Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Grinnell, Ellie thinks as she walks up the steps of Smith Hall for the first time, is nothing like what she’s imagined. Sure, she’d known it would be a big city, known that it would be more lively, more diverse, more vibrant than little old Squahamish, but it’s one thing to know it’ll be different, and quite another to experience how different it is. There’s wide swathes of green everywhere, framing tall red-brick buildings set with shining glass windows, and wide, flat roads free of the crunch of tyre-on-gravel that she’s grown up listening to back home.

Even just dragging her possessions up to the residential hall, she’s had to veer out of the way of five different cyclists, and she thinks of the clunky old bicycle she’d left behind in Squahamish, which had served her well all through middle and high school. A small part of her wonders if the air is different here in the city, whether it’ll feel different when it rustles through her clothes and messes up her hair.

There’s a Mandarin saying, “jing di zhi wa”, which translates to “the frog who lives in the bottom of the well”. Ellie remembers her Ba telling her the story of a frog who lived in the bottom of a small well, and had thought that was all the world contained – just a small circle of water below him, and a small circle of sky above. One day, a sea turtle came by the well, and the frog boasted to it about its home, inviting the turtle to come inside. The turtle, unable to fit in the well, had asked the frog to come out instead. When the frog stepped out of his well, he was taken aback and amazed by how vast the world outside his well was.

Coming to Iowa, Ellie thinks, makes her feel a little like a frog stepping out of her well for the first time, realising the world is a lot bigger than the small town that’s been all she’s ever known.

Her room at Smith Hall is on the top floor, the ceiling slanted to accommodate the roof, with two desks crammed at one end and two bare mattresses squished up against the window on the opposite end. It’s tiny, it’s cramped, and Ellie, unbidden, remembers her own little attic room, and a part of her relaxes at the familiar memory juxtaposed over this cold, unfamiliar room.

She breathes in, breathes out. Okay, she thinks. You’ve got this, Ellie.

Her roommate hasn’t moved in yet, so she picks the bed further from the door and sets down her bags. She’s got a ton of unpacking to do, but her hands go straight for the small pocket at the top of her backpack, where she’d carefully placed little trinkets from home. She pulls them out now, one by one, and carefully lines them up along the shelf above the desk. Her desk.

A faded photograph of her with her Ba and Ma, from when she must have been around two or three, smiling shyly with chocolate stains all over her hands. A newer photograph from high school graduation, just her and Ba grinning at the camera, a half-blurred Paul behind them attempting a photobomb (and not really succeeding; Mrs Munsky’d pressed the shutter too late). A half-dented ping pong ball, from the first time she’d tried to have ‘conversation practice’ with Paul (he’d pressed it into her hand right before she got on the train – “ball of ULTIMATE friendship!!!!” is written on it in messy ink).

She rocks back on her heels and examines the display with satisfaction, takes a photo on her phone. There are already four texts from Paul (two of which are purely emojis with no text) since the last time she’d checked her phone. have u reached?? says the most recent one, sent fifteen minutes ago.

She sends the photo to him. Settling in, she types, and almost instantly he responds with three exclamation marks, a one-hundred emoji, and another emoji of two ladies dancing; and despite herself Ellie snorts.

There’s voices coming down the hallway now, two female ones and a lower, male one. “-And this is my room, amma,” Ellie hears. “The school assigns us a roommate- Oh!”

There’s an Indian girl standing in the doorway in jeans and a faded My Chemical Romance t-shirt, two adults who Ellie assumes are her parents behind her each wheeling a massive suitcase.

“Hi!” says the girl. Her smile is bright, almost as though there’s a miniature sun inside of her, yearning to burst out. “You must be my roommate.”

“Um,” says Ellie, caught off-guard. “I’m Ellie Chu. I, uh, hope you don’t mind that I started setting up.”

“Oh, not at all! I’m Priya, it’s so good to meet you! I hope we can be good friends.” All of this is said at top speed, as the girl takes over both the suitcases and turns to her parents, still talking: “See, appa, amma, my roommate’s here already, I’ll be okay setting up by myself.”

The older woman, wrapped in a jewel-toned length of silk that Ellie’s pretty sure is called a sari, looks worried, but the man nods and pats her arm. “Make sure to call-”

“-Every Friday, yes, loveyoubye!” says Priya, nonchalantly reaching for the door as her parents give her one last hug and leave. The moment the door closes, Ellie sees Priya’s shoulders relax a little.

“Sorry about that,” she says wryly, turning back to Ellie. “My parents can be a little, uh, over-involved. I’m not from here, so they’re constantly worrying about me being here all by myself, but I’m a big girl, you know? I’d like to think I can take care of myself.”

Ellie’s been taking care of herself since she was thirteen, but she understands the feeling of wanting to just get out and do something different, so she nods and smiles. There’s an easy, warm energy to Priya, and even though Ellie’s privately always thought of herself as not warming up easily to people she finds herself relaxing even as Priya begins to chatter on, like a flower turning to the sun.

Perhaps, she thinks, college life won’t be so bad, after all.

~

In those romantic-comedy movies where the characters are in college, the trope always seems to be that one can make it through college as long as they have an ample supply of cup ramen. But, Ellie thinks, a couple of months into the first semester of college, those movies were clearly written by white people who hadn't encountered the wonders of an Asian supermarket.

If anyone were to ask Ellie, she’d set them straight: one can make it through college as long as they have soy sauce and sesame oil. So of course, that’s the first thing Ellie decides her new dorm room needs.

As it turns out, Google Maps says that the closest Asian supermarket to Smith Hall is at least half an hour away, but that first weekend in dorm, she and Priya are drowning in introductory coursework and homesickness, and their brains are endlessly searching for some sort of escape. Looking across the room at each other, they come to a single, ill-advised idea, one born of two broke students with neither a car nor a driving licence: they’re going to bike to the Asian supermarket and make themselves comfort food.

It’s good weather, thankfully, end of summer turning to late fall, but though the cycle to the supermarket is enjoyable, the two of them soon discover that trying to cycle back while carrying enough soy sauce, sesame oil, garam masala and cumin powder to feed a large army is a trial and a half.

“You’re crazy,” says a senior they run into in the stairway back at Smith Hall, each of them panting over a backpack stuffed full of the precious, precious glass bottles. She’s got black hair cropped short, the ends dyed pink, and her tone is half-admiring, half-disbelieving.

“Well, we’re not going to make that cycle every week, so we needed to stock up,” Ellie defends breathlessly – her lungs, while used to long cycles, are not used to cycling with weights on her back. She’s almost starting to think this was a terrible idea, the guilt of her half-written homework sitting on her desk rising up, but then her mind conjures up the thought of plain noodles with minced pork tossed in soy sauce, and the guilt fades.

The senior snorts.

“Looks like you bought enough for two years at Grinnell, that’s what you did,” she says, dryly. “Look. I’ve got a car. It’s banged up and the air conditioning’s kind of shitty, but you can fit two coolers in the trunk and all your shopping in the back seat. I go to the Asian supermarket twice a month – I’ve got enough space for two crazy freshmen if they want to buy groceries too.”

Ellie learns the senior’s name is Rebecca Yamamura, third-year physics major, and she stays in a double room on the second floor. Rebecca’s effortlessly cool and confident in herself in a way Ellie wonders if she’ll ever manage, fitting in seamlessly with the other students at Grinnell and also entirely at ease with her Asian identity. Maybe, Ellie thinks, I’ll be like that someday.

Rebecca teaches them how to make inarizushi one weekend, patiently waiting for the sputtering rice-cooker in Smith Hall’s only kitchen to cook the sushi rice that they’d combed the shelves of the supermarket for, while Ellie helps to drain the abura-age tofu pouches which had been simmering in a mixture of soy sauce and miso paste.

“It’s nice to make food with others,” Ellie admits, quietly. “I used to make dumplings at home with my dad all the time. We wouldn’t say anything to each other, but there was a certain comfort in creating something together.”

“Food brings people together,” says Priya, with a smile, absently playing with a half-empty bottle of sesame seeds Rebecca had dug out from the depths of her dorm room, one eye on the rice-cooker. “One day I’ll find a store that sells paneer cheese, and I’ll teach you guys how to make chapatti and palak paneer like my amma does.”

Ellie, having already heard Priya wax poetic about her amma’s palak paneer – a spinach puree served with firm chunks of fresh cheese – three to four times at this point, says nothing, though the warmth in Priya’s voice makes her smile.

They’re interrupted by the beeping of the rice-cooker, and the next five minutes are spent frantically microwaving the sushi vinegar they’d forgotten to heat up, mixing it with sugar and salt, and stirring it through the rice before it cools. They end up with bits of rice stuck all over their fingers and clothes as Rebecca tries valiantly to teach them how to stuff the abura-age pockets full of rice, but at the end of it all they manage to produce a plate full of glossy brown inarizushi stuffed full of rice and topped with sesame seeds.

It’s Ellie’s first time eating sushi that isn't the cheap packaged kind from the refrigerated section of the Asian supermarket, and the first bite of rice warms her from her belly down to her toes, makes her almost feel like she’s eating handmade dumplings in front of the TV with her Ba.

She doesn’t realise she’s closed her eyes in satisfaction until she opens them again to see Rebecca smiling at her knowingly.

“It feels like home,” says Ellie, because home might be shaky power connections and lu rou fan and old black-and-white movies, but home is also two or three pairs of hands quietly working to make food together side-by-side at the same kitchen counter, and Rebecca laughs.

“Yes,” she says. “I know.”

~

“You’re not coming back for summer break?”

Paul’s voice is tinny through her laptop speakers, but Ellie can still hear the disappointment, see the sad puppy eyes he’s giving through the 240p video that she’s got on her screen courtesy of spotty dorm wifi. It’s snowing today, an early December morning, and Priya’s already rolled out of bed in three layers of sweaters to go for a morning lecture, so Ellie’s alone in the room.

“I don’t know for sure,” she says. “It’s still early. But look, I found a little bookstore just down the street that’s been looking for part-time hires through the summer, and they pay pretty decently. And I hear there are always students who live in the apartments in town who want someone to plant-sit for them while they’re home for summer break, and they let you stay in their house for free in exchange. It’s an option, you know?”

Paul wilts further. “I guess I get it,” he says. “Gonna be real lonely without you here, though.”

Despite herself, Ellie smiles. “I see you on Skype every week, you sap. Come on, tell me what you and Ba made this week.”

As with any mention of cooking or Edwin Chu, this immediately perks Paul up. “This week we made beef noodle soup! Mr Chu said the recipe was originally for lamb soup, but nowhere in Squahamish sells lamb, so apparently he’s been making it with beef ever since you guys came out here. We made like a ton of soup and froze it all, so we’ll be having soup for another two months, I think. I brought some back home and there was still enough to entirely fill out your freezer.”

“Did your mom like it?”

Paul shrugs. “It’s free food.”

“…Good point.”

“Mr Chu taught me to make noodles, too,” Paul continues, gesturing animatedly. “Making noodles is real fun, Ellie. You just pull them real long and smack them on the table, and they stretch forever.”

Ellie remembers childhood, learning to pull noodles from her Ma, always breaking the dough too early and ending up with thick sausages of dough instead of the thin, flat noodles that her Ma could create. “Not bad,” she says. “You’re already better at noodle-making than me, if you managed to create a noodle.”

Paul looks inordinately pleased with himself, like ‘Beat Ellie Chu at Noodle-Making’ was a Girl Guides patch and he’d just earned one. “I wonder if beef noodle soup sausage-”

“Paul. No.”

“Do you know how many spices go into the soup, Ellie? Put it into sausage, and boom, flavourtown!”

Ellie groans. (She doesn’t know why she still tries.) “Just,” she says, resignedly, “don’t call it beef noodle soup sausage. It’s too much of a mouthful.”

“But isn’t that what I want, for people to take mouthfuls of it-”

“It’s too long of a name, nobody’s going to take mouthfuls of something which name they can’t remember,” she says, but she’s grinning. It’s strange, she thinks. There’s always been so little in common between her and Paul, but somehow they’ve clicked in a way that Ellie has thus far been unable to replicate at Grinnell. Sure, Priya is a sweetheart (if a little bit of a drama queen), and Rebecca their Cool Mom Friend, but there’s nothing like coming back on a weekend to Paul impatiently waiting on Skype, feeling her shoulders relax as he starts talking to her about his weekly sausage-related exploits.

