“Maybe,” she says. “That’s part of it, anyway.”
Hugo stays very still, waiting for her to say more, and when she doesn’t, he asks, “What’s the other part?”
There’s a long pause, and then: “Do you ever feel like you need to shake things up? Or just step outside your life for a minute?”
“Yes,” he says, his heart thudding with recognition.
“I wanted it so badly: to get in to that film program. You have no idea. The worst part wasn’t even being rejected—it was the shock of it.” She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I thought I was a shoo-in.”
“Did you?” Hugo asks, unable to imagine being so sure about anything.
“Yup,” she says. “Want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m good. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say. But it’s just a fact. And I want the chance to get better.”
“You will,” he says, though he has no idea really. He’s never loved anything the way Mae loves making films, and he wishes he knew what it feels like to have that kind of passion for something. For anything.
Her voice rises up to him again. “What about you? Why areyouhere?”
“Because my girlfriend broke up with me,” he says with a wan smile.
“Right. But most people wouldn’t have come after something like that. Much less go through all the effort of finding a girl with the same name to take the ticket. I mean, what if I were a total psycho?”
He laughs. “The jury’s still out.”
“Really—why did you come?”
Hugo hesitates. Even in the cramped bunk, there’s something so pleasant about the motion of the train and the sound of her voice, and he’s reluctant to spoil it with talk of his knotty feelings about his future and his family and everything else. But he can sense her waiting below him, the silence lengthening.
“It’s a long story,” he says eventually, and he can almost feel her peering up at him through the dark.
“The good ones usually are.”
They talk late intothe night. There’s something about the darkness that makes it easy, and when she checks the time and realizes it’s after two, it occurs to Mae that she’s already shared more with Hugo—whom she’s known for less than a day—than she ever did with Garrett.
She can’t help feeling as if she’s stepped out of her life as quickly and thoughtlessly as you might a pair of jeans; it seems impossible that she could be sharing a room with a boy she met less than twelve hours ago.
“It’s not that I don’t want to go to uni at all,” he’s saying, and she hears a dull thump as he knocks a fist gently against the ceiling of the train. “I’m not a bloody idiot. And I quite like studying, actually. I just don’t particularly want to go to that one.”
“So why are you going?”
“Because I’ve got a scholarship,” he says in a voice so miserable that it sounds like he’s telling her he has some sort of disease.
She can’t help laughing. “What am I missing here?”
“I didn’t get it because I’m clever,” he says. “Even though I am.”
“Okay,” Mae says, amused. “So, what? Was it a safety school or something?”
“No.”
“Sports scholarship?”
He snorts. “Definitely not.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “You have a hidden talent. You can play the piano with your toes. Or juggle knives. Or wait…are you in a marching band?”
