I almost drop my coffee when I see two texts from Jason.
You can use my laptop if you need it for studying. Password is BAUER$.
Sending you sum $$ for a cab or whatever. We're heading to DC straight from the arena. Back Sunday.
I stare at the screen. Jason Rujkowski, the man who weighs his protein powder and once threatened a college teammate for borrowing his stick tape, just offered me his laptop and left me cab money. Unprompted. Without a lecture about the rules.
Something happened. I don't know what happened, but something did.
I text back a quick
Thank you.
Three dots appear, disappear, appear again.
Yeah. Good luck studying.
That's it. No explanation. No emotional breakthrough. Just Jason doing something thoughtful for the first time in recent memory and immediately retreating before anyone can make a big deal about it.
I'll take it.
I get out of my shift only a half hour late and order a ride share for the first time, feeling like royalty in the back seat of a sedan that smells like pine air freshener instead of dried piss. The driver doesn't try to talk to me. The heater works. I tip him generously and feel only a small pang of guilt.
The apartment is empty. Really empty — I have the place to myself for at least three days. They’re in DC, then a stop somewhere else, I think. I haven't memorized their schedule.
I drop my bag, shower, and stand in the living room in my pajamas — flannel pants and an old college T-shirt — and notice something I missed this morning in my pre-dawn rush.
Curtains.
Someone hung curtains over the floor-to-ceiling windows. They're simple, dark gray, blackout material, the kind you'd find at any home store, but they transform the room. The living room is no longer a glass box broadcasting my existence to the riverfront. It's enclosed. Private. Mine, at least for the next few days.
I run my hand along the fabric. Did Bernard do this? Had to be him, right? I glance around, and there’s no note. I know my brother just turned into a human being, but Bernard has been kind to me for over a week. Rides to and from work. Leftover food. And apparently hanging curtains in a room so I don’t feel watched in my temporary home.
I close the curtains, and the apartment wraps around me cozy as a blanket. I duck into my brother’s room and grab his laptop, laughing when I see he has the password written on a piece of tape on the case. Snuggling into the sofa with just the stove light on, I pull up the NCLEX prep website.
I've been using the app on my phone, squinting at tiny text on a cracked screen, and the difference is immediate. The questions are larger. The answer choices are spaced apart. I can actually see all four options without scrolling.
But the real discovery happens by accident. I'm poking around in the settings when I find the accessibility features. Text-to-speech. Screen reader. Audio playback of questions.
I click it. A calm, robotic voice reads the first question aloud: "A patient presents with sudden onset chest pain, diaphoresis, and shortness of breath. Which of the following nursing interventions should be performed first?"
And I know the answer. Immediately. No jumbling, no second-guessing, no transposing words. The voice reads the choices, and I click the right one without hesitation.
I take twenty questions. I get sixteen right.
I take twenty more. Eighteen correct.
My hands shake. Not from anxiety — from something else that feels like the ground shifting under my feet, like discovering a door in a room you thought had no exits.
Suddenly, Bernard’s playful voice in the car and on this couch seems less like witchcraft and more like a revelation: when information comes in through my ears instead of my eyes, my brain processes it just fine.
I pass a practice test for the first time since I started studying.
I close the laptop and press my hands over my face and breathe, because I am not going to cry on my brother's couch. But something cracks inside me — something old and heavy and calcified — and for the first time I think: maybe I'm not stupid.
My roommates’ road trip leaves me feeling like I live alone. I drink coffee with no bra on, sleep in my underwear with the heat cranked high.
And, interestingly, I text Bernard Houser. A lot.