(There’s someone else that Ellie once felt like could just get her, someone with whom talking was always easy. She’s slightly ashamed to admit that she’s thought of Aster Flores a lot in these first few months in college, always in the wee hours of the morning when she’s labouring over an essay, or when she reads a line in a coursebook that resonates with her, and she finds herself wondering what Aster might think. But she remembers hurt brown eyes in a crowded church, the sound of a slap fresh in the air, the promise of two girls still struggling to find themselves. She does not reach for her GhostMessenger.)

“Mum’s invited your dad over for Christmas,” says Paul suddenly, changing the topic and startling Ellie out of her reverie. “Said it would be lonely if he was by himself, and that it’s the least she could do.”

“We’ve never really celebrated Christmas,” Ellie replies, shrugging. “The Lunar New Year to us was always the big holiday of the year.”

“Mr Chu says you get money from adults on the Lunar New Year,” says Paul. “That’s real dope. Why can’t Christmas be like that? Free money!”

Ellie laughs; she’ll bet anything that her Ba has already made plans to give Paul a red packet of his own this coming Lunar New Year. His initially awkward relationship with her first proper friend seems to have morphed into something more comfortable in her absence, and Ellie reckons (from what she sees during the fortnightly Chu family Skypes with Paul and her Ba) that Paul’s effectively been adopted as the second child of the Chu family, in all but name.

Indeed, two months later as winter stands poised to turn into spring, Ellie wakes to five text messages from Paul, the latest of which goes OMG I GOT NEW YR MONEY!!!! with five dollar-note emojis. As she blearily unlocks her phone, a sixth message comes in: also happy luna new yr!!!!! hope ur SURPRISE arrives on time :)

??, she types back. (She’s getting better at emulating Paul’s style of texting; perhaps not a development for the best.)

Almost as though on cue, there’s a knock on her door. “Chu,” calls a voice through the door, and it sounds almost like Rebecca. “Are you expecting a package today? There’s an impatient-looking UPS guy downstairs, and he’s holding a huge box with your name on it.”

Ellie blinks once, twice, and then she’s scrambling to pull her hoodie on over the long-sleeved t-shirt and sweats she’d slept in last night, shoving her feet into warm slippers and heading out of the room. The person outside her room is indeed Rebecca, who goes down with her and helps her to haul the box back up the stairs. It’s a box about the size of a drink cooler, made of thick Styrofoam and (oddly) very cold. CAUTION, reads a label on one side of the box, DRY ICE.

There’s also an envelope taped to the box very securely, and it takes Ellie a couple of minutes to slide her penknife through all five layers of tape holding the envelope to the Styrofoam. On the back, she recognises her Ba’s elegant flowing Mandarin penmanship (in ballpoint pen). Nian nian you yu, it says, and xin nian kuai le: Happy New Year, and may your years be filled with abundance. It’s a traditional greeting, and Ellie’s fingers tremble as she uses the penknife to slit open the envelope. Inside, there’s a red paper packet saying that this year’s New Year money will be Venmo-ed to her – sensible, Ellie thinks, because sending actual money by UPS seems like a terrible idea.

There’s another note in much messier, much shakier Mandarin penmanship. This one just says xin nian, and it’s accompanied by a quick note at the bottom in English: I learned to write this!!!!! – Paul

Ellie smiles to herself, and turns her attention back to the massive Styrofoam box. There’s another number of layers of tape around this box, though there are vents left open in order to allow carbon dioxide to escape; the last of the cool air puffs out as Ellie opens the box to reveal… sandwich bags. There’s a number of sandwich bags full of frozen dumplings, and others which are labelled five spice sausage. Sitting right on top is a single bag labelled beef noodle soup sausage of AWESOME.

It’s her first Lunar New Year on her own, away from her family during a holiday traditionally meant to be spent with family, but Ellie’s sat on the floor of her dorm room with a box full of flavours from home, surrounded by the love from her Ba and her best friend from miles and miles away.

She has five-spice sausage for dinner that night, and the blend of the spices is like running into an old friend, warm and familiar.

~

Priya catches wind of a garage sale one weekend close to finals – one of the art major seniors from Younker Hall is selling off the stuff from their dorm room – and immediately decides that they should go check it out.

Ellie looks up from the dog-eared copy of Twelfth Night that she’s filled to bursting with post-its that she’s re-annotating as revision for Intro to Shakespeare, and makes the mistake of meeting Priya’s pleading puppy-dog eyes.

“Fine,” she sighs, caving like a piece of wet tissue paper, “let’s go.”

They walk into utter chaos. The senior’s selling pretty much everything in their dorm room for cheap, and the place is filled with pajama-clad students looking for a good deal. Priya immediately wanders off towards where an eclectic collection of furniture and houseplants have been sent out, muttering under her breath about beanbags, but Ellie stays where she is near the door.

A splash of colour catches her eye and she turns, to see a small canvas hanging loosely on a nail hammered into the wall. It’s a riot of colour, coils of turquoise and sea-green and white dotted with flecks of gold paint, and Ellie’s so caught up in the energy behind the frenetic brushstrokes that it takes a while for her to realise that it's a painting of the sea. She loses herself in the twists and turns of the paint, feels almost breathless even as the calm blue of the palette pulls her into a semi-trance.

“See something you like?” she hears a voice behind her say, and she jumps, turns around to see an older boy in a beanie and a paint-stained tee. He laughs.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says. “I’m Rafael, and you’re probably here for the garage sale I’m running out of my room.”

“I’m mostly here for my roommate, really,” she says dryly. “You painted this?”

“Painted it for the student exhibition this year, but decided not to submit it in the end, so it’s just been bumming around on my wall.”

“I like the energy,” she says slowly, trying to find the words to describe how the piece makes her feel. “The brushstrokes, they’re wild and yet controlled. It’s… it’s almost like the essence of the sea itself, straining to escape the confines of paint and canvas.”

Rafael blinks once, twice, and his mouth curves into a wry smile. “Not too simplistic a piece of art for you?”

Ellie shrugs. “I’m not an art major.”

“You don’t have to be an art major to appreciate art,” he says in return. Pauses, then: “You should have it.”

“…What?”

“The painting,” clarifies Rafael. “Since you like it, and all. I’ll be happy knowing that it’s in hands that appreciate it, rather than wrapped in bubble-wrap in a cardboard box somewhere when I head home.”

“Uh,” says Ellie, rapidly trying to mentally calculate how much an art piece would cost, and how much it might take out of her weekly budget. Rafael rolls his eyes, and picks the painting off the wall, holds it out to her. “It’s a gift,” he says, uncannily predicting the cause of Ellie’s hesitance.

“I’m not about to take art for free,” Ellie protests. “Art deserves to be paid for.”

“I’ve had the piece hanging in studio and in my room for close to half a year, and nobody’s reacted to it like you have,” says Rafael. “That’s more than enough payment for me.”

Later, back in their room, Ellie watches as Priya putters around the room, looking for somewhere to place the giant monstera plant she’d managed to snag from Rafael’s apartment. She’s still got Rafael’s painting in her hands, the canvas about the size of a notebook. Impulsively, she takes a photo of it and sends it to Paul.

pretty!! comes the reply, followed by, wait did u mean to send that to aster.

??, she replies.

u know, Paul types, ur special painting friend, followed by four winking emojis.

Ellie snorts. I’ll have you know I haven't texted Aster since I left Squahamish, Munsky. (I haven’t texted her because I have too many things I want to say to her and I don’t know what to say first, she carefully doesn’t say.)

shes having tons of fun at art school, according to instagram :P

…, she types.

……, he responds, and she grins despite herself.

………………., she types back.

UGH FINE, he says, and Ellie snorts. it’s real pretty tho i bet aster would like it is all im sayin, he continues, followed by the caterpillar emoji with glasses.

Ellie looks down at the painting again, at the swirling maelstrom of bold brushstrokes at its centre. Hm, she types back. Maybe.

Chapter Text

Ellie spends her first summer away from home in a little bookstore, surrounded by the smell of paperbacks and the quiet rustle of pages. The owner is a little old woman who lives in the apartment above the store, and she hires college students to work for her so that she doesn’t have to sit at the front desk all day – “It’s bad for my back,” she’d told Ellie on her first day.

Ellie doesn’t mind. The store’s pretty quiet most of the time, and she happily spends her days sat on the lone stool behind the front desk, nose in a book, making use of the bookstore as her very own personal library. On the third week, she discovers on a back shelf a collection of works by Kazuo Ishiguro. Trailing her hand over the spines, her fingers hesitate for a beat over The Remains of the Day, and she burns with the itch to re-read the book.

She tears her gaze away and pulls out the next book instead – Never Let Me Go – and brings that with her back to the front desk. It won’t do, she thinks, to just read the same book over and over.

Never Let Me Go turns out to be a fantastic read, an aching tale of loss and death and grief, and Ellie reads the entire book three times through before she’s able to put it down. Before she’s consciously thinking about what her hands are doing, they’re already typing on her phone: do you ever wish you could have had more time?

She looks down at the screen, and only does she realise that she’s typed into the GhostMessenger chat window she has with DiegoRivera, pretty much on autopilot, as though they were back in high school, senior year. But she’s no longer ghostwriting for Paul, and she still doesn't know where she stands with Aster, isn’t sure if she can act as though the camaraderie between SmithCorona and DiegoRivera was something real.

She deletes the message instantly before she can do something stupid like send it.

~

Sophomore year comes with more coursework, more readings, and a Priya who seems to have fallen into a teenage rebellious phase a little late. Their first day back in the dorm, Ellie walks into their room to see a girl with curly hair cropped into a pixie cut and three piercings on each earlobe, and it isn’t until the girl turns and cries “If it isn’t my favourite Chinese girl!” that Ellie realises this stranger is Priya.

“I like the haircut,” she says in lieu of a reply, and Priya grins. Priya had had long, braided hair all through their first year, and Ellie thinks that she looks lighter now, as though a weight had been taken off not just her scalp, but also her shoulders.

“I’m trying something new,” she says. “Trying to figure out who I am, who I want to be, you know?”

“…So you decided a 180-degree image change was the way to go?”

“Please, you know I look fabulous,” Priya says, and winks. “Speaking of makeovers, is that a new plaid shirt?”

“Hey,” says Ellie defensively, tugging at the hem of her dark green plaid shirt. “It’s a good plaid shirt.”

“Honey, if you’re able to discern when you’re wearing one of your good plaid shirts, you’ve got too many plaid shirts,” says Priya, but she’s grinning. “You wear them, like, all the time.”

“I don't wear them all the time,” Ellie says, indignant. “I’ll have you know that I also wear t-shirts some of the time.”

Priya smiles like this proves her point, and waves her hand in the air. “You, my buddy, my girl-pal, need a change of wardrobe. New school year, new you, and all that jazz.”

Ellie sighs, and walks past Priya to flop onto the bed. “I buy all my clothes from Goodwill, Priya. Goodwill isn’t known for staying ahead of the fashion curve. You know this.”

Priya rolls her eyes. “Please,” she says. “I didn’t grow up receiving cast-offs from two sisters and one brother to not know how to make hand-me-downs look good. Just give me a sewing kit and we’ll be golden.”

And so it transpires that two weeks later, they’re in the closest Goodwill to Grinnell, Priya browsing through the racks and racks of donated clothes while Ellie awkwardly watches. “No skirts,” Ellie warns, when she sees Priya reach for some kind of floor-length floral monstrosity hanging at the end of a rack, and Priya sighs but leaves the skirt.

A little while later, Priya’s amassed a pile of clothes in her arms. She pulls out a few and passes them to Ellie. “Put those on,” she says, “but don’t look in the mirror until I tell you to, okay?”

Ellie, accepting her fate by this point, sighs and accepts the bundle. There’s only one changing room in this Goodwill, a tiny little mirror-less corner barely covered by a thin curtain, and Ellie dumps the pile of clothes on the ground, trying to figure out what she’s been given. None of them are items Ellie would have normally picked for herself, but a part of her muses that this is probably the point of the forced shopping trip, anyway.

“There,” she says, pulling aside the curtain. “This is weird.”

“Hold up,” Priya says. “One last thing.”

She comes forward and yanks the hair tie out of Ellie’s hair, and Ellie feels her doing something with it near the top of her head for almost five minutes before she pulls away with a satisfied hum.

“Come,” she says. “Have a look.”

Priya pulls her to the only mirror in the store, and Ellie stares. Looking back out at her is a stranger she almost doesn’t recognise, hair pulled up into a messy bun, clad in a V-neck t-shirt half-tucked into jeans that end halfway down her calves, with a leather jacket Priya had grabbed from the men’s section (the smallest size on the rack) thrown over the top. If not for the glasses still perched on her nose, Ellie would’ve sworn she was looking at a different person – one who looked confident, who looked like she knew who she was, and who she wanted to be.

