Time of Our Lives

by Emily Wibberley

  I’ll deal with her later. Right now, I’m determined to focus on the presentation.

  When the admissions officer opens the room to questions, my hand is the first one up. I’m called, and I project my voice to the front of the room. “What opportunities exist for double majoring?”

  I don’t need to glance over to know Matt’s enjoying this. In AP Bio last year, he bet me I couldn’t not be the first person to raise my hand in every review session. Of course, I lost. For winning, he requested a complete Lord of the Rings marathon, an obligation I grudgingly fulfilled over the summer.

  Whatever. He knows I’m eager.

  “It depends,” the officer replies. “Do you have a prospective major?”

  “I’m really interested in architectural studies,” I say. “But I’m considering combining the major with physics.”

  I want to be an architect. I want to pull buildings up from the earth, stretch skylines from the streets. Whatever I do, I want to shape the future. I want to create. I considered painting and thought about writing or drama or journalism. Finally, I found myself enthralled with architecture’s union of opposites. Art and science, mismatched pieces that decided to defy expectations and fit perfectly.

  “Definitely.” The officer nods. “The physics program is demanding. If you’re interested, though, double majoring is well within reach for the dedicated student.”

  I thank her. The questions continue, prospective students with inquiries on study abroad programs and sports, dorms and dining halls. When one guy wants to know whether the freshman have intramural baseball, I glance at Matt, knowing it’s something he would be interested in.

  Except he’s not listening. He’s looking at his phone. Craning my neck, I find he’s exchanging rapid-fire texts with Nathan Fletcher, who I’ve hung out with enough times to know is probably playing video games with Vincent Zhong and the Klarov brothers in his basement back in Springfield. I frown, nudging Matt’s knee, and whisper, “Hey, you might want to listen to this.”

  He looks up, focusing halfheartedly on the discussion. I wait for the moment curiosity kicks into his eyes, but it doesn’t happen. His gaze quickly returns to his phone. Frustrated, I watch a new message from Nathan pop up on the screen.

  After a couple more questions, the presentation ends, and everyone shuffles to their feet. Everyone but one boy three rows from the back. He remains in his chair, writing in a paperback book, while the rest of us head for the doors. His red hair stands out in the room, and when I pass him, he glances up for a heartbeat and his eyes meet mine. They’re startlingly blue, set in narrow, freckled features. It’s a face seemingly sculpted in its precision, with high cheekbones and a serious, contemplative mouth.

  I’m the one to break our eye contact, walking on with the crowd.

  The admissions officer divides the room in two for the campus tour. Because we’re on different sides, the boy and I don’t end up in the same group. Finally, in the bustle of everyone finding their tour guide, he closes his book and joins the others.

  He obviously hadn’t even noticed the information session ending, and the flush I felt when Matt texted through the presentation returns to my cheeks. This guy is completely checked out, finding whatever is in his book more important than the information he’ll use to make the decision on which his future hinges.

  I bet I know what he’s thinking. Because I bet it’s no different from the perception of college I’ve watched form for countless classmates. There’s an interchangeability to the college experience for them, the impression they’ll be content with whatever universities check a standard series of boxes. Football, parties, degree. They consider college nothing but doing what they’ve been doing, being who they’ve been.

  They’d rather read, or text people back home, than look at what’s ahead.

  I walk out onto the tour, carrying my coffee-scented cardigan, and put the boy from my thoughts.

  Juniper

  THE T RUMBLES toward Park Street. The view of the river explodes through the glass of the windows when we emerge from the tunnel, the ice reflecting the oil-paint oranges and pinks of the sunset.

  It’s nearly five. I’m packed between students with headphones and university sweatshirts and moms corralling children on the crowded train. Matt and I grabbed sandwiches when the BU tour ended around noon. After, I changed my shirt and took the T into Cambridge on my own for the Harvard tour I had scheduled for three. I’d planned to tour both schools today knowing I could cover each in a couple of hours.

