Begin Again

The rest of the day feels like something out of some storybook version of my childhood. The four of us spend the entire day together. We make the dough for Gammy Nell’s famous caramel-stuffed peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. We all muck ourselves up outside to help with Grandma Maeve’s side of the garden (read: most of the garden, since she’s decided Gammy Nell can’t be trusted with hers) as she chain-smokes and tells us stories about her college years in San Francisco. We start up a forest-themed puzzle someone got my dad for his birthday years ago that he never opened, and continue to work on it as my grandmas put on their coveted DVD of Definitely, Maybe, which only gets whipped out on special occasions. We order takeout from our favorite pizza spot in Little Fells, and have a small army of neighborhood kids on the porch by the time we pull Gammy Nell’s cookies out of the oven.

I’m eating them on the rocking chair by the front door when Grandma Maeve walks into the hall to join me and says, apropos of nothing, “I hope whatever got fucked up feels less fucked now, chicken.”

I finish chewing on the cookie, not quite finished chewing on the massive pile of regrets I’ve been ignoring all day. “I’m glad I’m home.”

She pats my cheek. “And we’re glad to have you. But also, it’s a damn Tuesday.” Her penciled-in eyebrows fly up on her wrinkled forehead, filled with more laugh lines than anyone I’ve ever met. “Smells like some conflict avoidance, if you ask me.”

She cushions it with an offer of her last pizza crust and the tub of butter, knowing full well how I love to dip my crusts in it. I accept them both with narrowed eyes.

“I’m guessing my dad already told you the gist of what happened,” I say. I can’t even pretend to be annoyed about it. It’s actually kind of nice, the normalcy of it. A parent being overly involved in something for once.

“Sure did,” says Grandma Maeve with a broad grin. “And can I just say, from the bottom of this feeble old heart . . .” I brace myself for some candid, sassy end to that sentence. But my grandma’s eyes lose their edge and keep all their sparkle. “You were always miles above that Connor Whit.”

Gammy Nell walks over, holding up a mug of tea. “Hear, hear.”

My eyes widen enough to rival planetary moons. “Wait. How did you know about . . . I mean, I haven’t even mentioned him.”

Gammy Nell winks. “We have our sources.”

“Sources that asked for our address approximately two hours ago,” says Grandma Maeve, glancing at the door expectantly.

As if on cue, there’s a knock.

“Hmm. Better go get that,” says Grandma Maeve with a wink.

I take my emotional-support pizza crust with me, trying to think of who it might be but drawing a complete blank. I don’t get much time to guess, because Valeria’s already talking before I fully open the front door.

“We fucked up,” she informs me, looking windswept and agitated, her usually sleek hair in tangles and her chic red coat buttoned up unevenly.

Grandma Maeve lets out her signature cackle. “I knew I liked you. Come on in.”

Valeria’s eyes widen in mild alarm—she’s met my grandmas twice now from their campus visits, but she’s always been at her utmost polite self for the occasion—but before she can sputter an apology, Gammy Nell has already started wrestling her coat off her, and Grandma Maeve has shut the door.

“What else did I mess up?” I ask. “Also, how are you here?”

She looks me up and down like she was half expecting to find me in pieces. “Um, where’s your phone, Andie?”

Tucked so far deep into my backpack that it might as well be in the earth’s molten core. “Kettle corn,” I mutter at myself, crouching down to wrestle it out. “What did I miss?”

The phone screen answers that for me before she can. Four texts and a call from Milo. Are you around? the first one reads. Sean says you took off the whole week?? says another. Seriously, though, where are you? Did you leave campus?

And then the fourth text, just before the call: Let me know when you get these, you’re freaking me out, new kid.

My face burns hotter than the aforementioned molten core.

“I texted Shay—”

“Yeah, uh.” Valeria winces. “Shay’s with her sister.”Please check at N/ôvel(D)rama.Org.

I set my backpack down. “Is she okay?”

Valeria blows out a breath, shifting her weight between her feet. “So, um. I may have confessed my feelings for her out in the quad this morning. And she just kind of like—bolted?”

My grandmas have already vacated the premises, taking their tea and wine out to the back porch where my dad is still frowning methodically over his puzzle. I usher Valeria into the living room, which is every bit at odds with itself as my grandmas: half dainty florals, half flashy hot pinks and jet blacks, like the cozy love child of several eras of Taylor Swift mashed together.

We take a seat on the old pink velvet sofa, Valeria too distressed to notice me subtly moving the LIVE, LAUGH, FUCK OFF throw pillow to the side. Now that we’re sitting and the shock of her being in my house has worn off, I see her eyes are puffy and bare, like she must have cried her mascara off a while ago.

“What exactly did she say?” I ask.

Valeria sinks into the sofa looking more miserable than I’ve ever seen her. “She, um . . . said she couldn’t handle the whiplash of the whole thing. I don’t know if she believes me. And after I shut her down last week, I guess I don’t blame her.”

The gears in my brain are already starting to grind when Valeria says something that slows them to a temporary halt.

“Also, Sean told Milo he saw you at Bagelopolis with a suitcase? I called him in case he knew where Shay went, but he was already freaking out because he thought you were like, full leaving Blue Ridge State.”

Ah. That explains why Valeria used “we” when she showed up at the front door. I’ve officially run out of choice foods to cuss with today, so all I can do is put my face in my hands and try not to groan.

