Time to make it official.
I press the call button. One ring. Two rings. Three rings—
“Liam! I’m so glad you called, I actually have something to tell you,” Claire answers, her voice carrying the lightness of someone who doesn’t know her world is about to collapse.
“Claire, before you go on…” I start, but my voice catches like it’s been clotheslined by my own guilt. I swallow hard, gripping the phone like I’m holding onto the edge of a cliff. Then I begin again: “I—I’m so sorry. I thought I had—” I say, stumbling for the right words, any words.
She cuts me off. “Remember after I redid your place?”
“What? Yeah, I remember…”
“And remember when I asked if I could share the photos on my social media?” Claire continues, her voice crescendoing.
I look around my apartment, really look at it. The sleek bookshelves that make me look literate, the lighting that suggests I understand ambiance.
“Yes, yes. Of course, Claire.” I rub my face, wondering where this is going when we should be discussing her impending doom.
“Well, remember also how you told me your PR guy’s wife saw the photos pop up on her Instagram feed?”
I sit up straighter, my confusion developing its own confusion. “Yeah…?”
“She wasn’t the only one, Liam!” Her voice brightens even further.
“What are you talking about?”
“I got an email yesterday from a tenured professor at Parsons. Turns out she saw the photos, and she loved what I did.”
My heartbeat picks up. “Wait, what?”
“She told me she saw my posts on Instagram—and I posted the before pictures too, by the way, so people could see the absolute disaster you were living in before I saved you.” A surprised chuckle escapes despite the knot in my gut. “So anyway,” she continues, “I quickly arranged a call with this Parsons professor, and we hit it off immediately. She asked for more photos of other work I’ve done, so I sent everything over.”
Hope tiptoes into my chest, quiet but insistent. “Claire…”
“This morning,” her voice trembles with emotion that makes my own chest clench, “the professor emailed me and said she spoke to admissions. A spot opened up—a student dropped out, and they re-evaluated my application.”
I’m holding my breath.
“I got in, Liam!”
Silence.
The words hang in the air, rearranging the molecular structure of everything. My vision blurs, and something hot and overwhelming builds inside me, climbing up my throat like emotional lava.
“You—” my voice cracks like I’m thirteen again. I clear my throat, trying to gather the pieces of myself that just shattered in the best possible way. “Claire, you did it?”
She lets out a watery laugh, the kind that comes when joy and disbelief collide. “I did it.”
I close my eyes, and suddenly the guilt that’s been crushing me vanishes.
“You did it,” I repeat. “And you did it on your own.”
The last part matters. She didn’t need Bunny Newman’s poisoned favor. She didn’t need my failed negotiations. She earned this with her talent and her transformation of my disaster apartment into something Instagram-worthy.
“That’s not all, Liam.”
My eyes widen instinctively. “What?”
Claire laughs again, breathless, like she can barely believe her own life. “The professor—she has a design firm. She wants me to intern for her while I’m in school. It’s unpaid, but the experience is going to be incredible.”
