"It is an encyclopedia-length list. Do not bother asking. You will be here until graduation trying to memorize all of them."
"It is NOT an encyclopedia!" I protest, swatting Cal's arm. "There are like five! Maybe six if you count the subsection about bathroom schedules, which I maintain is a necessary addition that prevents conflict!"
"The subsection has bullet points, Mae. It is a regulatory document."
"Organization is not a crime, Callahan!"
Raphaël raises a hand.
"Do not tell me," he says, his smirk widening. "That way they do not apply to me."
"That is NOT how rules work!" I sputter, turning to him with the indignation of a woman whose constitutional framework is being undermined by a Frenchman with a phoenix tattoo. "You cannot just opt out of communal living guidelines by claiming ignorance! That is the legal equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and humming! That would not hold up in any court!"
He chuckles, unbothered, the sound rich with amusement.
"I do need all of your numbers, though," he says, steering the conversation with the practiced redirect of a man who has been captaining teams long enough to know when to let a debate die. "If we are going to function as a pack, we should have each other's contacts. Communication is not optional."
Etienne nods from my right side.
"He is totally changing the subject," he observes. "But he is right."
We laugh. The sound overlaps and mingles and fills the apartment with a layered warmth that makes the walls feel less like boundaries and more like arms, the noise of four people who are learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to share a life.
Numbers are exchanged. Cal reads his out while I fumble with the new phone's contact interface, accidentally adding his number to my calendar before correcting the mistake. Etienne's number goes in second, entered with a precision that I am proud of until I realize I saved it under the name Etiene and have to go back and fix the spelling. Raphaël dictates his with the casual authority of a man accustomed to giving instructions, and I type it in carefully, letter by letter, refusing to make another error.
When it is done, I stare at the screen.
My contacts list glows back at me. Six entries. Cal. Etienne. Raphaël. Sage. Coach Lizzy. And the campus emergency linethat I accidentally called twice this afternoon and which now occupies a permanent spot in my recent calls with the judgment of a service that knows I cannot operate my own device.
From zero to six.
Three weeks ago, my phone held a single contact. My scholarship advisor, whose number I kept not out of personal connection but contractual obligation. Before that, during the communal housing years, I did not have a phone at all. Before that, in the period between my parents' door closing and the shelter system opening, I had numbers memorized but no device to store them, carrying names and digits in my head like a prayer I repeated to keep the loneliness from consuming me whole.
Zero contacts. Zero calls. Zero texts lighting up a screen with the proof that someone, somewhere, remembered I existed.
And now six.
The number is small. It would look unremarkable on anyone else's device, buried beneath dozens or hundreds of names accumulated through years of friendships and acquaintances and professional networks that stretch like webs across the digital landscape of a normal life.
But on my screen, those six entries glow like stars in a sky that has been dark for as long as I can remember.
I run my thumb across the names. Cal. Etienne. Raphaël. Sage. Each one representing a person who chose to give me their number, who handed me a thread of connection and trusted me to hold it. Each one a small, fragile bridge between my solitude and a world I am still learning to believe will let me stay.
I oddly feel as though it will only grow from here.
CHAPTER 27
Climb Me Up
~CALLAHAN~
My neck is trying to murder me.
That is the first conscious thought my brain produces. Not a pleasant one. Not the gentle, drifting awareness of a man waking naturally after a full night of restorative sleep. No. My nervous system boots up with a screaming protest from every vertebra in my cervical spine, a sharp, grinding ache that radiates from the base of my skull to the tops of my shoulders with the intensity of someone who has spent the last several hours sleeping at an angle that a chiropractor would weep at.
"Fuck," I mutter, sitting up with a wince that pulls at muscles I did not know could cramp simultaneously.
I am on the couch.