  The Harvard tour was breathtaking—the wrought-iron gates and brick buildings, the new dusting of snow on the courtyard where poets and presidents walked, the towering library. It felt intimidating, though, even unfriendly, if inspiring. I’d pitched the idea of touring Harvard to Matt weeks ago, but he wasn’t interested. Over our sandwiches today, I tried again on the off chance he’d changed his mind. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t. We made plans to meet in the North End when I was done.

  While I’m changing trains in the Park Street station, I find myself imagining what Matt’s doing now. I know with incontrovertible certainty he napped in the hotel room. Every chance the boy gets, he dozes. Traverson family trait, he told me once, which is a bullshit excuse. I’d guess when he woke up, he wandered to the closest coffee shop to grab a matcha because coffee is “gross” to him. It’s nice just thinking about it—he’s probably befriended half the baristas by now. There’s a tender pride to envisioning the person you love when you’re not there, being funny with friends, being charming with classmates, having interests and inspirations. It’s different from imagining yourself with them, and differently wonderful.

  The river of my thoughts reverses course, and I think back to the day he and I began. The hallways of Springfield High were empty, everyone having headed to the cafeteria for lunch. I had doubled back to grab the heavy AP US History textbook from my locker, and I was on my way to rejoin my friends when Matt walked past me.

  He was wearing his white Adidas, and his jeans bore grass stains, probably because he’d been sitting in the courtyard with his friends in the mild September weather, no longer summer and not quite fall, instead of in the cafeteria. I remember his confident stride—which hasn’t changed—and how he’d recently cut his hair.

  Of course, I blushed.

  This was Matt Traverson. Baseball co-captain, big man on campus—whatever big means in our class of one hundred—and the crush of one Juniper Ramírez. Wholly and completely. One year of sitting next to him in sophomore English, trading eye rolls and glances behind Mr. Ward’s back, and I was done for.

  He walked past, and I fought down the pink in my face, knowing my friends would call me on my rosy cheeks and discern exactly who’d caused them.

  I had nearly succeeded when I heard my name called behind me.

  “Hey, Juniper.”

  I found Matt grinning unevenly and running a hand through that neat blond hair, his bicep the stuff of dreams. I focused on the Celtics logo on his shirt, and this time I failed to keep the blush from my face.

  “Hey, Matt,” I said with a nonchalance I thanked god I’d practiced in the mirror. “How’s it going?”

  He jogged up to me, energy in his every movement. Without warning, he ducked down to retie his undone shoelace. When he stood back up, his eyes fixed on mine. “So Tory told me you have a crush on me,” he said. His voice betrayed nothing, neither flirtatiousness nor disinterested cruelty.

  It was brutal. He knew exactly what he was doing.

  In the moment, I figured he’d reduced my crush to hallway chatter because it was trivial to him. Probably just an everyday occurrence. The blood drained from my face, and I vowed to reap revenge on my best friend—ex-best friend—for her tactlessness.

  It felt like a bad dream, one I wanted to escape. “Don’t let it go to your head,” I said, hurried and defensive.

  I
turned to leave, but his hand found my shoulder. Grudgingly, I waited.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Matt said fumblingly, and I was struck by the oddity of seeing him off guard. “I just—it’s true then? You do like me?”

  The hesitant inquisitiveness in his voice eroded my defensiveness, and hope fluttered open in my chest. It was funny, I thought then, how a whole year of yearning and imagining could narrow down to a single moment that had come out of nowhere. I leaned on the locker behind me, looking up at him through my lashes. “I do,” I replied, feeling bold. “What do you think of me?”

  His eyes widened. I could have sworn I saw my flush mirrored in his cheeks. I took his hand, pulling him closer. He swallowed.

  “I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And I have a feeling you’re smarter than everyone in this school. Teachers included.”

