Begin Again

To be clear, I don’t believe in fairy tales. After the past eighteen years of existing, I’d have to be pretty silly to put any stock in those. But I do believe in destiny. Specifically, in our power over it.

Which is why, against all odds, I’m here—standing just outside my dream school as one of the record few mid-freshman-year transfers that Blue Ridge State has ever had. I kept it under wraps over winter break since I was scrambling to figure out the financials of it, but as of today, everything’s official. For once, everything is falling into place.Content property of NôvelDra/ma.Org.

I squeeze the “A” charm on my mom’s old necklace, slide it back under my coat, and knock three times on the door of the off-campus apartment in front of me.

“Who’s there?” someone calls from inside.

“Um.” I’ve mentally rehearsed this moment so many times this morning that my brain can’t shake the expectation of Connor swinging the door open, his amber eyes wide and so happy to see me he sweeps me off my Keds. Instead I lean in and say to the stranger, “It’s Andie? I’m Connor’s . . .”

Girlfriend, I’m going to say. Which I am, even if we’ve barely seen each other since August, when he moved two hours from home to study here, and I stuck around at the local community college.

A boy opens the door a crack, squinting at me. “Uh, I only just moved in. But I don’t know any Connors.”

“I mean Whit,” I correct myself. Connor’s teammates have always called him by his last name, to the point where I’m pretty sure they don’t remember he has a first one to begin with. Even his Instagram bio just says “Whit” now.

“No Whits, either.”

“Oh.” I step back to check the address. It looks like the same one I’ve been sending care packages to every month, but maybe in all the pandemonium of shoving my life into two suitcases and a backpack, I got the numbers jumbled.

I pull my phone out of my pocket to call Connor. “Sorry to bother—” The door shuts in my face. “You,” I mumble, taking a step back.

I press the phone to my ear, but it just rings until it hits Connor’s voicemail. “Snickerdoodle,” I cuss, an admittedly weird habit I’ve picked up from Gammy Nell, who refuses to use actual swear words and makes a big show of flinching when anyone does within ten feet of her.

I was hoping to catch Connor before the kickoff event for the school’s annual ribbon hunt, a tradition for freshmen I’ve only been dreaming about for—well, pretty much my entire human existence. According to the livestream I caught of the school’s underground radio show The Knights’ Watch, it’ll start on the quad at ten o’clock. But today’s already going to be stacked with a quick move-in and new classes and trying to find a decent work-study job as it is, so maybe catching up with Connor later is for the best. It’s not like we’re short on time, now that we’re going to the same school again.

I walk back to the car where my grandmas are waiting for me, flashing what I used to call my syndicated-talk-show smile, the one so practiced and reflexive that it’s almost stopped feeling fake.

“I forgot,” I say as I open the car door. “He’s at an early soccer practice.”

One of Grandma Maeve’s perfectly penciled eyebrows pokes out from behind her hot pink sunglasses. “Is he now?” she asks, turning her key in the ignition.

We both know I’m lying for Gammy Nell’s sake, so I press my lips back at her in the rearview mirror in acknowledgment that I’ve been busted. Better that than letting Gammy Nell go on another one of her doomsday spirals—she can take “Connor’s not picking up his phone” to “Connor’s been kidnapped by a cult that’s going to harvest his organs” in two seconds flat.

“Off to Cardinal, then?” Grandma Maeve asks, referring to the dorm I’ve been assigned.

Gammy Nell pouts, turning back to look at me with the same big blue puppy dog eyes she gave my dad, and my dad gave me. “I wish you’d let us come up.”

I lean forward from the back seat. “I don’t mind if you want to—”

Grandma Maeve waves me off. “And ruin your street cred with two bickering old ladies before you can so much as bat your eye at one co-ed?”

“I have a boyfriend,” I say patiently.

This earns me a scoff. Grandma Maeve isn’t Connor’s biggest fan at the moment, since he talked about taking a break last semester when the distance got to be too rough. But in his defense, Blue Ridge State is known for putting students through the wringer. I’m sure it’s why I didn’t get in when I applied out of high school—none of my otherwise shiny academic and community feats could make up for the string of Cs I got sophomore year, which was more than enough of a reason to put me in the “reject” pile at the most competitive school in the state.