“Which—you’re not, right?” Valeria asks cautiously.

I snap my head back up. “No. I . . .”

I know I can’t run away. But the crush of it all comes rushing back just the same—the grades, the radio show, my deeply inconvenient crush on a boy who is leaving me behind. The things I’ve been avoiding all day that will still be my problem tomorrow.

“Let me just send a quick text to Milo.”

I try to bite back my guilt with little success, texting a profuse apology and letting him know I meant for Shay to tell him I was with my grandmas and I’ll be back soon. I want to go into more detail or just call back, but if I am triaging the little disasters in my orbit right now, a near-tears Valeria who just up and drove two hours for my help is priority number one.

I set the phone down, shifting on the couch to level with her. “You really have feelings for Shay? Like . . . you know for sure now?”

I ask both for Valeria’s sake and for Shay’s. I don’t want either of them risking each other’s hearts if they’re not both 100 percent on the same page—and if I know Shay, I suspect she still is. She’s just worried about getting hurt all over again.

“I’ve always known,” says Valeria, withdrawing into some quiet place in herself. “Now I just have to make her believe it.”

She glances over at me then like she needs confirmation I believe her, too. Which means that it’s probably time for me to fess up.

“I’ve known, too,” I say. “You were the Bea who called into the radio show, huh?”

Valeria presses her lips together sheepishly. She must have made the connection that I was the Squire she’d confessed to after I accidentally put myself on blast yesterday. “Yeah.”

One of her hands is resting on the couch. I lean forward and put mine on top of hers, giving it a small squeeze. “I gave you bad advice.”

Valeria stares down at our hands, the words coming out in a mumble. “I didn’t give you the full story.”

I tilt my head at her. “What is the full story, then?”

“I don’t think I even understood it until this weekend,” she says. “This thing with Connor—it was about him, but I think it was also about me. I’ve just been scared.”

“Of what?”

Valeria draws into herself a bit more. “I’ve been writing romance for so long, but with Connor everything was so different from other people I’d dated. It was the first time I understood how a single person could affect me that much. So much that it bled into everything else.” Valeria looks at me with caution in her eyes, worried she’s said too much. When I hold her gaze, she adds, “I was just afraid of that, I think. Of letting love in, knowing that it could have that power over me.”

“I think it’s supposed to, to some degree,” I say carefully, ignoring the pang in my chest when I realize I understand exactly what Valeria’s talking about with Connor. How if I’d really taken a good, hard look at my life, I would have known it for years. “The difference is how you use that power. Whether you use it to undermine or support.”

Valeria sinks deeper into the couch. “And that’s the kind of person Shay is,” she says. “Someone who’s got your back no matter what.”

“Yeah,” I agree, and not for the first time, send a silent thank-you to MTV for scooping up her last roommate so she could be mine. “She is.”

“I just needed time to heal that feeling, before I could really let myself trust it again,” says Valeria. “Because what I feel for Shay—it feels even bigger. And at first that made it scarier. Easier to try to ignore. But with Shay . . . I really hope I haven’t messed things up too much. Because whatever we’re going to be to each other, I hope it’s for a long time.”

I nod, knowing exactly what she means. Milo, Shay, Valeria—at some point we crossed that line with one another, and I can feel the full force of my gratitude for it in this moment now.

“I’m sorry, Andie,” says Valeria. “I know that’s how you thought of Connor, too.”

This day has been long enough to feel like a year, and there’s a strange relief in that—even thoughts of Connor feel faraway.

“I think we’ve wasted more than enough headspace on him.”

This time Valeria’s the one to squeeze my hand. “I know. But I still want to say—I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t either of our faults, but I’m sorry that it happened to you.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever get any real closure from Connor. If we’ll ever be able to talk again, or if it will always be this open-ended, confusing thing that defined my life until it didn’t. But there is closure in this. Certainty in it. Something more unshakable than what I had with Connor.

“I’m sorry it happened to you, too.”

We hold our hands there for a moment, a beat punctuating the understanding we already had. Then Valeria shifts her hand away with a quiet smile.

“Well,” she says, “the good news is, this whole realization kind of freed up my brain. I . . . actually have an ending to the book now.”

“Oh yeah?” I ask. “What is it?”

Valeria looks at her shoulder bag shyly. “Do you want to read it?”

It’s strange how I already know the ending before she hands it over—how I can see it in the gleam in her eye, in the hopefulness of her brows. How my chest is already warm with the same certainty of it the way I am with this moment now.

“Immediately.” As she dutifully starts fishing it out, I can already feel the spark of a plan coming to life. “And you know what—I think I’ve got some ideas for fixing things with Shay and Milo.”

“You like him too, don’t you?”

Even if I had it in me to lie, Valeria’s eyes are all too knowing on mine.

“He’s leaving.” When I swallow the words down, my entire throat feels like a bruise. “I just need to fix our friendship, is all. I can get over a little crush.”

Valeria searches my face for a moment, but doesn’t pry. Just rolls up the sleeves of her cardigan and asks, “What can I do?”

I nod, grounding myself as I pull up a recipe on my phone. “Hope you’re not scared of food dye.”

Valeria takes the phone from me as she hands over the manuscript, a smile blooming on her face. “Never a dull moment with the All-Knighters, huh?”

I grin right back. “Not a one.”