The grass whispers beneath my loafers as I cut across the quad. The giant square is surrounded by impressive neo-Gothic-style buildings made up of picturesque windows, elaborate carvings,and larger-than-life arches. Ivernia School has always feltgrandandsweepingandromantic, which is why it captured my heart so quickly. It’s like stepping into another time and place.
Once I reach my room, I kick off my shoes and sink into my desk chair. Hyde House has single dorms with a shared communal bathroom down the hall, and I’ve made sure to breathe life into every square inch of tight space. A twin bed blanketed in a green velvet comforter sits in the right corner, jewel-toned throw pillows and a chunky knit blanket piled on top. From the ceiling, a twinkling disco ball reflects glimmers of light emitted by my sun-shaped LED sign I’ve hung above my bookshelves. It’s an intentional explosion of personality in here. Brightness and color occupy physical space while my mind bleeds gray.
I remove my phone and my dad’s journal from my pockets and set them on my desk. When I was home over the summer, I’d bring my dad’s musings to the back porch so I could read and stare at the night sky in silence. Our house could get so loud. Madelene running lines from a theater camp play with Mom. Jared’s and Sumner’s thunderous stomps over creaking floorboards, the sound competing with their overlapping chatter. The thumping chug of laundry drowned out by the TV someone never turned off. Outside, it was just me and the crickets and occasional wind rustling the bougainvillea.
Habits aren’t easily broken. I’ve brought Dad’s journals to school with me; it’s soothing to flip through his extensive notes scratched down in slanted capitals. Dates, formulas, planetaryalignments, predictions. Scribbles in the margins for no reason other than he wanted to remember.Today Delaney asked me to explain binary stars, one reads. And another,Madelene says celestial is a main character name.
How can something so tangible still exist when he cannot?
My phone bleats a melodic ringtone. I look down and find my brother’s name across the home screen. Huh. That’s odd. I must be on the receiving end of a butt-dial.
I answer anyway. “Jared?”
“Why do you sound so shocked?” he says. “Did you lose my number?”
“Of course not,” I say. “You okay?”
His tone shifts to defense. “Do I have to not be okay to call you?”
“That’s not what I meant,” I say through a sigh. “But you are calling on a Friday night during your first week of college, so you can’t blame me for asking.”
“It’s wish night. Wanted to see if you were going.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
It’s a rhetorical question. I know why. After Dad died in April, I’d become a more subdued version of myself. I retreated to the overbearing thoughts inside my head. The ones that said,You can do all the right things—work hard, earn exceptional grades—and you still can’t control when the universe wants to take someone away from you.
The world hasn’t felt right without him. It was around then that I realized loss isn’t a lesson. Grief isn’t a moral. Death isn’t agrand design to teach us something about ourselves. Instead, it’s a reminder that we’re all tiny specks on a massive planet within a vast galaxy. I’ve never felt as small as I do now without him.
He used to scrawl a saying across his whiteboard every lesson.Grounded feet. Open mind. Maintain curiosity.It was how he approached everything in life. With profound gusto.
“You’re fine with never getting concrete answers?” I’d asked him once.
“What are we here for,” he’d responded, “if not to try and understand?”
Before, I used to trust in the universe. Because he did. But not anymore.
Jared’s checking up on me. That’s what this is. He wants to make sure I’m not wallowing alone in my room at the end of my first week of senior year. Which is exactly what I’m doing.
He clears his throat. I’m certain he’s hoping I won’t make him say it.
“I’m going,” I assure him. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Just, uh, heading to this party,” he says. “Hey, how’s Sumner?”
I roll my eyes. “The absolute worst, as always.”
Back in April, Jared and I left school and returned to Pennsylvania when it was time to say our final goodbyes. The diagnosis felt fast. Eighteen months prior, our dad had complained of migraines, then forgetfulness, then larger holes in short-term memory. Then came the absence seizures, which led to doctors’ appointments and testing. That was when they found an aggressive tumor.Glioblastoma. It was inoperable, but radiation might help minimize its severity. When it didn’t, there was a new drug expected to delay progression, and would he like to try it? So he did. But it hadn’t helped.
Not long after, we’d run out of options. Hospice arrived, our uncles came to help out, and then our entire world changed overnight.
Three months later, Sumner arrived. He didn’t get along with his mother, that much I knew, and when our mom learned about this, she invited him to stay for the summer. She worried about Jared, how he suppressed his mourning to try to step into a parental role for us, and she couldn’t allow that burden to fall on him. Jared needed support, and Sumner’s presence gave him someone outside of our family to lean on.
My mom had one rule: Sumner couldn’t interrupt the makeup work Jared and I needed to complete. Ivernia emailed us recorded lectures and homework and talked to my mom about rescheduling the final exams we’d missed, which we’d complete virtually with a proctor. This was their way of understanding our situation while making sure we didn’t fall behind, especially Jared, who had to transform his incompletes into As to secure his spot at Columbia.
While I was in the deep end of my own thoughts, Sumner was there to force me out of oncoming spirals. Every normal conversation was an opportunity to initiate a challenge. We bickered over pizza toppings because once I’d ordered mushroom and pineapple and he informed me it was an abomination to society. We debated over the correct way to tie shoes and how to write a lowercasea(I’m pro two-story, he’s pro single-story). We even argued over who got control of Bluetooth in the car when Jared picked me up from my hostessing gig.
“He told me about Capture the Flag,” Jared’s saying. “You gotta respect his game, you know? You would have done the same thing.”
