“It was a long time ago. You were just a child. A baby, really.”
A baby?
“I don’t understand,” Nell said. “You’re saying . . . you’re saying that you were old friends with my father?”
Ramona shook her head. “Not just with your father. With your mother, too.”
Romi
There were so many secrets between the seven of us, but at the time, none of us knew that. We had no idea how much was hidden. We never could have guessed what was to come.
We all met during undergrad, at the University of Wisconsin. Well, not all of us. Your mother and Wally had known each other since childhood. They were inseparable—more like siblings than friends. They’d applied to all the same schools and chosen Wisconsin together. They were the core of our group, the original two who brought everyone else in, and the most brilliant of all of us. The start, and the end, of everything.
I was the first one they found.
Most freshmen had already been on campus at the University of Wisconsin for a week, preparing for the start of the semester, but I’d been helping take care of my grandmother, who was in the late stages of cancer, and didn’t leave until the day before classes started. The cheapest flight I could get from Los Angeles landed in Milwaukee, and I’d had to huddle with my suitcases for an hour and a half on an intercity bus with a broken window, shivering as the frigid breeze streamed in off the highway. I dumped my things at dormitory reception and ran, still shivering, to the freshman welcome mixer in the science building, where the geography department was housed.
The door banged as I pushed it open, and the room went quiet as everyone turned to me. I stared back at the sea of faces peeking out from beneath wool hats and thick down jackets, and shifted awkwardly in my thin windbreaker.
“Hi,” I managed to mumble. “I’m Ramona Wu.”
“Everyone, let’s welcome Fiona Chu!” a voice proclaimed, having misheard my mumbling, and a junior professor began to clap.
“Ramona,” I said, but I was drowned out by the applause. Mercifully, the room went back to ignoring me, swelling with laughs and chatter. I squeezed through the crowd toward the snack table, hoping for something warm to drink.
“Hot chocolate? Tea? Anything?” I asked desperately, and the overworked sophomore shook his head. The main door kept opening as more people came or left, each time throwing in another gust of arctic air that chilled me to my bones.
The whole plan seemed more foolish by the minute. My parents had wanted me to go to school in California, where I would be closer, but I’d insisted on Wisconsin, on this program. My great-grandfather had drawn tactical maps for the army in World War II, and his work had saved his fellow soldiers many times over. Before he died, he showed me the few he’d saved—these old, yellowing, tissue-thin things. There were so many stories bound up in them, so many lives. To me, nothing had sounded more thrilling than to follow in his footsteps. And it had taken so many arguments with my parents, and finally the solemn support of my ailing grandmother, to convince them to let me, that by the time I finally got to Wisconsin, I’d built the whole thing up to be impossibly perfect. In my head, it would not have been so bitterly cold, and I would not have been so sheltered and innocent, and would have known exactly what to do and say.
There was no way it could have lived up to the dream.
I was about to give up and go back to my dorm room—where I could pretend to be asleep before my new roommate came back, pushing off reality until the next morning—when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned to see a short girl with a curly brown ponytail smiling at me, and a tall, thin boy with pale, grayish eyes and hair that was somewhere between blond and brown, so indecisive it almost seemed gray as well, behind her.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I started to say so, making excuses, but as we shook hands, she gasped at how cold mine was.