1. Sloane #2
The campus end of Main Street is already busy — students moving back in, hauling duffel bags and furniture and the optimistic organizational systems that won’t survive the first week of classes.
I pass the coffee shop on the corner of Whitmore and Elm, the one with the good espresso and the uncomfortable chairs that somehow always has a line.
I pass the arched stone entrance to the main quad, the iron gates standing open, the bell tower catching the last of the light.
I pass Corbin Arena, its parking lot already dotted with cars — preseason training, probably, or one of the early skates. The lights inside are on.
I keep driving.
Sailmaker Lane is two blocks off Mill Street, a narrow residential street of old houses that the university bought up over the decades and converted to student housing — the kind of housing that still looks like actual houses, with front porches and garden plots and the occasional original window that drafts badly in January.
The Sailmaker is at the end of the lane, a three-story white clapboard with a wraparound porch and blue shutters and a history that the university’s website describes as “significant to Haven’s founding,” which is a diplomatic way of saying it’s old enough that several things inside it work only in theory.
It is the first place I have ever lived where I was not performing being fine.
I pull into the driveway.
The SUV parked crookedly at the curb is still warm — the hood ticking as it cools.
Before I’m fully out of the car, the front door bursts open.
“MOTHER HAS ARRIVED.”
Margo.
She comes down the porch steps like a blonde hurricane in a white sundress, arms already open, smile already at full wattage, the kinetic energy of someone who has been in a car for three hours and is now releasing all of it directly at me.
I barely get my feet on the ground before she slams into me.
“Oof.”
“Missed you.”
“You’re crushing my lungs.”
“Worth it.”
I laugh — actually laugh, the kind that comes from somewhere below the performance, and hug her back properly.
Over her shoulder, Wren appears in the doorway carrying two suitcases with the same focused efficiency she applies to everything.
June follows, a coffee cup in one hand and a paperback in the other, wearing the expression of someone who has been trying to finish a chapter since before they left Boston.
For a moment I just look at them.
There is a thing that happens when the people you’ve chosen are all in the same place at the same time — a rightness that I don’t have better words for and have given up trying to name.
I know what it is not: it is not family, not the way I understand that word, which carries weight I don’t always want to carry.
It is something I built myself, which is different.
Which costs more. Which I’m not going to think about right now.
The four of us collide in the driveway in a chaos of hugs and luggage complaints and everyone trying to talk at once.
Then Margo leans back, holds me at arm’s length, and squints.
“You worked too much this summer.”
“I really didn’t.”
“You have stress eyebrows.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It is absolutely a thing.” She looks to the others for confirmation.
Wren nods without hesitation. “She’s right.”
June points with her coffee cup. “You look tired.”
I stare at all three of them. Betrayed. “I hate you.”
Margo beams. “No, you don’t.”
She’s right. I don’t.
Two hours later, the kitchen table is buried under takeout containers and four months of accumulated updates, and I have eaten more Thai food than I strictly needed.
Margo, who processes information through cross-examination, is working through her mental agenda item by item.
She has already covered: the Boston internship (exhausting, excellent, her boss was a tyrant she deeply respects), the state of the dining hall (unchanged, still an existential threat), and the situation with Theo Mercer, which she summarizes as “nothing, absolutely nothing, I barely think about him at all” in a way that suggests the opposite.
Then she refills her water glass, sets it down, and looks at me with the focus that means she has arrived at a topic she’s been saving.
“How’s Evan?”
The table goes quiet.
Not dramatically quiet. Just the kind of quiet that happens when three people who’ve discussed something among themselves already want to hear the answer directly from the source.
“Fine,” I say.
“Mm.” Margo tilts her head. “You went on a break.”
“I needed space. We went on a break.”
“In July.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
I drag a piece of pad thai through the sauce at the bottom of the container. “He texted last week. Asked me to come over for dinner.”
The quiet becomes a different texture.
“Dinner,” Wren says.
“At his apartment?” Margo asks.
“As in, you and Evan, alone, at his apartment.” June closes her book. June never closes her book unless she needs both hands for the conversation. “You didn’t.”
“I said I’d go.” I look up. “It’s dinner. Not a wedding.”
“Sloane.” Margo’s voice has dropped into the register she uses for things she means. “He showed up outside the theater building three times last spring.”
“He was walking by.”
“All three times?”
“He lives in that direction.”
“And the texts?” Wren says. “The two a.m. ones?”
“He was drunk.”
“He was always drunk.” Margo sets her fork down with a precision that means she has more to say but is choosing the measured version.
“I just think that a person who texts you at 2 a.m., shows up at your workplace, and then asks you to have dinner alone at his apartment after a break that you asked for is not actually respecting the concept of the break.”
“It’s dinner,” I say again.
“It’s a trap,” June says.
“June.”
“I’m not being dramatic. I’m being accurate.”
She is being accurate. This is the problem with living with people who know you well — they see around corners you’re still pretending don’t exist. I know what dinner at Evan’s apartment means.
I have known since I said I’d go, and I’ve been performing not-knowing ever since, which is a kind of exhausting I do not have the vocabulary to explain without giving away too much.
I want to be done with it. That’s the thing. I want to go and have it be nothing and come back here and tell myself I ended it cleanly, on my own terms, the way I do everything.
“I’ll be fine,” I say.
Wren looks at Margo. Margo looks at June. June looks at me.
Then they all three groan.
“We’re putting this on record,” Margo says. “Officially. For the record.”
“Noted.”
“This is a bad idea.”
“Also noted.”
She points her fork at me. “If he does the thing—”
“He won’t do the thing.”
“If he does the thing where he talks for thirty minutes about how his last coach didn’t understand his potential and how this season is going to be different—”
“It’s dinner, Margo.”
“I’m just saying,” she says, in the voice of someone who has given up winning and is now purely documenting, “that we are all on record as having had concerns.”
“Duly noted.”
“And if it goes badly, we’ll be here.”
I look at her.
Then at Wren, who is already clearing the table because that’s what Wren does when she has feelings she isn’t going to say out loud.
Then at June, who has reopened her book but isn’t reading it.
The thing beneath my ribs is back. Different shape now — warmer. More complicated.
“I know,” I say.
And I do.
Evan’s apartment is off Whitmore Avenue, in one of the old Victorians that hasn’t been converted to student housing because it’s too close to the athletic facilities to need to advertise.
Senior athletes get first pick of off-campus housing.
It’s one of those arrangements the university doesn’t publicize but everyone understands.
I’ve been here more times than I’ve admitted to my roommates.
I let myself in with the key he gave me in March — the giving of which I probably should have examined more carefully at the time, but didn’t, because I was twenty and it seemed like a gesture and I am very stupid sometimes about gestures.
The front hallway is dim.
The light over the stove is on in the kitchen. His jacket is slung over the back of the couch the way it always is, the casualness of a person who grew up in houses where other people cleaned things.
“Evan?”
Nothing.
I set my bag by the door and check my phone. Seven on the dot. He said seven.
Then I hear it.
From down the hall.
My first thought is that he’s watching something — that he fell asleep with his laptop open, which he does, which has always driven me slightly insane.
My second thought arrives approximately half a second later, because I have ears and I know the difference between the sounds a laptop makes and the sounds that are currently coming from his bedroom, and those two categories do not overlap.
I stand very still in the hallway.
The sounds are not ambiguous.
“Evan.”