“And I don’t bicker,” says Gammy Nell primly.

Grandma Maeve pats her on the shoulder with the hand that isn’t trained on the wheel. “Sure you don’t, Nellie.”

The thing about Grandma Maeve and Gammy Nell is that they have precisely two interests in common: a years-long, borderline-concerning obsession with Ryan Reynolds, and me. Other than that they might as well be night and day. Grandma Maeve is all sass and flashy accessories and telling you how it is; Gammy Nell is all sweetness and cotton cardigans and not telling you how it is, but passive-aggressively letting you know she doesn’t like it. The only reason they haven’t blown our house in Little Fells sky-high is that seven years ago, when my mom died, they both decided to move in with my dad to help raise me.

Well, “help” might be a generous word for it. With Gammy Nell long since widowed and Grandma Maeve divorced multiple times over, they did their fair share of it, then pretty much took over after my dad landed a job two hours away and I stayed put to finish high school. It wasn’t long before the two of them were so well-known in our neighborhood that the neighbors practically camped out on our porch, hoping to hear about another misadventure behind one of Grandma Maeve’s tattoos or score some of Gammy Nell’s famous chocolate cherry jam.

There’s this pang then that I’ve been doing a pretty decent job of ignoring for the past few weeks, ever since I got my transfer acceptance letter. It’s been a weird childhood, but a mostly good one. They’ll only be a two-hour drive away, but it still feels like a whole lot more.

We roll up to the entrance of Cardinal and my heart skips a beat. I’m trying to think of something to say as we all get out of the car, something to reassure both them and myself, but then Gammy Nell nudges Grandma Maeve and says, “You forgot.”

Grandma Maeve scowls. “Forgot what?”

“I knew you would. The rib—”

“Oh, you’re right. Shit.”

Cue the trademark Gammy Nell flinch.

“Hold up, chicken,” says Grandma Maeve, pulling something out from the glove compartment.

She presses a stack of three ribbons into my hand, one red, one yellow, and one blue, all of them stamped with a faded version of the Blue Ridge State logo of a knight. She waits to give me the fourth ribbon last—a white one marked with my mom’s signature “A” in permanent ink.

My throat goes tight. I haven’t seen these since my dad put them in storage; I wasn’t even sure we still had them.

“I dug them out of your mom’s old things,” she says. “She’d have wanted you to have them.”

Neither of us likes to talk about my mom in front of other people. After our tiny town of Little Fells watched her grow her local radio show into a statewide syndicated one, she was so universally loved as the “hometown spitfire” that everyone jumps at the chance to share memories of her. But there’s always been this private, almost sacred grief between me and Grandma Maeve and my dad, in the rare moments he acknowledges it with us.

So I’m not surprised when Grandma Maeve immediately changes gears by pressing a bag full of quarters into my hand for the laundromat. A beat later Gammy Nell yanks out an entire grocery store aisle’s worth of snack cakes and candy she’s stuffed into a tote bag and hands them to me, nearly spilling out individually wrapped Ring Dings and Tastykakes onto the sidewalk.

“For all your new friends,” she says excitedly.

I grin back, the seams of my coat itching at the anticipation. The minute I had that acceptance letter in hand I promised myself that this wouldn’t just be an academic fresh start, but a fresh start for making new friends, too—something I don’t have a lot of experience with, growing up in a small town full of people I’ve known my whole life. Lightly bribing the dorm with snack cakes seems like a good place to start.

They hug me in turn, Grandma Maeve with that deep, sharp squeeze like she’s jolting my bones with love, then Gammy Nell all soft and full and smelling like the apples she put in the air fryer this morning. I swallow back the extremely unhelpful balloon of fear in my stomach.

“Call us when you’re settled,” says Grandma Maeve as they get back into the car.

“And every day!” Gammy Nell demands.

Then Grandma Maeve blows me a kiss and steps on the gas as Gammy Nell squawks in protest, trying to take my picture through the open window in vain. I wave as they turn the corner, smile still fully intact, then open my suitcase to its hidden pocket and press the ribbons inside, safe and out of sight.