“Not exactly. It was some rich guy who went there.”
“Seriously?” she says, surprised. “He just handed you a whole bunch of money?”
“Well, he died a few years ago, so technically he handed it to the university. And we had to get the grades first. But otherwise, yeah. He thought it would be good publicity for them. Which it will. Basically, we get a free education and they get to parade us around campus.”
“I’ve heard of worse deals,” Mae says.
Hugo sighs. “I know. That’s just it. What kind of prat would have the nerve to be ungrateful for something like that?”
“A prat who wants something different?”
“Did I mention it’s also in my hometown?”
“Oof,” she says. “Really?”
“And I’m the only one who seems to mind it. I love my brothers and sisters. I do. They’re my best mates, and it’s strange to imagine being without them—like losing an arm. Or five.”
“That’s a lot of arms.”
“And it’s not as if I didn’t know this would be happening. It’s been the plan since we were born. Literally. I thought I was fine with it, but then I started hearing about classmates who are off to new places, and Margaret…” He trails off. “She’s going to Stanford. And she’ll be meeting all these new people and doing all these exciting things while I’m stuck at home, about a mile from our secondary school, surrounded by all my siblings, like nothing has changed at all.”
“Have you ever thought about not going?”
“And do what?” he asks. “We can’t afford anywhere else.”
“What about loans?”
“I can’t—” He pauses, frustrated. “I can’t just abandon them. That’s not how it works with us. We’re a unit.”
“But it won’t be that way forever,” Mae says.
He’s quiet for a moment. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“No,” Mae says, shaking her head, though he can’t see her. “It’s just me.”
“Then you can’t understand. It’s not that easy.”
Maybe not,she thinks. But they’ve always been a unit too—she and Dad and Pop and Nana—and she’d left them behind because it was time to go. And because she has dreams that are too big to fit back home. She suspects Hugo’s problem isn’t that he can’t bear to leave. It’s that he hasn’t figured out where he wants to go.
“Most things are easier than you think,” she says. “It’s deciding to do them that’s hard.”
“I suppose,” he says with a sigh. “Though we can’t all be intrepid filmmakers who run headlong into a field of cows. Or whatever dreams we’re chasing after.”
She smiles at this. “Well, why not?”
“For starters, I don’t even know what my dreamsare.All I know is that I feel…restless. And I’d love to do something different, you know? Something new.”
A few seconds pass, and Mae looks up at the bottom of his bed. “Hugo?”
“Yes?”
“Who ever told you that doesn’t count as a dream?”
Hugo wakes not fromthe motion of the train but from the absence of it. He blinks at the ceiling, which is alarmingly close to his face. Below, there’s the scratching of a pen on paper, and it takes him a moment to place himself.
He nudges open the curtain beside the bed, wincing as the light comes streaming in the window. Outside there’s a sign that saysToledo.Beside it, the man from across the hall, bleary eyed beneath the brim of a cowboy hat, is smoking a cigarette. It’s early still, not quite six, and the sky is glowing and shimmery. Hugo flops onto his back again.
“Mae?”