“It’s-” Ellie says, pauses, swallows. “I don’t hate it.”

“I’ll help you take in the jeans to make them slimmer,” Priya says. “But you look great, girl.”

“It’s weird,” Ellie says. “But, I guess, weird in a good way. I might wear this, from time to time.”

“Success!” says Priya, and fist-pumps into the air.

“I mean,” Ellie hastens to amend. “I’m still going to wear my plaid shirts, most of the time. I like those.”

“I figured I wouldn’t be able to break you of that,” shrugs Priya. “But at least you’ve got new stuff to mix and match it with.”

Ellie smiles. “Yeah,” she says. “I’d like that.”

~

She’s on the way back to hall one night when it happens. She and Priya had been dragged (“Invited,” Rebecca had said, rolling her eyes) to the charity screening of Spirited Away that the Japanese Culture Club was organising; Rebecca, treasurer of the club and main organiser of the event, had asked them along to support the event.

The movie itself is good; Ellie’s never seen an animated movie before, never really seen a movie outside of the classic, black-and-white genre her Ba prefers, and decides that if all Ghibli movies are this good, she should make some time to watch them all.

Priya had gone ahead back to hall once the movie had ended, citing a family call that she couldn’t afford to miss, but Ellie, having nothing better to do on a Friday night, stays behind to help Rebecca clean up. It’s late when they start heading back to Smith Hall, each holding a bag laden with audiovisual equipment. The nights are starting to turn cold, and Ellie is just beginning to bitterly regret leaving her room in only her standard plaid shirt with a t-shirt layered underneath, when Rebecca snorts and puts down her bag.

“Come here, you dork,” she says. She sets down her bag on the pavement and turns to face Ellie, unwinding the hand-knitted scarf that’s coiled twice around her neck and draping it over Ellie instead. It’s warm and smells faintly like the houjicha that Rebecca likes to drink on late nights.

“Won’t you be cold?” Ellie asks, for the lack of anything better to say, but Rebecca only raises an eyebrow, gestures to her own leather jacket.

“I’m more prepared for autumn than you,” she says, smirking. “Seriously, Chu, did they not have seasons in your small town?”

“I didn’t-” Ellie starts to say, but they’re interrupted by a loud yell coming from behind them.

“Oi, you dykes, nobody needs to see your disgusting homo shit out in the open,” said the slurred voice loudly, and Ellie glances in the direction of the voice to see a middle-aged man, very visibly drunk, stumbling towards them intently.

“Ignore him, let’s go,” Rebecca says under her breath, dropping her hands from the scarf and bending to pick up her bag once more. She reaches for Ellie’s arm and begins to walk forward briskly, pulling Ellie along with her.

Ellie, not prepared to react to either the angry yelling or the sudden movement, stumbles along in Rebecca’s wake. It’s not that bigotry is unfamiliar to her, and she’s definitely read about it; but in small, quiet Squahamish, where everyone had stuck to the status quo instead of sticking out, there was nobody really available for bigots to openly discriminate against, at least in the (small) circles that Ellie moved in. Sure, Ellie’s had her fair share of people looking at her funny because she was the only Chinese girl in town, but this focused, homophobic rage is something new entirely.

“Have fun burning in hell,” the man calls after them. “Sinners, miscreants!”

“I’m surprised he’s sober enough to know what that word means,” Rebecca mutters, but Ellie’s only half-listening. She remembers harsh light from a vending machine, lips still warm from a kiss she’d never asked for, horrified brown eyes staring at her, a quiet yet determined whisper of “you’re going to hell”. She knows, of course, that Paul hadn’t meant it, hadn’t known better at the time, and he’d apologised to her for it since then.

But Paul, her mind thinks, was never the child of a pastor. That was-

And it’s that thought that stays with her as Rebecca drags the both of them back into the warmth and safety of Smith Hall, the angry drunkard left far behind to continue yelling into the empty night on a pavement, somewhere.

“Chu?” Rebecca’s asking now, peering at her in concern. “Ellie? You alright?”

Ellie nods. “Sorry,” she says, taking off the scarf and handing it back to Rebecca, and Rebecca raises an immaculately-plucked brow.

“What for?”

“Didn’t it bother you? What that guy was saying.”

Rebecca sighs, accepting the scarf and stuffing it into her bag. “Drunkards will say all sorts of things,” she says. “They’re not worth getting upset over. Besides,” she continues, and Ellie wonders if she’s imagining the slight hint of challenge that colours Rebecca’s tone, “it’s not like there’s anything wrong with being a lesbian, is there?”

Thrown by this, Ellie stares back at Rebecca, mind whirling to come up with an appropriate response. She must take too long, because she sees something shutter in Rebecca’s gaze.

“Thanks for helping me with these,” she says, voice cool, as she takes the other bag of audiovisual equipment from Ellie’s unresisting arms. “Good night.”

“It’s not-” Ellie blurts, as Rebecca’s about to head up the stairs. She takes a deep breath, lets it out, because this is important. Because she’s seen the little rainbow flag pin on a discreet side-pocket of Rebecca’s backpack, because she remembers the warmth of a girl’s lips on her own, remembers how there had been no shame, only relief and understanding. “It’s not wrong,” she says, halting. “Um. To like girls. I know that. But what he said, about lesbians going to hell…”

She sees the stiff set of Rebecca’s shoulders relax a little, and the older girl turns, gazes at her silently for a while. Finally, she sighs and says: “An open hallway like this isn’t the place for this conversation. Come on.”

They head up to Rebecca’s room, which Ellie’s never set foot in before. The door reads Rebecca Yamamura / Emily Teo, but unlike the other rooms’ name tags which are typed out in Arial font, these appear to have been neatly written in fountain pen. Inside the room is a wash of colour and mess – in one corner there’s a laundry hamper filled with untidy balls of yarn and what looks to be a half-completed blanket with a crochet hook stuck in it; in another corner there’s five mini-cactuses lined up in a row on the windowsill. Occupying pride of place on the far wall is a poster from the Wonder Woman movie.

“Pardon the mess,” Rebecca says, as she sets down the bags and reaches for a mini-fridge under her desk. “If you find knitting needles on the floor, they’re Emily’s; I don’t understand how they’re always everywhere. It’s sorcery.”

She pulls out a can of beer, and then hands to Ellie two small bottles of what looks like Yakult, except instead of the red foil lid she’s used to, the foil on these ones is purple. “Grape flavour,” she explains in response to Ellie’s visible confusion. “You’re the Yakult fiend, aren’t you? Emily just realised the Yakult stash she brought back from Singapore expires this week, and has been trying to finish them before they expire, but I’ve just about reached my limit for them. I’m sure she won’t mind if you drink some of it.”

“Um,” says Ellie, trying to pretend like her Yakult worldview hasn’t just been rocked to its core by the knowledge that flavoured Yakult exists somewhere in the world. “Thanks.”

“Emily’s my girlfriend, by the way,” Rebecca continues nonchalantly, sitting down on her bed and popping open the can of beer.

“I’m not-” Ellie says firmly, abruptly. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking girls.”

She’s silent, going through the words in her head, deciding what to say, and Rebecca smiles a small knowing smile. “Don’t feel obliged to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says quietly. “But just know that it’s a safe space for queer thoughts, here.”

Ellie’s never told anyone about this. Well, Paul sort of knows because he was directly present during her lesbian awakening, but aside from him, she’s kept it close to her chest, years of pretending to exist in the background in Squahamish forcing old habit onto her even in this new town.

But Rebecca is patient, gives good advice, and – more importantly, Ellie thinks – knows what it means to be in love with a girl. So she ruthlessly organises her thoughts, takes a sip of the grape Yakult in her hand, and-

She pauses, looks down at the purple Yakult, and takes another sip. “This,” she breathes, train of thought momentarily forgotten, “is incredible.”

Rebecca snorts. “I’ll let Emily know,” she says mirthfully. “I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to know she’s converted someone else to the church of grape-flavoured Yakult.”

Ellie clears her throat awkwardly, and reclaims her train of thought. “Do you believe in soulmates?” she asks, serious now. “The idea that there’s someone out there who’s just meant to be your perfect other half?”

Rebecca hums, thinking. “Yes, and no,” she says, slowly. “I believe that soulmates exist, that there are people out there with whom you can just click, people who just get you. But I don’t necessarily believe that that means you’re meant to be with them. I think that’s just a very lazy way of thinking about love.”

“How so?”

“To think that someday you’ll meet someone someday who’ll be your perfect match, is a slippery slope towards thinking that you’ll definitely have a perfect, happy relationship as long as you can find your soulmate. That if you find the ‘right one’, you won’t need to put in any effort in order to keep your relationship healthy and alive, because the magic of the soulmate bond would be more than sufficient,” says Rebecca. She takes a long drink from her beer can. “But I don’t believe that’s all you need. Sure, you might have found the right person, but it might not be the right time. And even if it is the right time, you’ll need to keep putting in the effort to maintain the relationship.”

Ellie sighs, and looks down at the floor reaches out to play with a little bit of yarn fluff trapped between the cracks of the floorboards.

“There was a girl,” she says quietly, not looking up. “Back in Squahamish. She… she’s a pastor’s daughter.”

“…Oh,” says Rebecca, understanding creeping into her voice.

“Her father gave sermons at the church in town,” Ellie continues, on a roll now, a burning desire to get this rock off her chest pushing the words out of her mouth, tumbling over each other in their eagerness to be spoken aloud into the air. “He was…conservative, I guess, though I never really had any other point of comparison as far as pastors go. One of his favourite teachings was that to be gay is a sin, and that such sinners would burn in the deepest reaches of hell and couldn’t be redeemed. That to love someone differently was fundamentally and morally wrong. I never cared about it, because I’ve never believed in God. But she…”

She remembers Aster’s face when she’d kissed her in broad daylight in the middle of the road, remembers the light in her eyes reminiscent of a person about to skydive out of an airplane: enthralled, and yet entirely terrified. “I’d never believed in soulmates, not until I met her,” she says. “I could talk to her for hours on end, discuss books and movies and philosophy until the sun came up, and still have more to ask her. It felt comfortable, with her, and I’m at least fairly certain she felt the same click that I did, the same feeling of rightness. But she hasn’t figured herself out yet, and I’m pretty sure this contradiction between what she’s been taught and what I hope she feels isn’t helping. When I left to come to Grinnell, it felt like perhaps what we had could one day be something more. But the more I think about it, the more I’m not sure.”

Rebecca is silent for a while. “I’m not religious,” she says, after an introspective pause. “My mother’s Buddhist, but my dad’s a free-thinker, and they never really cared about any of the religious stuff growing up. But Emily’s Christian, and she’s talked to me once or twice about it. From what I understand, not every Christian interprets the teachings of the Bible in the same way. Emily’s told me that she believes the most important commandment of Jesus is to love one another, and to treat others with the same love with which you would treat yourself. She believes that Jesus had always made it a point to look out for the downtrodden and the outcast, and he helped them all the same, and that to discriminate against queer people and condemn them rather than show them love acceptance would not be to live a life in accordance with His teachings. That’s how she’s reconciled being a Christian and being a lesbian.”

Ellie sighs, and opens up the second bottle of Yakult.

“I guess maybe, as you said, it was the wrong time, for me and her,” she says.

“Did you tell her?”

Ellie half-shrugs. “Not exactly? I mean,” and here she feels her cheeks flush, “I might have kissed her. Sort of right before I left for Grinnell. And then told her I’d be back in a few years.”

“And?” Rebecca asks. “What did she say?”

“She said that she’d be sure of herself in a few years,” Ellie says, smiling a little at the memory, and Rebecca laughs, downing the last of the beer.

“Well then, Ellie Chu,” she says. “You take these few years to find yourself too. And then maybe the next time you meet your pastor’s daughter, it’ll be the right time.”

~

When the announcement comes in the spring that the Wall Street Journal is opening its internship applications, Ellie sends in her own hastily-cobbled CV on a whim, and doesn’t think too much of it. She loves writing essays about books and themes and ideas, but journalism is a chance to try writing essays about human stories instead, and a part of her is curious to find out if she’s suited for it.

They call her back for a phone interview, and then another, and she tries her best, but doesn’t hold out high hopes. She still remembers her Ba’s difficulty in getting jobs he was otherwise qualified for, because of the spelling of his name, and though she tries to hope that times have changed she doesn’t bank on it.

