Chapter 21
I MIGHT JUST YET PASS
SIMONE
The coffee shop is old enough to have ghosts, and if it doesn’t, I supply my own.
The walls are wooden—real wood, dark and varnished, the kind that remembers every humid summer and every dry, cracked winter.
I sit in a battered wingback by the window, alone except for a dozen other people pretending not to notice anyone else.
The glass is fogged with steam and breath.
Outside, snow falls in clotted, lumpy drifts, erasing the world one inch at a time.
I’m on my third latte, which is just enough to push my pulse into the red, but not enough to make my hands shake so badly that I can’t operate my phone.
The barista has written “Simone” on the cup in purple Sharpie, with a cartoon heart for the dot on the “i.” It’s dorky and a little desperate, but I’ll take it.
I’m not the only person here with a laptop, but I’m the only one here with a death grip on her phone and the Century College student portal open in four different tabs.
The entire break has boiled down to this: the moment grades are posted, my fate will be decided.
It’s so retrograde and high school and humiliating that I want to scream, but I’m trapped.
If my GPA doesn’t break the right threshold, my scholarship is gone and so am I.
A woman two tables over shuffles her tarot deck, laying the cards out for an invisible client on Zoom. She murmurs about “future prosperity” and “hidden enemies.” I want to believe the cards, but I know better: the future is whatever the algorithm spits out when I hit refresh.
Jazz piano filters through the air, polite and soft enough that nobody can claim to hate it, even if they want to.
The tables are a mess of MacBooks, library books, and tourists from the nearby hotel—everyone huddled in from the cold, forming a temporary family of the slightly-deranged.
Every time the front door opens, a knife of January air slices through the place, scattering napkins and making the lights flicker.
I’ve been out of the hospital for a few weeks now.
The scars are neat and thin, fading from angry purple to a more elegant blue.
I touch them sometimes, under the table, half-expecting to find stitches still in place.
The pain is less too—more of a low, persistent hum than a scream—but it’s there, a reminder that my body is a patchwork, and nothing truly heals the way you want it to.
The surgery was textbook, according to the doctor.
The recovery, not so much. There were days when I couldn’t stand, days when the only thing that kept me going was Andie’s relentless cheerleading and the promise of homemade soup.
There were days when even the soup tasted like dust. But I did it. I made it. I survived.
Liam visited every day, which is either a testament to his character or his guilt complex.
He brought books and crossword puzzles and, once, a contraband bottle of gin in a thermos labeled “Green Smoothie.” He never stayed long, always conscious of boundaries, never crossing the line into what we both wanted.
I’m not allowed to have sex for another two weeks, doctor’s orders, but the way he looks at me sometimes—like I’m the only thing in the room that matters—makes my skin fizz.
He texts every morning: How are you feeling?
Can I bring you anything? His messages are short, but the timing is always perfect.
I never thought I’d miss his stupid little tics—how he refuses to use emojis, how he capitalizes every sentence like he’s writing a legal brief—but now they’re my weather, my metronome, the thing that makes my day real.
I hit refresh again. Still nothing. The portal is a black hole. I can almost see the code, mocking me from the other side of the glass.
My leg is bouncing so hard I nearly tip my latte. I slide my phone across the table and stare at it, daring it to blink first.
A man in a battered Carhartt jacket lumbers to the counter, stomping snow off his boots. The noise snaps me back. He orders black coffee and a muffin, his voice a low gravel. The barista gives him the same heart-dotted smile she gave me. For a second, I hate her, and then I don’t.
I glance at the window. The world outside is white and empty, the sidewalk erased. A pair of kids in matching parkas throw snowballs at a stop sign, missing every time but refusing to give up. Their stubbornness is contagious.
I check my phone again. The student portal has crashed, or maybe just timed out from the collective panic of a thousand other people like me, all waiting for the same digital verdict. I reload, wait, and reload again. My heart is a metronome gone off the rails.
I wonder what Liam’s doing. Of course, he knows what grade he gave me in his class, but he doesn’t know if I was able to turn my whole slate of classes around. I imagine him in his apartment, pacing the floor, reciting Keats to the furniture.
The phone vibrates in my hand. I nearly drop it.
The portal has reloaded. The grades are up.
I scroll past the filler classes, my eyes moving too fast to focus. The one that matters most to me is American Literature, the class that started all of this, the class that almost killed me and then saved me.
Next to the course code is a single letter: A.
I stare at it, not believing. Then I see it again, and again, and it’s real.
I feel the air leave my lungs. My hands go numb. For a second, I think I might pass out.
I scan the rest of the list. The GPA at the bottom is a miracle: high enough to keep my scholarship, high enough to keep me here, high enough that I might—if I want—qualify for the co-terminal master’s program at Century. I want to laugh. I want to scream.
I clutch the phone in both hands, afraid the numbers will disappear if I let go.
I look at the world through the fogged window, through the rim of my cup, through the lens of a life that almost wasn’t.
For the first time in forever, I feel like I belong.
I take a long, scalding sip of my latte, and the bitterness is perfect.
I barely have time to process the grade before the front door blasts open and Andie comes barreling in, trailing a cloud of cold air and the sharp, almost ozone tang of sidewalk salt.
She spots me instantly—maybe it’s the hair, maybe the posture, maybe just the way I’m vibrating at a frequency only the desperate can see.