  I smiled the kind of smile lit with a thousand smiles saved up for right then. When Matt returned it, I stepped in closer, my chest meeting his. “Let me get this straight,” I said softly. “I’m smart, I’m beautiful, you know I like you. Why haven’t you kissed me yet?”

  He laughed, lowering his mouth near mine, closing the distance between our lips.

  The crazy thing isn’t how wonderful the kiss felt, the blinding rush of heat racing the highways of my heart. The crazy thing is how that’s the way every kiss has felt from then until now. For fleeting instants, they erase complicated choices, and inescapable uncertainties.

  The train hurtles into Haymarket Square. I follow the crowd onto the platform, then up the escalator into the fading daylight. Pulling on my scarf in the cold, I take in the street corner. The taxis in front of slush-piled gutters, the pubs with EST. 1826 and A.D. 1795 signs over the doors. I’m walking toward the North End when I feel my phone ringing through my coat.

  I pull the phone from my pocket. It’s my dad. With gloved fingers, I clumsily pick up and press it to my ear. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Found your dream college yet?”

  It’s exactly what my dad would say. Instead of the introductory pleasantries of conversation, he loves just jumping to the point. It’s probably—no, definitely—where I got my own directness. I hear the clatter of kitchen prep over the phone. He’s getting ready to open the restaurant for dinner, chopping vegetables and frying tortilla chips.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I did BU and Harvard. They were both great, but Boston is a bit close to home.”

  “Yeah,” he says thoughtfully. “Big city, though.”

  Dad and I both love big cities. He went to college in New York City, and I could fill books with the stories he’s told of getting ramen with friends past midnight, living with five roommates in a loft meant for three, his yearlong quest to determine the greatest pizza in the city. The way he describes them, cities exist in perpetual reinvention, sparked by constantly changing populations of constantly changing people. They’re places where the strangers you meet on the street could derail your life in wonderful, unforgettable ways.

  “Boston is great,” I reply. “I’m going to the North End right now to meet Matt before we drive to Providence.”

  “The North End,” he repeats, excitement jumping into his voice. “Oh man. You can’t come home without grabbing cannoli from Mike’s Pastry.”

  “Twist my arm, why don’t you?”

  He laughs over the clang of pans in the kitchen. “How were the hotel rooms?”

  “The rooms were good.” I emphasize the plural, which I know my dad detects, because he chuckles.

  “Uh-huh,” he says. “You know, I was Matt’s age once.” I permit myself a small laugh, understanding this is one of those things we won’t be discussing with Mom and Tía. “I trust you to be responsible, Juni,” he continues, “and to never, ever tell your sisters about this.”

  I laugh. “Promise,” I say resolutely. I know full well that I, the oldest daughter, provide precedent for my siblings. If Marisa knew I shared a hotel room with my boyfriend, she would be clamoring for the exact same within weeks. It’s part of why the idea of leaving home for college is contentious with Tía. If I do, every one of my siblings can, and probably will.

  “I have to finish prepping,” Dad says. “Enjoy the city.”

  “I will,” I say.

  I hang up, wondering if I caught wistfulness in my dad’s voice. He’d probably be living in Boston or New York if he could. We both know why he isn’t. We moved to Springfield because of Abuela’s heart trouble. We stayed because she died. The guilt kept my parents rooted to the restaurant, to Springfield, to the house of fraught memories and family history.

  But I won’t spend my college tour ruminating on old wounds. I lift my head and keep walking, fixing my eyes forward.

  Fitz

  ENTERING MIKE’S PASTRY, I breathe in the sweet smells of dough and sugar. Everything is exactly the way I remember. The brown tile floors, the glass display cases on three walls of the room, the warm brilliance of the overhead lights. Behind the counters, women in black uniforms, universally gruff and wordless, point to customers for their orders. They pull white string from overhead spindles and deftly wrap cardboard boxes of every kind of cannoli imaginable. The place is packed, the crowd incessantly moving up to the counters and exiting with white-and-blue packages.