It’s therefore a complete surprise when she opens her email one morning to see an email in her inbox: Dear Ms Chu, we are pleased to offer you an internship position with the Wall Street Journal at its offices in New York…

The first emotion that comes is excitement, followed swiftly by panic as she realises that she’ll now need to figure out accommodation in New York.

I got a summer internship, she types to Paul, even as she’s scrolling through cheap apartments on Airbnb. In New York, though.

!!!!!!, is his immediate reaction, followed swiftly by a phone call.

“Oh my god,” he says, the moment she picks up. “Was it the Wall Street Journal one?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Look at you, going places,” he says fondly, and she can hear a door slam faintly from his end of the line. “I’m super excited for you, but at the same time I’m bummed you won’t be home for the summer again.”

That thought hadn’t occurred to her, and she deflates a little. “I know,” she says. “I miss Ba, and you, but-”

“Don’t get defensive,” he says, cutting her off. “It’s an important opportunity for you, and you deserve it. We’ll always have Skype, anyway.”

She sinks back into her chair, holding her phone to her ear. “Thanks,” she says quietly. “It means a lot, you know?”

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” he says. “Hang on-” Another door slam, and then: “Mr Chu! Ellie says she’s got an internship in New York for the summer- No, she won’t be coming back- Yes, she’s on the line, hold on-”

There’s a fumble on the line, and then Ellie hears the familiar voice of her Ba. “New York, mm?” he asks in Mandarin, and she smiles to hear the familiar cadences.

“With the Wall Street Journal. I’m sorry I’ll be away all summer again,” she says back in the same language, and he chuckles warmly.

“I’m proud of you, Ellie,” he says. “And I am sure your Ma would have been very proud of you too. There is no need to apologise.”

“It’s going to cost money to get an apartment there,” she says, “and I don't know if the internship pay is going to be enough to cover it.”

“We will work something out,” he says. “Do not worry, there is still time.” A pause. “Have you eaten?”

“I’ve just had breakfast,” Ellie says, looking at the half-eaten granola bar she’d dropped on her desk out of excitement. “You?”

“Paul made what he calls a ‘sausage hash’,” her Ba says dryly, carefully sounding out the last two words in English. “There are a lot more potatoes than I am used to, but it smells not too bad.”

Ellie smiles, closing her eyes and imagining Paul and her Ba puttering around their tiny kitchen, the house rich with the scent of sizzling meat. “I’ll talk to you this weekend,” she says.

“Yes. Drink more water,” he replies, and the phone is passed back to Paul.

Two hours later, she’s still on Airbnb when Priya bursts in, arms laden with messy notes from her lecture. “Hey, girl,” she says, waggling her fingers at Ellie. “You look down. What’s up?”

“I got the internship in New York for WSJ,” Ellie says.

“And you’re glum?” Priya asks incredulously. “Dude, that’s incredible news.”

“I’m still looking for places to stay during the internship,” Ellie explains, gesturing halfheartedly to the Airbnb window still open on her browser. “Rental in New York is expensive.”

“Oh, is that it?” Priya says. “You know, my family stays in Brooklyn. If you don’t mind being on the New York subway for more than ten minutes in order to get to and from work, you can come and crash with us for the summer. Amma and appa won’t mind, and my brother’s bedroom has been empty ever since he got married and moved out to San Francisco.”

Ellie blinks at her, stunned.

“Really?” she asks, hardly daring to believe her luck.

“Yeah?” Priya shrugs. “I’m pretty sure I told you before, that I live in New York.”

“No, not about that- Are you sure your family will be okay with me freeloading for an entire summer?”

“I’ll call them later, just to be sure,” she says. “But I’ll be home the entire summer for internship as well, anyway. And it’s not like you’ll be freeloading – I’m sure amma will ask for your help in washing the dishes at some point, and you can make us those vegetable dumplings that you’re always stress-making before finals. As long as you’re alright with eating vegetarian food pretty much the entire summer, it should be fine. And it’ll be dope to spend time with you in the summer, when we’re not both slaving away over assignments.”

“I think,” Ellie says, a warm feeling blooming in her heart as she looks into Priya’s eyes, “that you should probably clear this with your mum first. But if she says okay, I think I would love that.”

~

Summer in New York is everything Ellie has ever imagined life in a big city would be like. It’s hectic, a whirl of colour and sound and life, and Ellie finds herself thinking that she’s never really missed the quiet of Squahamish until now. The city never sleeps, here, whether she’s out on the streets after a late night rushing an article out for tomorrow’s paper, or curled up with Priya on her family’s couch being inducted into the colourful world of Bollywood movies and then calling for late-night delivery.

It’s fun at the Wall Street Journal, in a way she hadn’t been expecting. Talking to people isn’t her strong suit, and sometimes she thinks she would much rather be writing essays about philosophy than politics, but she won’t deny that being plugged into the heartbeat of the daily news is exciting in a very different way; waking up every morning not knowing what she’s going to be doing at work is its own brand of exhilarating.

Today begins like any other Saturday – she sleeps in till 10 before rolling out of bed. Priya’s brother lives across the country, now, but his room is still papered with posters of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and decorated with various WWE memorabilia, but it’s warm and lived-in, and Ellie wouldn’t trade it in for a cold empty apartment any day. The sun shines in through the window and reflects off the screen of her phone, lying on the desk where she’d forgotten to charge it last night.

Priya’s parents are early risers, and they’ve already left for their weekly weekend walk around the neighbourhood by the time Ellie staggers out into the kitchen. There’s a plate of still-warm dosa wrapped in clingfilm on the dining table, For Ellie written on a post-it stuck to the top, and she smiles to herself. Priya might swear by her daily breakfast of fruit granola and oat milk, but the homemade dosa with its little treasure-pocket of spiced potato in the centre is something Ellie’s grown addicted to in her stay at the Rajendran household, the complex mix of flavours new yet somehow familiar on her tongue.

Priya’s yawning into a glass of oat milk, half-slumped across the dining table. “Plans?” she asks, and Ellie shrugs.

“We could go see a museum-” she begins, and Priya groans dramatically.

“We went to the Guggenheim last weekend,” she says. “Ellie, have mercy.”

Ellie raises a brow. “Do you have any better ideas?”

“There’s a hipster food festival at Prospect Park,” Priya says immediately, like she’s found the website on Google two hours prior and was just waiting for Ellie to ask. “The theme is fusion cuisines from all around the US.”

It sounds interesting, Ellie’s got nothing better to do, and – more importantly – she’s still hungry after finishing the dosa. “Sure,” she says.

It’s another hour before they leave the house, mostly due to Priya’s long morning showers but also due to Priya trying to wrestle Ellie’s hair into a braid. (Priya loses the fight, but Ellie concedes and lets her pin it up into a messy bun and stick some kind of hair-stick through it.) The early afternoon sun bears down on the both of them, and Ellie finds herself mildly regretting the denim overshirt she’d thrown on.

The food festival is in full swing. Ellie, never having seen a food festival quite on this scale before, stares down the rows of little white tents, each with a little signage hanging outside announcing what they’re serving, from duck rilette banh mi sandwiches to Japanese-style pasta, and the ubiquitous boba stall. The smell of oil and smoke hangs in the air like an invisible mist, threaded through faintly with the aroma of cooking food.

Ellie’s waiting for Priya to queue up for a stall selling Middle East-inspired mushroom burgers when she sees it. A little stall right at the end of the row, about five stalls down from where she’s standing, the proud red sign handing just below the tent canopy reading Munsky’s Sausages – and her breath catches. No way, she thinks.

“Priya,” she says absently, “I’m going just down this row, alright?”

Not waiting for Priya’s answer, she begins to walk down the row. As she gets closer she sees: a long grill rack set over charcoal embers, three sausages slowly roasting to perfection; a stack of hot dog buns and taco shells waiting to be filled; and, finally, a very familiar stall-owner, mop of curly hair shaved into an undercut she does not remember, one hand tucked into a pocket and another flipping the sausages around.

There’s three girls waiting for their food, and Ellie hangs back to wait until they’ve collected their food before she marches straight up to the workstation. “Paul Munsky,” she says, and sees him jerk in surprise and look up, “when were you going to tell me that you were selling your sausages in New York?”

“Ellie!” He drops his tongs and immediately pulls her into a bear hug and, unbidden, she relaxes into his familiar embrace, warm and comforting like a summer’s night in Squahamish. “Did you get my text?”

“My phone’s out of battery,” she says. “I forgot to charge it last night. Did you seriously only text me today to say that you were coming here?”

He grins sheepishly at her, and rubs the back of his head. “I was too busy trying to pack all my supplies, and I literally forgot until I woke up this morning,” he says. “Turns out, the reviewer from Wenatchee really liked my taco sausages, and recommended me to a friend of his who works with food markets in New York. They all came down to Squahamish to try my sausages, and next think I know I’ve got an email inviting me to set up a booth here. It’s been crazy since then.”

“Nice.”

“I know right? It’s wild. Ma couldn’t really say anything about it, either, since they offered to cover my transport and everything to get here.”

Ellie pats his arm, looks up at the sign on the table stating that two out of four kinds of sausage are already sold out. “You’re doing well,” she says. “I’m really happy for you, Paul.”

He crooks a half-smile at her, puts an arm around her shoulders. “I should be saying that to you.”

“Heyyyyy, girl,” she hears Priya come up behind her. “Oh, hi! Boyfriend?”

Ellie nearly chokes on her spit in her haste to turn around, but Paul beats her to a response. “Nah,” he says, snorting, “I’m not exactly her type.”

“Priya,” Ellie sighs, ignoring Paul’s teasing tone, “this is Paul Munsky. He’s my best friend from back home. Paul, this is Priya Rajendran, she’s my roommate at Grinnell.”

“Oh,” says Priya. “Is this who keeps filling our fridge with sausages and dumplings during the term?

Ellie wants to put her face in her hands. “He does that once a semester, Priya,” she says, but Priya’s cackling, already reaching for her phone.

“Any friend of Ellie’s is a friend of mine,” she says. “Here, it’ll take just a second and then you can go back to grilling. Do you have Instagram?”

“Yes,” says Paul, which is news to Ellie (though then again, Ellie doesn’t bother using Instagram, or any other form of social media, anyway). “It’s uh, mostly photos of my sausages, though.”

“That’s fine, mine’s mostly just pictures of other people’s dogs.”

“Sounds great!”

They spend the next two minutes looking through each other’s feeds and laughing, and Ellie begins to wonder whether she might end up regretting introducing her two closest (and most extroverted) friends to each other. But, she thinks, a fond feeling in her chest as she watches the two of them coo over the photo of a puppy in a hot dog costume, I guess it’s worth it.

Chapter Text

Junior year opens to leaves gently curling into red-yellow-brown, falling across the wide pavements of Grinnell’s campus and crunching underfoot. Ellie’s rushing from one tutorial to another, half-drunk coffee in one hand and three notebooks in the other, hair half-falling out of the messy bun she’d twisted up and secured with a pencil when she’d woken up a little too late that morning.

There’s a large branch on the ground she doesn’t see, and she almost feels herself trip in slow motion. Of course, she thinks, Murphy’s law in action.

Except, she doesn’t end up face-planting onto the pavement, cold coffee spilled over her class notes and the sleeve of the new cardigan she’d scrounged up from a Goodwill in New York over the summer. She feels a hand push gently against her shoulder, and another gently wrap around her wrist, preventing the coffee cup from tipping any further.

“Woah there,” says a voice, amused, and Ellie looks up to see warm brown eyes in a freckled face, messy dirty-blonde hair tied into a side braid with a knitted beanie pulled loosely over the top. It’s a tall girl holding her up, her own book bag gently knocking against her side from the momentum of running to stop a fellow student from tripping over her own two feet.

“U-uh,” says Ellie, feeling her words dry up on the tip of her tongue. There’s a warmth in this girl’s easy smile that stirs something in her, and her mind scrabbles desperately for something to say. “I’m, uh, Ellie.”

(Smooth, she thinks to herself. Real smooth.)

“I know,” says the girl, still grinning, as she pulls her hand back from Ellie’s shoulder, lets go of Ellie’s wrist. “Ellie Chu, right? You’re the one who’s always got something to say in Sex, Gender and Critical Theory. I’m Blake, by the way.”

Ellie winces a bit – Sex, Gender and Critical Theory is an extremely fascinating class, and she’s found herself volunteering for discussion much more than she usually would, purely because the topics are so relevant, so ripe for discussion. “I, um. Like the class.”

