“I just found out. That’s why I came over.”
He slings an arm around my shoulders, the way he always used to before things got complicated between us, and I burrow into the crook of his arm, resting my head on his chest, and we stay there like that—our breathing syncing up, our hearts beating in time—and it feels like coming home again.
“That’s awesome, Al,” he says, his breath warm against my cheek. “Congrats.”
“Thanks.”
There’s a pause, and then he asks, “So I guess that means you’ll be moving to California?”
“Probably,” I say, happy that I can’t see his face, because this would all be so much harder if I could. “But you never know. Aunt Sofia’s dragging me to Northwestern this weekend. She wants to make sure I consider my options.”
“Yeah, but that won’t happen. We all knew you’d go back there eventually. California’s always been home, right?”
I nod, but sitting here now, tucked under his arm in this little apartment in the middle of Chicago, the rain beating against the window and turning the afternoon sky the color of a bruise, it seems strange to me. I’ve been away from California for nine years now, which is just as long as I lived there in the first place. There’s nothing waiting for me there. Everything I know, everyone I love, is here now.
So why does it still have such a hold on me?
I push the question out of my mind, pressing myself closer to Teddy, and we sit there together for a long time, until the rain slows, and then stops. Until, finally, the light comes back again.
It’s Sunday morning and the Northwestern campus is quiet. It rained again last night, so the paths that cut between buildings are slick with wet leaves. We pause beneath a metal arch near the entrance, and Aunt Sofia lets out a happy sigh.
“This place,” she says, shaking her head. “Best four years of my life. Just don’t tell Jake that. I didn’t meet him until after I graduated.”
I give her a smile, but I don’t want to be swayed by nostalgic stories of her college days or the clusters of castlelike buildings with their high-gabled roofs and spires that stretch into the low gray sky. Not when I’ve already settled on Stanford.
“I can’t believe I’ve never taken you here before,” she says, looking around. “I should really come up more often myself. I always forget how close it is.”
“We’ve been to football games,” I remind her. “Just not for a while.”
She laughs. “Not since that time you and Leo got into a fight and spilled your drink on the guy in front of you.”
“We weren’t fighting,” I say with a frown. “Were we?”
I remember the drink getting knocked out of my hands and landing on someone’s lap: an enormous guy who stood up to glare at us, soda dripping from his purple sweatshirt. But it’s harder to imagine that Leo and I could have been fighting. We used to squabble all the time, the way any siblings do. But we never fought for real.
“Oh yeah,” Aunt Sofia says as we head toward the sprawling green of the quad. “He was worked up because you were off to visit your grandma the next day without him. You’d only been with us about a year, and I think he’d gotten a little too attached.”
A dim light switches on in a dusty corner of my memory, and I can picture Leo—red-faced and teary-eyed—trying to explain to Aunt Sofia that I belonged tothemnow, which meant I should be spending Thanksgiving at home rather than in Boston. This was before my grandmother on my mom’s side passed away, my last remaining relative outside of the little family I’d recently joined.
“And you couldn’t stop talking about the trip,” Aunt Sofia is remembering, “so Leo just kept getting more upset, and you two started arguing, and he knocked the drink out of your hand. It was a total disaster. We had to leave in the middle of the second quarter. Last time we ever took you troublemakers to a game with us.”
“Wow,” I say, blinking. “I didn’t remember that.”
Aunt Sofia gives me a sideways glance. “Well, memory can be a tricky thing.” It seems as if she’s about to say more, but then she looks up and spots a huge, blocky building up ahead and her face breaks into a smile. “My home away from home.”
“The library?”
“How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess,” I say, watching her closely. “You really loved it here, huh?”
“I really did,” she agrees. “Though it took a little time. I almost left after the first semester. The cold really got to me. All I’d brought was this flimsy jacket, and there was a big snowstorm at the beginning of October that year. It was brutal.”
“I can’t imagine coming here from Florida,” I say. “It was a rough transition even from San Francisco. Why’d you apply in the first place?”
“The plan was to go back to Buenos Aires for university. It was where I was from, and we still had family there, and whenever we visited I fell in love with the city a little more. It wasn’t home, exactly, but—well, you know what it’s like.”
“What?”
