I make the decision on impulse, even though I have nowhere else to stay, even though campus will be closed over the holiday. “No. I’m going home with a friend.”
“Oh? Which friend?”
“You don’t know her.” I hook my ankles around the legs of my desk chair. “But you’re always welcome to come and visit next semester. If you want.”
She doesn’t want.
A long pause drags out behind my words. My mother would love to prove me wrong, but even Cecelia Morrow can’t deny her nature. “Maybe…I’ll be quite busy in the spring. I’ll have to check my calendar.”
“You do that.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? You sound a little…” She doesn’t seem able to find the word. My mother has never been much of a poet. “Have you been taking your medication?”
“I told you, I’m fine. I have to go, actually. I’m meeting my friend to work on our final project.”
“Is this the same friend you’re visiting for break?”
“Yes. Same friend. She’s right here; I have to go. I’ll talk to you later. Tell Dr. Ortega to stop worrying about me.”
I hang up before my mother can say anything else or demand to speak to the imaginary and impatient friend.
I drop my phone behind my bed and sink lower in my desk chair, turning my face toward the ceiling. I’m still like that, eyes half-shut, when someone knocks at my door.
It’s Kajal. “There’s a visitor downstairs for you,” she says. I recognize the dubious edge to her tone and frown.
“Who?”
“Some little third-year girl. She kept asking if Ellis was here, too.”
Hannah Stratford.
“Did you tell her I was gone?”
Kajal’s mouth twists into something that is almost but not quite a smile. “I told her you’d be right down.”
I sigh and follow Kajal down the stairs to the entryway, where Hannah Stratford stands in the foyer, bowed under the weight of a massive brown box.
“Hey!” she says, breathless and staggering with the effort of keeping herself from tipping over. “I was just in the mail room. This came for you!”
A dark, mean part of me wants to keep watching her struggle, but I shove it away. I’m not that person. I’ve tried so hard not to be that person. So I move forward to take one end of the box, and when it slumps lower in Hannah’s arms, it exposes her flushed, damp face grinning over the edge of the cardboard.
“You didn’t have to bring it here,” I tell her. “They would have called.”
And now I’m wondering why Hannah was looking at the names on packages in the first place.
“I know, but it’s been forever since I’ve seen you, so…”
Hannah nudges the box against my chest, and I step back, letting her guide us up the stairs. We have to pause on the landing for Hannah to catch her breath; I position myself in front of the corridor, in case Ellis makes the mistake of emerging from her room while Hannah is still present.
Eventually we manage to lug the box to the third floor and shove it onto my bed. Hannah’s shoulders heave. I’m perspiring a little myself.
“What’s in it?” Hannah asks.
I eye the box, which is plastered with fragile stickers and has my own home address scrawled in one corner. “It’s everything I didn’t bring with me when I came back to school.” My mother had said she’d send it at the start of the semester. I’d almost forgotten.
“Oh! Cool! You should open it.”
I look at her, long enough that anyone else would have gotten the message. But Hannah Stratford stays precisely where she is, beaming at me patiently with her hands clasped in front of her.
I wonder if I ever looked like that. I wonder if I ever smiled so easily.
I dig out a knife from my desk drawer and slice open the tape, unfolding the cardboard flaps to expose the box’s contents. Hannah watches on, fascinated, as I sift through all the artifacts of a life lived so long ago it feels like it happened to someone else. There’s a handheld video-game system—that can go in the trash, obviously—some art prints I bought two years ago in Granada, hiking books filled with glossy photos of trails in Albania and Greece and Turkey from trips me and Alex will never take. It’s a box of useless things.
Hannah dives in the moment I withdraw, pulling out my tennis racquet. “I didn’t know you played,” she says, delighted. “We should go down to the courts sometime.”