“I’m not saying it’s bad, you know,” says Blake. “I quite liked your point of view on privilege and white feminism that you raised at last week’s tutorial. Really got me thinking.”

Ellie breathes in, breathes out, stands up straight and carefully adjusts her stack of notebooks. “I’m glad,” she says, for the lack of anything better to say, her heart beating nervous double-time in her chest for some unknown reason. “Thanks. For, well, saving me from death by pavement. And my notes from death by coffee stain.”

“No worries at all,” says Blake easily. “I’m glad I could be of assistance.”

There’s a beat of awkward silence, before Ellie clears her throat. “Well,” she says. “I should get, uh, to class. Thanks again, I really owe you one.”

Blake nods, but there’s a look in her eyes like she’s struggling with the desire to say something, so Ellie waits a heartbeat more.

“If you want,” she says, “you could make it up by going for a coffee with me sometime.”

Ellie blinks. Coffee doesn’t sound too bad, and there’s a easy familiarity about this complete stranger that makes it feel like she’s known this girl for a while, sets her at ease. “S-sure,” she says, blinking. “I wouldn’t mind.”

They meet up later that week for a coffee in a slightly less shitty café down the street from Grinnell, a small cozy establishment not full of sleep-deprived students hunkered over textbooks while clutching their fifth cups of coffee. Blake’s waiting outside the café, nervously pacing around in heeled combat boots, face tucked into her thick woollen scarf and hands jammed into the pockets of her long cardigan. As she looks up and spots Ellie approach, she straightens up from her slight slouch, eyes lighting up.

“Here!” she says. “They’re still half-empty, and they’ve got a student deal for brunch.”

“Perfect,” says Ellie.

They talk for three hours, squished into a tiny booth by the window of the café. Ellie learns that Blake’s full name is Blake Giuliani (“No relation to Rudy Guliani, I promise”), the middle child of five Italian-American siblings, and her family stays in Iowa itself. She’s a psychology major in her junior year who’d taken the Sex, Gender and Critical Theory module purely out of interest, she’s allergic to cats, and she loves karaoke.

“Blake doesn’t sound like a very Italian name,” says Ellie, idly stirring her latte.

“Ellie doesn’t sound like a very Chinese name,” Blake counters, but she’s smiling. “It was a compromise – my mum really liked William Blake, so that’s where my name came from. Dad got to choose the middle name, but it sounds weird so I never use it.”

Ellie raises an eyebrow. “Oh, now you’ve got to tell me.”

“…Mariella,” Blake says, making a face. “It sounds like the name of a girl in fifteenth-century Rome.”

“It’s a pretty name,” says Ellie honestly. “I like it.”

Perhaps it’s a trick of the light, but for a second Ellie thinks Blake flushes a bit, ducking her head down into her scarf, but she recovers quickly. “Do you have a Chinese name as well?”

Ellie does in fact have a Chinese name, but nobody’s used it ever since her Ma passed away. Ma used to call her by her Chinese name, and the first time Ba had tried to call her that after the funeral she’d flinched unconsciously. Since then, she’d always been ‘Ellie’ at home.

“Hui,” she says, now. It’s been a while since she’s said it aloud, but the pain of hearing it has long dulled, bringing with it only a warm nostalgia. “It means ‘intelligent and wise’.”

“Hm,” Blake smiles around the rim of her espresso cup. “Very on the nose. I like it.”

~

Ellie accidentally spends most of junior year not thinking about Aster Flores. It’s not like she makes herself a promise not to moon over warm brown eyes, or think about the feeling of soft lips on hers- it happens without her noticing. It goes a little something like this:

The one coffee with Blake becomes a weekly coffee meeting, always at the same café. Sometimes they bring their books and quietly work, but the café’s got a strict policy against students doing work on their premises, and they often get chased out. Other times it’s spirited discussions about what happened in class, both of them already on their third cup of coffee.

Blake talks with her hands. It’s something Ellie begins to notice on their second or third meeting. Her slim pianist’s fingers wave animatedly in the air, gesturing as she speaks, and sometimes Ellie has a hard time focusing on what Blake’s saying because she’s too distracted by Blake’s hands, drawing invisible pictures in the air.

“Oh my god,” says Blake one day, laughing, “wait, you’ve never watched an anime before?”

“Never in my life,” Ellie shrugs. “We always watched old movies at home, and nobody in Squahamish was really into that kind of thing. They were more into, uh, football and stuff.”

“There was a Japanese-American girl in my class in middle school, who sat next to me in class,” says Blake. “She introduced it to me, and I’ve never looked back since. You should totally watch one. It’s a formative experience.”

Blake’s eyes are alight with mirth as she tries (and fails) to describe the complicated plot of her favourite anime show without giving away too many spoilers, and even though Ellie’s never seen anything more modern than 1980’s TV she has to admit she’s intrigued. Anything that can bring a person so much joy just to talk about, she thinks, must be worth at least checking out.

So of course, it’s only natural that they wind up squished side-by-side on Blake’s bed in her room, Blake pulling up Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood on her Netflix and offering her right earbud to Ellie. “You absolutely have to watch it with the subtitles,” she says, grinning. “I am a strong believer that English dubs are a crime on this green earth.”

“I’m not entirely sure I know what a ‘dub’ is, but I trust your judgment,” Ellie says, mock-seriously accepting the earbud.

As it turns out, the show is fascinating, an interesting mix of pseudo-science and political intrigue and just enough darkness to make it more than just a simple children’s show.

Somewhere around the fourth or fifth episode, as the sun’s going down outside the window, Blake starts to sniffle as she stares at the screen, watching the animated events unfold.

“This is my least favourite episode of the entire show,” she says, voice muffled through her sleeves. Onscreen, a little girl and a large dog wave adorably at the protagonist of the show, and Ellie frowns.

“Haven’t you watched this before?”

“I’ve seen it three times, but I still cry every time.”

Ellie can’t help but chuckle at that, and Blake whines into her sleeve piteously, shoves Ellie with her shoulder. “Don’t laugh at me until you watch the entire episode.”

After they watch the entire episode through, Ellie watches the end credits play in silence. “I take back the laughing,” she says, voice thick. She hasn’t cried during a show in very, very long, but she’s definitely a little sniffly now. “That hurt.”

“The show gets better, I swear,” Blake says. “This episode is the hardest hurdle to cross. You’ll see, next episode.”

Fullmetal Alchemist becomes a fortnightly weekend activity for them, always squished on Blake’s bed and abusing her Netflix account. There’s one day when Blake brings the laptop up to Ellie’s room, after Priya had caught wind of their binge sessions and demanded to join, but Blake swiftly bans Priya after the latter ‘accidentally’ drops three spoilers in the span of five minutes.

Halfway through the semester, the Japanese Culture Club has another movie screening and Blake, apparently a member of the Club, drags Ellie along. “They’re showing Your Name,” she says, “and you definitely have to watch it, it’s one of my favourites.”

Ellie, having nothing much better to do on a Sunday afternoon, lets herself get dragged along. The movie is decent, a little too predictable in the plot for Ellie’s liking, but the soundtrack is amazing and the art breath-taking, so Ellie mentally chalks it up as a plus in her book. She hears Blake sniffling through the emotional end scenes of the movie, curled up on the bean bag next to hers on the floor, and she absently drapes an arm across Blake’s shoulders and pats her comfortingly.

(Blake leans slightly into her in response, the solid warmth of her side comforting.)

Some of the Japanese Culture Club alum had returned to join the movie session, and as the movie ends and the Club members begin to beeline towards the table full of snacks, Ellie catches sight of bright fuschia hair cut in a familiar bob, an absent smile that turns into a knowing grin when she catches sight of Ellie.

“You’re looking well,” Rebecca says, as she approaches.

“I could say the same to you,” Ellie returns. Rebecca looks more polished than when she graduated, shoulders lifted with a confidence that hadn’t been present when she was stressing over job applications this time last year.

“Adulthood sucks,” says Rebecca, “but once you start to get used to the idea that nobody knows what they’re doing, you adapt really fast.”

Blake chooses that moment to come back up from the snack table, a can of some soda with Japanese characters on it in one hand, and puts her chin on Ellie’s shoulder. She’s started doing this recently, usually to hide her face in Ellie’s shoulder when the slightly more grisly bits of Fullmetal Alchemist come onscreen, so Ellie doesn't jerk in surprise, just sighs and lets it happen.

“Hey, Rebecca,” says Blake, grinning. There’s a look of faint… surprise? in Rebecca’s eyes, but Ellie can’t get a read on it before they shift to warm recognition.

“Blake,” she says, nodding. “I assume you’re responsible for dragging my young padawan to our Club?”

“I’m not a member,” Ellie says, “just hanging out.”

“She’s not a member yet,” Blake corrects. “But I’ve been inducting her into the world of animated movies, and figured it’d be a crime for her not to watch Your Name.”

“Fair enough,” says Rebecca, then, inexplicably, switches to another language and continues to talk. The vowels are rounded and intonation smooth, sounding somewhat like Mandarin and yet entirely unlike it, and if Ellie had to hazard a guess, it’s Japanese.

Even more surprising is when Blake sputters, and responds in the same language defensively. Ellie watches them banter back and forth for a bit, Rebecca with a smirk growing on her face, and Blake getting flustered, and Ellie wonders if this is what Paul feels like when she speaks to Ba in Mandarin while the three of them are all in the kitchen. If so, it’s a little weird, and she resolves to speak in English more the next time she goes back to Squahamish.

Eventually, someone from the other end of the room calls out to Rebecca, and the conversation ends with a switch back to English. “See you around, Ellie,” Rebecca says, and disappears into the crowd while Blake huffs, amused.

Ellie turns to Blake. “I didn’t know you spoke Japanese.”

“Uh,” Blake says, one hand going to the back of her neck, looking a little embarrassed. “I taught myself, mostly. At first because I wanted to watch anime without looking at the subtitles, and then I started becoming interested in the culture and stuff as well, so I kept learning.”

Ellie, more than painfully aware that her Mandarin accent and fluency, practiced for the twenty-ish years of her life, is nowhere near what she’d like it to be, feels the perfect honesty emanating from her when she says: “That’s impressive.”

“Ah, it’s nothing that special. Languages come easily to me, that’s all,” says Blake, sheepishly.

“What did Rebecca talk to you about?”

For a moment, Ellie thinks she sees Blake’s cheeks flush (though it might just be a trick of the light), and she gets a little flustered again. “N-nothing much,” she says, with a little nervous grin. “Just asked how I knew you, told me to take care of you and stuff. As a friend.”

“Hm,” says Ellie, resolving not to look to deeply into Blake’s strange behaviour. “That’s nice of her.”

“Y-yeah, I guess.”

~

“So, spill the tea,” Priya says one morning, as they sit companiably by their shared window seat, Ellie holding a warm cup of oolong tea made from the tin that Paul had sent along with the last frozen dumpling delivery, Priya with a concoction that’s got three shots of espresso and too much sugar.

“I’m not spilling this,” Ellie says indignantly, “it’s good tea.”

Priya badly conceals a laugh behind her mug. “You’re such a granny, sometimes,” she says, “how do you not know what it means to spill the tea?”

Ellie gives this comment the dead-eyed stare it deserves, and Priya backs up a little. “It means, give me the juicy details, girl. What’s with you and Blake?”

“Nothing,” says Ellie, bewildered. “I mean, she’s a good friend. I’m glad I met her, even it was entirely by chance.” A thought occurs to her then: “Wait, you know you’re still one of my closest friends here, right?”

“Oh, you’re adorable,” Priya grins. “Do you like Blake?”

“Of course, or else I wouldn't call her my friend,” says Ellie, not entirely seeing where Priya’s going with this.

“Ah, but do you like her, or do you like like her?”

Ellie blinks. “Uh,” she says. She’s never thought about it, but she’s thinking about it now, unbidden: the warmth of Blake’s shoulder against hers after five hours of Netflix, Blake burying her face in the crook of Ellie’s neck when she wants to pretend she’s not crying at animated characters on a laptop screen, Blake’s sparkling eyes and dancing fingers painting a story as she discusses the newest topic that’s caught her fancy. “I don’t know,” she says, at last. “I’m not sure if I know what it means to, well, like someone in that way, if there are any indicators or some sort of checklist I can look at to confirm if I like someone that way.”

“Well,” says Priya. “There isn’t really a checklist or whatever, you nerd. It’s a feeling you get in your chest, when you just know.”