  I love Mike’s Pastry. When I was in elementary school and my parents were still together, my dad would drive Lewis and me into Boston for pretty much the greatest day a ten-year-old could imagine. We would catch the Sox in Fenway or visit the New England Aquarium, then head to the North End for Italian and finally, Mike’s for dessert.

  I text my dad a photo, knowing he probably won’t respond for a couple of hours. He went into academia like my mom—archaeology, Grecian art and history in particular—and now he’s his university’s department chair. He has office hours for undergrads in the evenings. I’ve dropped in on them once or twice in my life, giving him the chance to recite Euripides and Sophocles to me, eyes bright behind his glasses. While I don’t know what I want to study in college, I know it’s not Grecian art or history. Despite the ancient pottery shards on my dad’s shelves and his trips with students to Athens or Crete—not to mention his irrepressible passion describing some statute or discovery—I never found the enthusiasm for the subject he did.

  I don’t exactly know what pulled my parents apart. I do know the change was not abrupt or unexpected. I had felt continents shifting under my feet for years, and then one day the marriage was over. I felt them shift again when my mom told us her test results, and again when Lewis left home. I feel them shifting now, shaking the foundations of the life I know. I just want the ground under me to settle.

  Lewis doesn’t mind the shifting, doesn’t reach for familiarity the way I do. Familiarity that today takes the form of cannoli dusted with powdered sugar, ricotta spilling out the ends. When I extended the invitation to Lewis to head uptown with me on the Green Line and revisit Mike’s, he declined, his flippancy betraying no cognizance of the childhood trips we would take with Dad. Instead, he suggested I join him for drinks with three friends whose names I obviously didn’t know, but who Lewis rattled off like I did. He wanted to hang out with Bruce, Trevor, and Amir before leaving for the week with me. I said no.

  I don’t care, honestly. I’m content to visit Mike’s completely on my own. It’s probably better this way, because the week to come will be nearly nonstop time with my brother. For now, cannoli and solitude will be the panacea for the frustration of this trip.

  I join one of the lines in front of the counters, although “lines” suggests an orderliness lacking here. While nobody is pushing or shoving, I find myself jostled in the gradually moving pilgrimage to the registers.

  Eventually, I notice a girl next to me craning her neck, rising onto her toes to look over the heads of the crowd, checking her place in line a little obnoxiously. Wobblin
g, she tilts in my direction, her shoulder bumping mine. She glances toward me, and our eyes connect.

  Which is when I recognize her.

  Juniper, the girl from this morning. She’s holding her parka, and I notice she’s not wearing the coffee-stained cardigan from earlier. I search the shop for signs of the Hemsworth boyfriend, but he’s not here. Maybe they broke up, and she’s here to find someone to help nurse her heartbreak. I’m reaching for some small talk when she speaks.

  “You were in the BU information session today.”

  “I—yeah,” I stammer, startled she remembers me.

  “You weren’t interested, though.” It’s a statement spoken like a question. Her eyes burn into me, holding the intensity I remember from this morning in front of the dorm. It’s intimidating when that intensity is directed at me, even if she looks curious, not accusatory.

  “What makes you say I wasn’t interested?” I ask, puzzled I’m even having a conversation with this girl, and that this is the topic.

  “I saw you reading. You didn’t even know when the presentation ended,” she replies, undaunted. Her hair remains in the uncompromising ponytail it was during the tour, and I’m beginning to learn there’s no halfway with this girl.

  “You were watching me read?” I say, surprising myself with temerity.

  For the first time I catch the force in Juniper’s eyes flicker. “I wasn’t watching you, watching you,” she explains. “You just stood out because you weren’t listening to the presentation,” she continues, recovering quickly.

  We’ve nearly reached the registers, and I wonder if she’s going to question me through the entire ordering process. I know the women behind the counter don’t have a profusion of patience.