She doesn’t walk, she power-marches, parka half-zipped, boots squeaking, cheeks flushed so red she looks frostbitten. She lands in the seat across from me like she’s been launched. There is no preamble.
“Tell me you checked,” the sassy blonde demands, eyes glittering.
“I checked.”
“And?”
I turn my phone to face her, finger trembling as I slide the screen across. She leans in, nearly jamming her nose to the glass. When she sees the “A,” her whole body snaps upright.
“YES!” she yells, way too loud for the jazz piano mood, then flattens her voice and tries again, a hissed whisper: “YES. YOU LEGEND.”
The tarot lady looks up from her deck and grins. The barista gives us a thumbs-up. I’m mortified, but also elated.
Andie wraps me in a hug so tight it knocks the air from my lungs. She smells like vanilla body spray and the outdoors. Her hair leaves a static electricity shadow on my face.
“I’m so proud of you,” she says, and it’s not a joke, not even a little.
I blink, and for a second my vision goes blurry, but I hold it together. “We did it,” I say, my voice small.
She pulls back, wipes under her eyes with the heel of her palm, and immediately starts digging through the sugar caddie on the table.
“This is a full-sugar day. All bets are off,” she announces, and proceeds to dump five packets of sugar into her thermos of black coffee.
The sweetness must be astonishing, but she drinks it anyway, eyes never leaving my face.
We fall into easy talk, the kind you only get after surviving a war together.
We gossip about the other finals, the tragic fate of mutual friends who failed to surface, the looming threat of next semester’s tuition.
Every now and then, Andie circles back to the grades.
“You know what this means?” she says at one point.
“You’re locked in for the scholarship. And you could—if you wanted—apply to the co-term. I mean, who even are you right now?”
I laugh, but I feel it, too: the giddy, unstable sense that my life just leveled up, that the girl who almost flunked out is now the girl who could go for a master’s.
“Look at you,” Andie marvels. “From hot mess to campus genius. God, I wish my parents would believe it. I’m texting my mom right now. She’s going to lose her mind.”
She holds out her phone and takes a selfie with me, which I hate, but she insists, and I don’t have the energy to resist. She posts it instantly, hashtags it “#livinglife #nerdalert #watchherglow.”
I smile despite myself. The café has settled into a late-morning lull. The barista is restocking the pastry case, the jazz has shifted to something slower, sadder. The tarot woman is packing up her cards. For the first time all break, I feel something like actual peace.
I pull out my phone and compose a text to Liam. The words don’t come easy. I write, “Thank you for helping me become a better student. I couldn’t have done this without your guidance.” I stare at it, debating if I should add more.
Andie leans in, reading over my shoulder. “Send it,” she whispers.
I hover my finger over the button, then set the phone down.
“I will,” I say. “In a minute.”
Andie grins, then raises her cup. “To a minute,” she toasts.
We clink, and the world feels just a little less fragile.
After sending the text, I get hit with nerves. Did I come off as too needy? Too lame? But then my phone vibrates again, harder this time, as if it can sense my indecision.
The new message is from Liam. I see the notification bubble, and for a moment all the air is vacuumed out of the room. I swipe to open.
So proud of you. Can we talk seriously this week now that grades are out? Are you feeling better?
I read it twice, then a third time, as if repetition might reveal the hidden layer I know he’s tucked inside. My pulse spikes; it’s almost audible, a tap-tap-tap like a bad snare drum in my throat.
What does he mean by “talk seriously”? Is this the beginning of the end—one last, surgical incision to cut us apart, now that I’m technically not his student anymore? Or is it the other thing, the thing I don’t dare name, the possibility that this is not the end but a beginning?
I look up, find myself staring into the middle distance. The window is an oil painting now: streaks of condensation, outside world smudged into abstract. The snow’s gotten heavier. The kids have vanished, replaced by a slow, almost solemn parade of bundled shapes trudging to nowhere.
Andie watches me, her gaze surgical. “Is it him?” she asks.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“Bad news?”
I shake my head. “Not bad. Not good. Just uncertain.”
She grins. “You can handle uncertain. That’s your whole brand.”
I make a face, but she’s not wrong.
I hover my finger over the keyboard, unsure how to answer. I type, “Yes, I’d like that,” then delete it, then re-type it and add a smiley, then delete the smiley and put a period at the end, because I want to sound mature and not desperate. I finally send:
Yes, I’d like that. Just tell me when and where.
The message whooshes off into the ether, and I feel like I’ve jumped off a ledge, the ground rising fast.
Andie leans in, lowers her voice. “So, what’s next?”
“I don’t know,” I say, which is both the truth and the entire summary of my last year.
She bumps her mug against mine. “Whatever happens, you’ve got this.”
I smile, letting her confidence buoy me for just a second.
Outside, the snow keeps falling. The latte is gone, the cup still radiating a little warmth into my palms. I flex my hand, feeling the strength return.
My phone dings with a new message from Liam: How about Thursday at my place, six or so?
I start to reply, but then I stop. I look at Andie, at the soft light, at the cozy, wood-paneled haven we’ve built around ourselves. I want to memorize the moment—me, not broken; Andie, loyal and fierce; the world, cold but still spinning outside.
I gather my stuff. As I zip my bag, I steal one last look at the student portal, at the line of “A’s” that shouldn’t exist, at the GPA that’s mine, nobody else’s.
And for the first time in a long time, I feel ready for whatever conversation comes next.
We head for the door together, into the blue-white light and the unknown.