It’s so much like Paul’s advice from what feels like a lifetime ago, when she’d first asked him how to know when a girl wants to be kissed, and Ellie snorts. “Helpful,” she says dryly.

The conversation with Priya is all but forgotten by the time winter arrives. It’s her last café hangout with Blake before winter break begins, the two of them forgoing their usual lattes in favour of hot chocolate in deference to the season.

“Are you heading home for Christmas?” Blake asks.

“Not really,” says Ellie. “My family doesn’t really celebrate Christmas, and it’s not cheap to go back to Squahamish just for a holiday that my Ba and I don’t celebrate, anyway. My best friend back home takes him in for the holiday season, so he doesn't feel too lonely.”

“But then you’ll be lonely,” Blake protests, and she’s got a glint in her eye now, the kind that means that she’s got an idea, and Ellie has a sense of foreboding.

“I’ll be fine,” she starts to say, but Blake barrels over her with: “Why don’t you come spend Christmas with my family?”

There’s an awkward pause, before Blake continues on, stumbling over her words. “I mean, you don’t have to feel obligated or anything. But my nonna loves feeding people and she always makes too much food for Christmas, anyway, and I’m sure my parents won’t object. It’ll be real noisy because all the cousins are coming over for Christmas lunch, but it might be better than spending Christmas on your own.”

Ellie wavers. “I don’t want to impose,” she says, but Blake shakes her head.

“You won’t be imposing,” she says. “Actually- hang on, let me get you verbal confirmation.”

Before Ellie can say anything further, Blake’s whipped out her phone and is calling her mother. One half-English, half-Italian conversation later, Blake’s hanging up with a satisfied smile on her face. “Mum says you’re welcome to come,” she says. “I told her you don’t usually celebrate Christmas, and she seemed distraught at the thought. I hope you’re prepared to be stuffed full of Italian-style Christmas lunch and dinner.”

And so it transpires that Ellie finds herself in the backseat of Blake’s dad’s car on the first day of winter break, driving out towards Iowa City, pulling up outside a white brick-and-mortar house with a number of colourful vines painted all across the front wall.

“My sister painted that,” says Blake, following her gaze. “We figured it was too much hassle to redo the paint job, so we've just left it up.”

She’s introduced to Blake’s parents and three of her four siblings in short order – the oldest brother is working in London and is only flying in a couple of days later. Blake’s mother is a kindly woman with Blake’s eyes and smile, a spot of flour on her cheek as she hugs Blake, and then Ellie. “Blake’s told me all about her new friend,” she says. “I’ve set up a spare mattress for you in Blake’s room, I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s fantastic,” says Ellie faintly, already overwhelmed by all the people in the house, the heavy scents of basil and frying meat wafting out from the kitchen, and the echoes of people yelling up and down the stairs.

Blake, perhaps sensing this, gently tugs on her arm. “I’ll bring Ellie up to my room, then,” she says, and they head up.

Blake’s room faces the morning sun, and it’s covered head to toe in peeling posters, some of them bleached from years spent basking in the daylight streaming in from the windows. Ellie thinks she recognises one of Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist, but before she can take a closer look Blake says: “Uh, please ignore the posters on the wall. I’ve been in this room since I was five, pretty much.”

Ellie laughs, but obligingly tears her eyes away from the posters. “You know I won’t judge you,” she teases. “It’s not like we’re halfway done with our anime marathon or anything.”

“Well,” Blake huffs, but her eyes are dancing, so Ellie figures she isn’t actually mad.

“Seriously, though,” Ellie says. “Thanks for having me.” Blake smiles, warm like a summer’s day, and shakes her head.

“You’re always welcome,” she says.

The house gradually fills up over the next few days, cousins and aunts and uncles beginning to pop in for the festivities. They’re all thrilled by the idea of someone new joining in on the Christmas celebrations, and Ellie quickly loses count of how many of them want to talk to “Blake’s friend”. It’s strange, somewhat reminiscent of the chaos at the Munsky house that she’s become somewhat familiar with, but at slightly lower decibels.

The night after Christmas dinner, they’re sitting on Ellie’s borrowed mattress, backs against Blake’s bedframe, when she catches sight of the guitar case in the corner.

“You play guitar?” Ellie asks, pointing to the case.

“I uh, tried to learn it,” Blake says, sounding sheepish. “But I was terrible at it, so I stopped. It’s a hand-me-down from my older brother, but nobody else was interested in playing it so it’s been vegetating in my room since.”

Ellie’s fingers itch for the press of metal wires against her finger-pads, missing the feel of the guitar she’d left back home in Squahamish. “May I?”

“Oh, please, go ahead.”

Ellie unzips the case and pulls out the guitar, a black beauty that’s only slightly dusty but rather out of tune. She spends a good ten minutes tuning the strings to her liking before she realises that there’s no pick on this guitar, and resigns herself to idle fingerplucking. Unbidden, her muscle memory goes to the last song she’d played, the song she’d done at the talent show in high school. The chords come easily to her, like a long-forgotten friend, and she loses herself just for a moment in the music, humming softly in tune.

“Brilliant,” she hears Blake say in a whisper, and looks up to see Blake gazing at her with something unrecognisable in her eyes, something that makes her own heart skip a beat of its own. Blake blinks, then, and it’s gone, replaced by simple warmth. “You’re good,” she says.

“Music comes easily to me,” she replies, with a slight shrug. “Your parents won’t mind me making this kind of noise so late at night?”

“Honestly, I’ve done worse, so I don't think they will,” Blake says, shrugging. “I think as long as I haven't brought home a girlfriend or boyfriend, they pretty much don’t care what I do in my room.”

Ellie raises a brow at this. “Girlfriend?”

“Well,” says Blake, and her cheeks are definitely turning red now. “They don't think you’re my girlfriend, don’t worry. They wouldn’t have put you in my room, otherwise.”

The unrecognisable glint is back in Blake’s eyes now, the air heavy with silence. Ellie feels it again, the feeling you get in your heart when you’re on a roller coaster at the top of the slope, about to take the trust fall and feel the ground plummeting towards you.

(“It’s a feeling you get in your chest,” she hears Priya’s voice in her head, the muffled voice of a distant memory, “when you just know.”)

“Do you want them to think I’m your girlfriend, though?” she asks, hoarsely, fingers stilling on the strings of the guitar. She doesn’t know what she’s asking for, doesn’t know what the reply will be, and she holds her breath, waiting.

“I don’t really care what they think of my relationships, since they’re just so strict on them all the time,” Blake shrugs. Ellie puts down the guitar by the side of the mattress, turns to face Blake fully.

“Then, how about what you think?” Ellie amends, and watches Blake swallow nervously.

“Um,” she says. There’s a moment, where it seems like she’s steeling herself, and when she meets Ellie’s eyes there’s a look of nervous determination behind them. Quickly, before Ellie has time to react, she’s leaning forward, one hand reaching out to cradle the back of Ellie’s skull and then-

Lips on hers, slightly cracked, faintly perfumed with the scent of the panettone they’d eaten at dinner, a blend of honey-sweet apricots and the faintest hint of cinnamon. Ellie feels Blake’s nose awkwardly bump her glasses, feels their teeth clack against each other as Blake jerks back, eyes wide.

“That,” she says softly, nervously, as though afraid to break the delicate tension between them, “is what I think.”

Ellie thinks about the warmth of Blake’s hand at the base of her skull, carded through her hair. She thinks about the warmth and joy in Blake’s eyes when she looks at her, the smile that looks like the sun itself lived inside her body. She thinks about how speaking with Blake feels easy, familiar, as though they’ve known each other for years instead of months. She thinks about the feeling of lips on her own, of diving off the cliff and trusting that someone will catch her when she hits the bottom.

Priya was right, Ellie thinks, but does not say this aloud. Instead, she whispers: “I like the way you think,” and reaches out to pull Blake in for another kiss.

Chapter Text

It takes all of two minutes after Priya comes back from Christmas break before she finds out. (Not that Ellie and Blake had agreed to keep this… thing…. between them a secret, but she’s still cautious, still not about to go shouting from the rooftops that she’s dating another girl right now.)

“Girl,” says Priya, hip-checking her way into the room, holding a large Styrofoam box in her hands. “My amma made enough frozen food to last a month, so uh, Merry Christmas, here’s some authentic food from Casa Rajendran as your gift!”

Ellie looks up, blinking, from where she’d been slouched against the windowsill, watching Fullmetal Alchemist on Netflix Party with Blake.

“I’ve missed your mum’s cooking,” she says, pressing ‘pause’ on the player and typing out a quick message to Blake, “but are you even sure all of that will fit in the common fridge?”

“Amma packed it all into freezer bags so they could squish. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Ellie comes over and peers into the box. Indeed, there’s a wide variety of freezer-bags stacked in the box, each filled with a single portion of some thick gravy and pressed flat to fit easily within. She can make out familiar words on some of the labels, names of foods she vaguely remembers from last summer when she’d stayed at Priya’s: paneer makhani, rajma, chana dal.

“They’d better,” she says, poking at one of the packets. “We have a not-exactly-legal mini-fridge, but it does not have a freezer compartment.”

Priya doesn’t respond, and Ellie pulls back to see her staring. “What,” she says self-consciously, “do I have something on my nose?”

“You’re wearing a cardigan,” Priya accuses.

Ellie looks down at the long cardigan she’s wearing. She’d pilfered it (with permission) from Blake’s closet on her last day at Blake’s house, a grey knit cardigan that falls to her knees, sleeves ending just slightly before the tips of her fingers. It’s warm, and smells (even now) of the faint vanilla scent of Blake’s perfume, and with it wrapped around her it feels almost like Blake’s warm presence is right next to her.

“It’s comfortable,” she says in response, shrugging, and Priya begins to grin like a shark that’s scented blood.

“You don’t own a cardigan, Ellie Chu,” she says. “You literally only have plaid shirts, regular button-up shirts, and like, two jackets. Neither of which are cardigans, or made from any kind of wool.”

“Well,” Ellie says, “I have a cardigan now.”

“I’ve seen Blake Giuliani walking around campus in that cardigan,” Priya continues, grinning. “What a coincidence.”

Ellie sighs. She’s well aware that she’s absolutely pants at lying, and this is Priya, who’s kept all her embarrassing secrets from the day they’d met, who’s been nothing but a supportive friend. It’s the knowledge that she’d be actively lying to Priya that pushes her to say: “Yeah, it was Blake’s cardigan, but it’s mine now.”

“Awww,” Priya coos, “from your girlfriend?”

“Well, yeah.”

Ellie is treated to the sight of Priya choking on her spit the moment she says that, putting down the Styrofoam box on the floor to hack and cough and try to clear out her airways. “Wait,” she says, once she’s recovered her breath (but not necessarily her dignity, “for real?”

“Why would I joke about something like that? It’s bound to backfire.”

“Point.” Priya scowls and takes out her phone, starts furiously typing into it. “Now I owe Rebecca 50 bucks, dammit.”

Ellie blinks once, twice. “You…bet on whether Blake and I would get together?”

“Girl, that’s a sucker bet,” Priya waves a hand, not looking up from where she’s pulling up Venmo on her phone. “I wouldn’t spend three hours a week in a café with someone, and then watch animated shows with them all night, unless I really liked them. Rebecca bet that something would happen this Christmas, and I foolishly bet that you wouldn’t realise your feelings yet.”

Priya pauses when she doesn’t respond, looks up at her, and sighs. “Rebecca says she’s already given Blake the shovel talk so I guess I don’t have to tell her where I’ll hide her body if she makes you cry, do I?”

That draws a startled laugh from Ellie. “Please don’t,” she says. “We’re still figuring this out, I guess. You’re really the first person I’ve told. Though I guess Rebecca’s the second now, by proxy.”

“Oh, crap,” says Priya. “Shit. Sorry. I didn’t realise you guys were planning to keep it under wraps and stuff.”

“We’re not trying to actively keep it a secret, I guess,” Ellie says, bites her lip. “But it’s so new, and I’ve never really had a girlfriend before, so it’s all a little overwhelming.”

Priya softens, and she reaches up to take Ellie’s hand. “If you need to talk,” she says, “you can come to me, alright? I mean, well, if you need to talk about the relationship, you should probably talk to Blake first, but you can always come to talk to me second, you understand?”

Ellie squeezes Priya’s hand. “Thank you,” she says, and means it. “I really appreciate it.”

~

Paul finds out two days later, when Ellie accidentally lets it slip on their Skype call, and the moment she does she notices a wide grin slowly begin to steal across his face.

