“About what?” I stood like a stone statue.She’s moving out.My sudden guess stabbed my lungs.
We’d been together since birth. Inseparable as kids and teenagers. In Philly, there weren’t laundry lists of actors and celebrities to shirk attention from ourselves. We weren’t in LA or New York. Our families were the only shiny toys in the window. The only animals in the zoo.
Growing up in the public eye here, we related to very few people. So we naturally stuck together. As an adult, it always felt like we weresupposedto move on somehow—but I never understood why that meant we had to move on from each other.
I wanted Janie in my world. And she was the one who said those three months we separated at college—I went to Harvard, she went to Princeton—were the “darkest, most miserable days” of her life.
After a quick glance at my cracked door, she murmured, “An epiphany about my future. Midnight life contemplations, you know those.”
I did. When we were sixteen, we used to sneak into the Meadows girls’ treehouse at night and talk for hours about our identities. Our role in the world.
Who we were. Inside. And out.
Our attention drifted as two calico kittens skulked up the stairs. She picked up Walrus and let his brother Carpenter scamper away. Jane owned five cats: Walrus, Carpenter, Toodles, Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth. I never minded them or even the strays she sometimes housed.
They made Janie happy.
“I can’t do philanthropy for much longer,” she said after a short pause.
That.
Too many emotions hit me at once, so I knocked them aside. And a heavy nothingness weighed me down.
Since she was eighteen, Jane had been the temporary CFO for H.M.C. Philanthropies. I tried to prepare myself for the day she’d leave, but I let the idea wither and die in my brain.
She’d be by my side forever.
Except forever always ends.
“It’s almost been three years, Moffy.” She tried to kiss Walrus without avocado-ing his calico fur. Then he sprung out of her arms. “Charity work is just supposed to be my pit stop. It’s what you’re good at. It’s what you desperatelylove.” She said the wordlovefrom her core. “But me?—”
“You don’t have to convince me. I know it’s not your thing.” I wish it could’ve been, but I wouldn’t selfishlybegher to stay.
Because out of loyalty, she would. And I wasn’t going to trap my best friend.
Jane lowered her voice to another whisper. “We’re all incredibly privileged, and the thought of wasting a moment or any opportunity we’ve been given feels like eternal failure.”
“No,” I snapped, concerned about where this was headed.
“It’s true.” She tried hard not to scratch her face. But her mask must’ve itched because she kept crinkling her nose. She tilted her chin up and looked me right in the eye. “I can’t sit idly by and be the womanno onehoped I’d be.”
My jaw tensed. “You putwaytoo much fucking pressure on yourself.” All of the girls I was surrounded by did, and it had a lot, in part, to do with the media placing impossible ideals on them.
Before they even hit puberty, they were supposed to be role models, advocates, successful, beautiful, fierce, strong, humble, and sweet—when all I ever wanted for each of them was to behappy.
“Let me preface,” Jane said, “my epiphany has nothing to do with math.”
“Good.”
Jane loved math as a child. Even joined mathletes as a teenager, and people fantasized about Janie having a career in the field. But she never meant for it to be alifelongpassion.Still, people on Twitter, Tumblr, all social medias—they created an entire life for Jane off a favorite childhood school subject.
It was a lot of pressure for akid.
Fear of disappointing your parents—that’s one tough thing. Fear of disappointing fans, the world—that’s a massive, indestructible wall that many people I love keep running into.
I’ve even met that wall before.
Jane took the largest breath. The crux was coming. “I realized tonight,” she said, “that I’ve spent nearly all four years of my ‘college experience’ ambitionless. Lackluster. I need drive.” She clenched her fist like she channeled Joan of Arc into her soul. “A challenge.” Her eyes lit with fire. “My parents live by ambition, and my tank is dry. Empty.Caput.”
