I drink my coffee slowly on purpose, both in an attempt to keep Bex talking and because my hands are starting to shake from all the caffeine. Out the window it’s beginning to get dark. I know I should probably get back to the tournament, but part of me feels like I could hang out in this Starbucks all night. That’s when Bex’s phone dings in his pocket.
“Holy sh . . . ,” he says when he looks at it, glancing at me and trailing off before completing the swear. “Is it really after four o’clock? How did that happen?”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not really. “I distracted you. You didn’t get any writing done.”
Bex shrugs. “Let’s be real,” he admits, “I probably wasn’t going to get any writing done anyway.” Then he grins. “Besides, the conversation was worth it.”
He stands up and slings his messenger bag over his shoulder, lifts his empty cup in a salute. “Enjoy the rest of the weekend,” he says with an easy smile. “And send that admission essay off before you come into my class on Monday. Noodling time is officially over.”
“I will,” I promise. I watch his back until Bex disappears into the crowd outside.
Four
My dad makes a double batch of chicken noodle soup for dinner on Sunday night, so on Monday after school I head over to Sunrise Senior Living to drop a container of it off for Gram. I know most people think nursing homes are totally creepy, and I guess they’re not wrong, but I’ve been coming here for so long at this point that the bleachy smell and occasional confused, wandering person don’t really bother me that much.
“I mean,” I pointed out to my mom the last time the two of us came to visit together, “depending on your perspective, it’s not actually that different from high school.”
I check in at reception before climbing the stairs in the atrium and waving hello to Camille, the nurse supervisor on Gram’s floor. She’s wearing scrubs printed with wildflowers and a pair of bright green Crocs. Camille has scrubs in a riot of different patterns and Crocs in every color of the rainbow; she’s wearing a different combination every time I see her, mixing and matching like she’s a walking, talking paper doll.
“Hey, Marin,” she says, tilting the plastic tub of cat-shaped Trader Joe’s cookies on the counter in my direction. “All those college apps submitted?”
“Yup,” I reply, reaching for a cookie. I took Bex’s advice and hit send over the weekend, dorkily emboldened by his pep talk. “They’re all in.”
“And you’re going to bring me a T-shirt when you get into Brown, right?”
“A T-shirt, a pennant,” I promise her. “One of those big blankets you’re supposed to use at football games, maybe.”
“See now, you’re making fun, but I’m gonna hold you to it.” Camille grins. “Go on in, honey.”
Gram’s door is propped halfway with a doorstop shaped like a Boston terrier, but I knock lightly to give her some warning before easing it all the way open.
“Hey, Gram.”
When she first moved into Sunrise back when I was in middle school, Gram still had way more good days than bad days, starting a little rose garden at the back of the building and organizing pinochle tournaments in the rec room. It’s about fifty-fifty now; she always remembers me, but according to my mom and Camille it’s better not to startle her.
“There she is!” Gram says with a smile, setting her book—a thick, slightly grisly looking mystery—down on the side table. Gram has been a member of the Book of the Month Club since the seventies, and everybody says I get my book-nerd genes from her. “Come here, you.”
I bend down to wrap my arms around her narrow shoulders, careful. Gram’s always been thin, but in the last couple of years she’s gotten downright fragile. She says it’s because she doesn’t like the food at Sunrise, so a lot of times Mom and Gracie and I will cook her old recipes—chicken parm, baked ziti, her famous meatballs—and bring them over. Still, she’s got to weigh less than one hundred pounds. I remember her swinging me up into the waves when I was a little kid at the beach on the Cape, how strong and tan her shoulders were. These days she feels like a bird in my arms.
“Come sit,” she says now, motioning to the chair across from her, a roomy upholstered holdover from her house back in Brockton. Her room at Sunrise is suite-style, with a sitting area, a bedroom alcove, and a private bathroom she’s outfitted with fancy hand soap from Williams-Sonoma and a curtain printed with arty pineapples. “Tell me about your day.”
“It was okay,” I say, sticking the soup in the mini fridge and hooking my backpack on the coatrack. “Pretty uneventful.”
“Uneventful!” Gram raises her eyebrows, which she fills in every morning with a dark brown Revlon pencil, before getting up and heading over to the tiny kitchenette at the far end of the sitting room, pulling a jug of iced tea from the mini fridge. “How evocative.”
“Sorry, sorry.” I smile guiltily. “I guess it was just kind of tough to be back in school after the weekend, that’s all.”
Gram nods. “You know, people always say that high school is the best part of your life,” she says, pouring me some without bothering to ask if I want it or not. “But that’s just baloney. You’re going to go to college, you’re going to find out just how much there is for you out in the world. You’ll see.”
“I just scheduled my interview for Brown, actually,” I tell her, taking a sip of my iced tea. “So with any luck, you’ll be right.”
“See?” Gram beams. “There you go.” She went to Brown herself—or to Pembroke, technically, which is what the women’s college was called before the university went coed in the seventies. She took me as her date to her fiftieth reunion a few years back, which is when I decided I wanted to go there myself. I still remember the look in her eyes when I told her, the way her whole face seemed to glow.
Now she reaches up with her free hand, tucks my hair behind my ears. “You’re such a good girl, my Marin,” she says. “You don’t always have to be so good though. Lord knows I wasn’t.”
“Oh no?” I ask, unable to hide a smile.
“Don’t laugh,” Gram says. “I’m serious.”
“I believe you,” I say, although actually I don’t. For all her style and sophistication, Gram is one of the most buttoned-up people I’ve ever met: she married my grandpa when she was twenty-two, then raised my mom and her brothers while working part-time as a bookkeeper for a discount mattress company and hosting Tupperware parties on the weekends. I’ve literally never seen her without lipstick; she’s been wearing the same shade of Clinique since at least the eighties. “I want to hear more about this wild and crazy past, Gram.”
“Oh,” she says, waving her hand, the clear polish on her nails catching the sunlight trickling in through the window.
“Oh,” she says again, and just like that I know her mind is wandering. The most surprising thing about Gram’s illness is how fast it can make itself obvious, like she’s walked out of the room even though she’s still sitting right here.