“Ellie Chu,” he says, “I am so proud of you, I just want you to know.”

Ellie remembers her lesbian awakening a few years ago, remembers Paul regaling her with the tale of his mother finding his search history on how to know if you’re gay. He’s certainly come a long way, and even though she’s seen or heard him come on this journey of casting aside the narrow views preached by the older generation in Squahamish, she’s still pretty proud of his, their, progress.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You should’ve told me sooner,” Paul continues, his grin threatening to nearly split his face in two, and Ellie groans.

“It’s been less than two weeks, Munsky.”

“Man, wait until I tell Mr Chu, he’s going to be-”

The world seems to stop for a moment, the tips of Ellie’s ears and the back of her neck growing first ice-cold, then burning hot, as a feeling of sheer panic shoots up her spine. “No,” she bursts out, cutting Paul off.

“…Hm?”

Ellie tries to breathe, one quick inhale, two, three, and then an exhale. “Don’t,” she says, voice shaking. “Don’t tell Ba.”

It’s not that she’s ashamed of who she is or who she loves, not really. Logically, she knows her Ba doesn’t listen to the homophobic rhetoric that Deacon Flores and other older members of the congregation share on occasion, knows that her kind and gentle Ba isn’t likely to judge her for loving someone different, loving someone outside the social norm. And yet.

Yet.

She remembers long nights spent in the train station booth, doing her homework by lanternlight so she can run out and signal the last train for the night. She remembers the slightly hunched silhouette of her father sitting by the armchair, gaze lost and wandering in grief in the days after her Ma’s passing, shadowed against the curtains as she walked to replace the signal-lights back in the booth for the night. I’ll take care of us, Ba, she’d promised many times. Don’t worry if you need time.

One day, he’d replied once, gazing at the old black-and-white photograph on their mantel from her parents’ wedding day, her Ba and Ma beaming front and centre with various grandparents, cousins, siblings all gathered behind. One day, when I am old, bring home a strong young man to help you, Ellie. Don’t carry the whole world on your own.

It’s not something he’d enforced, something he’d expected of her, but she knows that the relatively progressive idea of a girl loving another girl might not be something he’d considered, knows that in their tiny town where time never seemed to move, something outside the norm might come as a surprise. And Ellie finds that there’s a part of her that’s worried, terrified to know how he might react.

(There’s a famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat, which she’d written a bunch of essays on for Mrs Geselchap’s class back in sophomore year in high school. There’s a closed box containing both a cat and a decaying radioactive atom, and until you open the box, you won't know if the cat is alive or dead from the radioactive exposure.

The point of the experiment is that until the box is opened, two strands of possibility run in parallel: the cat is both alive and dead, at the same time.

In one of the six essays she’d done on the topic, Ellie had written: To the objective scientist, the cat in the box is a thought experiment, a funny little paradox. But the uncertainty of not knowing, the suspense of wondering whether one will open the box to find a healthy cat or a still corpse, makes Schrödinger’s cat an instrument of constant dread. If one, fearing that they will open the box to find a dead cat, never opens the box, the cat remains suspended between realities at once, and the person looking at the box remains in a constant state of dread. It is a stalemate, and one in which neither party is likely to turn out for the better.

She feels like the person faced with Schrödinger’s box, now, standing in front of the closed doors of her home and hesitating to knock, hovering on the precipice of two different realities: one in which her Ba accepts who she is, and one in which he does not. She knows which reality she fears.)

“…Ellie?” Paul says, concernedly, and she blinks back to reality, realises she’s been staring hollowly at the screen for a good amount of time. “Ellie, I’m sorry if I upset you,” he continues. “I was just- I’m sure he would be happy for you too-”

“Ba doesn’t know,” she says, voice cracking a little. “That I’m- that I-”

“That you have good taste?” Paul asks, smile a little wobbly. His voice is light, obviously trying to defuse some of the tension lining her shoulders, and she finds it working just a little, huffs a small laugh back at him.

“Chinese people are big on family,” she says, quietly. “I don’t know how he’ll take it, knowing that I won’t be bringing home a future husband, that I’ll never give him grandchildren.”

Paul raises an eyebrow. “He’s asked you for grandchildren? He never really seemed the type.”

“Not actively,” she says. “But you know Ba. He’s a caretaker, at heart. Growing up, he’d sometimes talk about me bringing a young man home, to help with the station-work, or to keep me company so I wouldn’t be lonely when his time was up. I don’t think he’d ever considered that I might bring a young woman home.”

Paul is quiet for a moment.

“You remember that time, back in senior year, when Mum found my Google search history and thought I was gay?” he says, at last, and Ellie snorts.

“Yes,” she says, “and not in the least because you’ve told that story at least ten times by now.”

He flashes her an unrepentant grin, lightning-quick, and then his face falls back into a more sombre expression. “I thought she was going to kill me, for being gay,” he says, slowly. “We’re a God-fearing household, we go to Church every Sunday, and five times a year we listen to a sermon on how the Lord made Adam and Eve, and not Adam and Steve. I was so sure that she’d cast me out of the family for committing some kind of grave sin, and I was terrified, even though I wasn’t actually gay.”

“Thanks,” Ellie says dryly. “This is making me feel way better already.”

“No, Ellie, listen,” he says, his voice earnest. “Here’s the most important part: she accepted it as part of me. Because that’s what family should do: accept you for you who are, and not who they want you to be. And your dad? Ellie, your dad is the best kind of family. I know that. And I know that you know that.”

Ellie sighs, and nods. She knows Paul isn’t lying, knows the truth in her bones like she knows the truth of Saturday night lu rou fan in front of the TV, spiced and warm with love. And truth be told, there’s a small part of her that feels awful about keeping something this big, this important to her, from her Ba.

“I’ll tell him,” she says, after mulling it over in silence. “In person. I don’t think this is the kind of thing I should drop on him over Skype.”

“I’ll keep your secret,” Paul smiles. “No pressure, alright? You don’t have to tell him if you don’t want to. But I just thought you deserved to know that you could tell him.”

“He’s all the family I have,” she says, softly. “I should tell him. He deserves to know.”

“Don’t tell him because you think he deserves it,” says Paul, slowly, deliberately. “Tell him because you want to.”

Ellie laughs, a little choked sound, a small sense of relief flooding over her. “When did you get so wise?”

“Oh, Ellie,” he says, and his smile is fond, even through the shitty graphics of his webcam. “I learned it all from you.”

~

It’s three weeks to finals and Ellie’s nose-deep in her American Poetry notes, yellow highlighter in one hand and ballpoint pen in the other, busily re-annotating a verse. It’s evening but the library is still about half-full, a stark difference from the quiet emptiness it would have had at around this time closer to the start of term, but finals are approaching now and most of the student population is only just remembering that they probably should start revising on lessons they haven’t paid attention to all term.

There’s warm fingers on the back of her neck and Ellie jumps, narrowly avoiding drawing a long streak of neon yellow ink across the back of her hand, as Blake slides into the empty seat next to her.

“Hey,” she says, sliding across a hot cup of green tea from the café. “You’ve been here since the library opened today – need a break?”

Ellie reaches for the cup and takes a long, fortifying sip, and only then does she realise she’s parched – she’d been too absorbed to remember to take a drink of water since at least the early afternoon.

“I’d like to finish going through these three poems, at the very least,” she says, regretfully.

Blake dimples at her, taking back the cup and sipping from it as well. “I can wait. But I’m dragging you to dinner after that, so you don’t forget to eat, alright?”

Under the table, she reaches for Ellie’s hand and gives it a gentle squeeze, and Ellie can’t help but smile back.

“Sure,” she says.

Half an hour later, Ellie’s packing up her stationery as Blake puts away a heavily dog-eared textbook bristling with post-it flags, and they head out of the library into a darkening evening, street lamps all already shining up and down the promenade. There are couples sitting close to each other on various benches and on the grass, some of them hugging or kissing each other, some of them just leaning close and speaking in hushed voices. Ellie almost starts to wonder why so many of them are out, and then belatedly remembers it’s a Saturday today.

“You know it’s close to finals when nobody’s leaving the campus even on date night Saturday,” Blake laughs, leading the way towards her dorm.

“Yeah,” says Ellie, distractedly, looking around at the various couples around. Most of them are straight couples, but she sees two guys leaning against a tree trunk watching a Youtube video together, one leaning his head on the other’s shoulder with their hands entwined; she sees two girls kissing in the shadow of one of the college buildings, half-hidden by the cover of night, and wonders.

She and Blake don't do couple-y things like that. Sure, they cuddle together in each other’s dorm rooms, and they’ve done their fair share of kissing, but nothing in public. They’ve never really discussed it, but when they’re in public they keep their hands to themselves, nothing more than a friendly shoulder-bump, a soft smile, or walking next to each other, too close to be just friends – but that’s it.

“Hey,” she says, once they’re both ensconced in Blake’s room, picking from the remains of a large bowl of microwave mac-and-cheese that they’d quickly devoured. She’s curled up into Blake’s side, now, mildly sleepy from the heavy weight of the cheese sitting in her stomach.

“Hmm?”

“Does it bother you, that we don’t hold hands or anything in public?”

Blake hums softly, and Ellie feels her drop her chin to rest softly on top of Ellie’s head.

“Not particularly,” she says. “Why?”

Ellie squirms a little. “I don’t know,” she says. “I just… well, I wondered. Isn’t it something couples do?”

“Well,” says Blake. “It’s not like it’s a pre-requisite or anything, you know. It’s not like we’re not a couple until we’ve held hands in public.”

“That’s not answering the question,” Ellie replies, frowning a little. “Does it bother you that we don’t?”

Blake’s quiet for a while, one hand idly tapping a rhythm on the side of Ellie’s arm. Then: “Ellie, you realise that if we hold hands in public, or show any other public displays of affection, then people will know you’re queer, right?”

And the thing is, she knows. She knows that it’ll be a declaration of her queer identity, opening up to the world this part of her that she’s only just started to come to understand and accept in the last few years, and she won’t deny that the thought terrifies her. But there’s still a part of her that wonders if she’s being fair to Blake by holding back, this girl who has given her heart entirely to Ellie to hold, and has not asked for anything in return.

“If it’s something you want,” she says, “If it’s something that’ll make you happy, I’d do it.”

Blake sighs, a puff of warm breath that ruffles the short baby-hairs at the top of Ellie’s head, and the arm that’s wrapped around Ellie’s shoulders squeezes a little. “I know you haven’t officially come out yet, other than to your close friends,” she says. “I’m not about to force you to come out to the entire world if you’re not ready for that.”

“Mm.”

“Ellie,” and Blake pulls away so she can look Ellie in the eyes, reaches out to squish Ellie’s cheeks in one hand. “I’ll never ask you to do anything that’s going to make you uncomfortable, alright? I’m not dating you so that I can show you off to the world. I’m dating you because you’re you. That’s all I need.”

“Okay,” Ellie tries to say, but it comes out garbled because of her squished cheeks. There’s a pause, and then both of them burst out snickering for a full thirty seconds before they can recompose themselves.

Once they’ve calmed down, Blake smiles and reaches out for Ellie’s left hand, threads their fingers together.

“I’m happy just with this,” she says, looking down at their joined hands. “Don’t worry about it, alright? We’re not other couples, and we don’t have to do what they do. We’ll just do things our own way.”

Ellie softens, and squeezes Blake’s hand in hers, a warm swell of affection rising in her chest. “Okay,” she says.

~

Ellie doesn’t go home immediately that summer. There’s no New York internship waiting for her (WSJ had asked if she’d like to come back, but she thinks of the little train booth and rickety little house she hasn’t seen in nearly three years, a warm smile and hot soup on the table, and declines the offer), but she calls her Ba, tells him she’s coming home only in the second month of summer break, because Blake’s invited her to spend a month with her in Iowa.

Blake’s not out to her family, and Ellie knows her sleeping bag at the foot of Blake’s bed is there because the Giuliani household thinks she’s Blake’s ‘friend from school’, but that's more than enough for her. They’ve definitely finished all of Fullmetal Alchemist by then (including the liveaction movie on Netflix, which Ellie firmly decides she’ll remain on the fence about), but every night they huddle together under Blake’s covers, one earbud each, and look through the catalogue of Asian shows on Netflix.

Ellie’s not one for hyperbole, but she thinks that if she is, she might well be tempted to say that it’s the best one month of her life.

