “Friolero—I knew there was a word for it. That’s Spanish for someone who’s very sensitive to the cold.”

“Friolero. I love that. I am that. Or friolera, actually. Don’t need my Spanish class for that, at least.” I hug his hoodie tighter. “Almost as good as the real thing.”

We go back to studying, Neil placing meticulous sticky notes in his linguistics book while I make Spanish vocab flash cards.

“Are you getting much done?” he asks after ten minutes.

“Tons. You?”