Blake volunteers at an after-school centre most weekdays, giving supplementary lessons to children in the neighbourhood, helping to patch the gaps where the teachers or the textbooks haven’t managed to get through.

“I’m not going to force you to come with me,” she tells Ellie on the first day that she heads out for lessons. “I know you’re not comfortable meeting a bunch of new people at once, and some of the kids are really energetic.”

“It’s something important to you,” Ellie replies. “I’ll go with you. At least for one day, just to see what it’s like.”

And so, Ellie goes. Supplementary classes are held in an old building three streets down from Blake’s house, one session for younger children in the morning and one for older children in the afternoon. It’s unstructured chaos, and the handful of volunteers don’t really follow fixed lesson plans as much as they do answer questions on the spot. Ellie generates some modicum of excitement on the first day when she’s introduced as “Miss Blake’s best friend”, but as it turns out a good number of the children are just as shy as she is, and Ellie finds herself watching from a quiet corner as the children flock to Blake instead, watching as Blake patiently answers each question as best as she can.

It’s the afternoon session in the second week of Ellie’s Iowa summer when a young girl comes in with a well-worn copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Ellie’s been slowly helping Blake with the children, and they’re slowly beginning to warm up to her, but a bulk of them still head to Blake and the other volunteers first rather than this unfamiliar stranger in their midst.

It’s therefore a surprise to her when this girl comes up to her corner, book in hand and eyes wide. “Hi, I’m Brooklyn. Miss Blake says you're really good at literature,” she says, all in a rush. “Can I talk to you about To Kill a Mockingbird?”

“Of course,” Ellie says, moving to sit cross-legged on the floor, and motioning for Brooklyn to sit next to her.

Three hours later, some of the other children are beginning to leave, and Blake comes over to find the two of them deep in discussion about Atticus Finch’s views on doing the correct thing, and doing the right thing. Brooklyn’s young but she has interesting perspectives on the text, and Ellie doesn’t even realise they've been bent over the book together for so long until she shifts her seated position and feels how cramped her knees are.

“Hey, book nerds,” Blake says, looking down at them with an amused half-grin on her face. “They need to close the centre for the day.”

“Nooooo,” Brooklyn whines, but obligingly sticks a tattered bookmark between the pages that they’d been poring over. “Miss Ellie makes the book way more interesting than they do at school.”

“I’m here again tomorrow,” Ellie finds herself saying. “We can continue that discussion, if you’re interested.”

Brooklyn lights up at that. “Okay!” She bounces to her feet, and looks down at Ellie. “It’s a promise!”

Blake watches Brooklyn’s retreating back and laughs softly. “I see you’re getting good with them,” she says.

“Nah,” Ellie says, stretching out her cramped calves. “Definitely not as good as you. But it was fun, you know? I think I learned something from her today, as well. I can see why you like it.”

“Hm?”

“Teaching,” Ellie clarifies. “It’s more than clear to me that you’re in your element here, teaching others, but I think I only truly understood today, why you like it so much.”

Blake smiles a fond little smile at her. “Gosh,” she says, softly. “I love you, you nerd.”

Chapter Text

Blake sees her off at the station for her train back to Squahamish when her month in Iowa is up. “I’ll miss you,” Blake whispers into her ear as they hug, just a few seconds too long to be a hug between friends, but nobody’s watching on the crowded platform.

“I’ll text you,” Ellie whispers back. She’s got two stolen cardigans and a stolen high school hoodie from Blake’s closet stuffed into her bag and she knows she’s going to wear them to sleep most nights, but it’s still hard to leave part of her heart here on the platform, when they’ve spent the last month together pretty much 24 hours a day.

She’d told Blake about her plan to come out to her Ba, two nights ago when she’d started to pack up her suitcase; told her how she was both looking forward to and dreading going home before it. “If it doesn’t go well,” Blake had said, taking both of Ellie’s hands in hers, “I’ll beat him up for you. Girl scout’s honour.”

“Please don’t beat him up,” she’d said in reply, voice choked. “He’s a good guy, and he’s also very frail.”

“Alright,” Blake had said, “but I’ll give him a dozen calls a day if he doesn’t love and accept you like you deserve, alright? You’re being so, so brave, and I’m so proud of you.”

An announcement plays over the system now, notifying passengers that the train will depart soon, and Ellie pulls away from Blake’s warm embrace.

“I’ll see you next fall,” she says, and Blake smiles, a little quirk of her lips.

“I’ll Skype you this weekend,” she says. “Now go, silly, before your train leaves without you.”

And so, Ellie goes. She picks a window seat with a view of the platform, watches Blake as she waves and waves and waves until the station is no longer in view. It’s a long train ride, and she remembers taking this journey once before, with a large suitcase full of dreams, on her first ever trip out of Squahamish. It seems a lot shorter, now, most of the journey passing by while she drifts in and out of sleep, or immerses herself in the pages of a novel she’d picked up the week before.

Eventually, the train pulls into a painfully familiar platform, a familiar little booth on one side and an even more familiar house on the other, paint slowly peeling off its walls. The view of her childhood home from the train window is at once both familiar and strange, like viewing a memory through a sepia-toned lens, a snapshot of warm memories of the past, and she suddenly feels the need to scramble off the train, breathe the familiar air, hear the familiar crunch of the gravel below her sneakers.

She is the only one who gets off at Squahamish station, and there is nobody else with whom she could be mistaken for; and yet, the first thing she notices once she gets her luggage down from the carriage is a tall man with an undercut and a faded varsity jacket, holding a large piece of cardboard with the words Ellie Chu written on them in bold red marker ink.

“There she is!” Paul yells when he catches sight of her, and the next thing she knows he’s bounded over and swept her into a warm bear hug. She breathes in his familiar smell, spices and cooking-oil and home, and pats his back as best as she can with an ex-football player pinning her arms to her sides.

“I’m home,” she says, slowly, deliberately, and means it.

“Did you like the sign?” he asks, pulling back and grinning at her. He’s holding it loosely in his hand now, and she can faintly make out the word Munsky on the other side of it, likely part of the printing on the box the sign was recycled from.

“There is literally no way you would have been unable to find me,” she says dryly, and he beams at her. “Nobody got off the train except for me, and I’m the only Asian person besides my dad who would be getting off at Squahamish.”

“But it’s my first time seeing my best friend in three years! What if she’s gotten so cool that I don’t recognise her any more?”

“Please,” she says, rolling her eyes as he reaches across to swipe her suitcase from her before she can so much as protest. “We just Skyped like, last week, Munsky.”

“Yeah,” he says, turning back to look at her, smile warm and fond. “But it’s different, having you physically here.”

Ellie grins right back at him, and she realises that she’s missed this, even through all the wonderful experiences she’s had in Grinnell: the warm, easy acceptance of a person who’s seen her at her most vulnerable, who she’s seen at his lowest, and who she trusts implicitly. Maybe, she thinks to herself, this is what having a brother is like.

“Now,” Paul says, turning back. “Come on, let’s go. Mr Chu’s making all your favourites tonight, and they’re all my favourites too, so I really want to go back and eat right now.”

Paul marches up the ten steps it takes to get from the train tracks to the front door of her house, and throws the door open, dragging her suitcase inside. Ellie follows suit, more sedately, hears Paul call out and an answering voice come from the kitchen.

All at once, as Ellie steps into the foyer, she’s hit with the warm, spiced scent of the minced-meat gravy for lu rou fan simmering on the stove, the clean smell of rice cooking in the rice cooker, and an overwhelming sensation of home. She barely notices as the slight form of her Ba, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and hands slightly wet from a quick wash in the kitchen sink, comes out of the kitchen.

“Ellie,” he says, his voice breaking the careful silence. And then, in Mandarin: “You’re home.”

It’s not like she hasn’t seen him in three years, of course; there’s the regular Skype sessions with Paul playing tech assistant, but looking at his face on the grainy screen is nothing compared to seeing him standing before her. Paul, she thinks, might have been right – it is different, being physically back.

“Ba,” she says, and her voice cracks a little. She drops her backpack on the ground, kicks off her shoes, and shuffles forward to hug him. She feels like she’s five years old again, warm and sleepy in her Ba’s arms after watching a movie; fourteen years old again, eating leftovers on the couch while her father sleeps beside her; eighteen years old again, making dumplings side-by-side with her father in the kitchen.

“I’m back,” she says, again, pretending her voice isn’t choked with emotion. “I’m home.”

~

“So,” says Paul. They’re sitting in front of the TV in the Chus’ living room, with a massive basin of washed beansprouts in front of them, methodically snapping the little root off each sprout and throwing it into another bowl on the coffee table. Fried noodles are on the menu tonight, and Ellie had volunteered to prep the beansprouts (mostly out of nostalgia for the job she had once despised) while Ba went out to the supermarket to get condiments.

A commercial’s playing on the screen, but they’ve long turned the volume down to mute in favour of talking to each other. “So,” Ellie echoes. She pulls out three beansprouts and snaps off all their roots at once.

There’s a pause, broken only by the soft wet sound of beansprouts snapping between their fingers.

“How has everything been, back here?” Ellie asks, eventually.

“Pretty much the same,” Paul shrugs. “Most days, I think there must be some unspoken natural law of Squahamish, that if more than one thing changes within the span of a week, the fabric of reality will bend and warp itself into oblivion.” He says this with a straight face, and there’s something so incongruous about his deliberate lack of inflection with the utter ridiculousness of his statement that Ellie can’t help but snicker into her sleeve for a moment.

“Business as usual for you as well?”

“Well,” Paul says, “I’ve been doing more mail-order stuff recently, for some food stalls that want to sell my sausages. It’s driving Mum nuts, because I’m spending more time working on my own stuff rather than helping out with the shop. But I think I’ve managed to talk her around, at least a little.”

Ellie knows vaguely about the mail-order plan, having been a passive part of the group Zoom calls between Paul, Priya and herself discussing the marketing plan behind it. It had been three separate calls and a long, frantic email chain (that Ellie had half-ignored once it went into discussions of design and social media engagement), but the power of procrastination of her actual college tutorials had meant that Priya had nearly singlehandedly hammered out a marketing plan for Munsky’s Sausages in the better part of a week.

“It’s good,” she says, now. “That your mum’s okay with it.”

“Well,” Paul says, with a small crooked smile. “It took us a while to get there.”

“Hmm,” Ellie hums, and throws another fistful of beansprouts into the bowl. “How has the rest of Squahamish been?”

Paul badly stifles a snort, and sways his knee gently to the side to knock against her own. “Since when did you care about the rest of this dinky town?” he asks, teasingly. “I bet you don’t know more than five people in it.”

“I know your mum,” Ellie says, indignantly. “And at least two of your siblings. And Mrs Geselchap. And-” She cuts off, noting Paul’s small smile curling into a wider grin.

“What?”

“Nothin’,” he says nonchalantly, reaching over to pluck some more beansprouts out of the never-ending basin, snapping their roots off. “Go on. That’s still only four people, not counting me and your dad.”

“…And Aster,” she says. “That makes five.”

“Mm,” says Paul, still grinning. “Well, I don’t think you’re that interested to know about my siblings and you’ve asked after my mum already, and I don’t think you’re itching to ask about Mrs G since you’ve been making plans to meet her for coffee. So if you’re using this to fish about information about Aster you might as well ask outright.”

Ellie rolls her eyes and flicks a piece of beansprout root at Paul – it lands in the soft curls of his hair and stays there, like a stray leaf. It’s true, she had been trying to fish for information about Aster without coming across as being too obvious, but apparently Paul knows her better than she thinks. “Fine. Don’t make it weird, Munsky. How is Aster doing? I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”

Paul is silent for a while, the only sound the soft burble of the TV and the snapping of beansprout roots. “She came back, earlier this summer,” he says. “She’s gone up to Sacramento now, though. Something about a church retreat? Not sure what kind of church retreat takes more than one month, though.”

“How’s she doing in art school?”

Paul shrugs. “I didn’t really talk to her that much,” he says. “Her dad keeps her busy helping out in church and stuff. But I did run into her once, after service. She said she loves being in art school, and can’t wait to go back.”

“Hmm,” says Ellie. “That’s good, I’m glad. I know she was still trying to figure things out when she applied for art school. It’s good to know it’s working out for her.”

“…Do you wish things had turned out differently?” Paul asks eventually, after another long comfortable pause.

Ellie raises an eyebrow as she reaches into the basin, her fingers finally brushing the bottom for the first time – the end of the beansprouts is in sight. “Do I wish what had turned out differently?”

“You know,” Paul says. “With Aster. If you’d kissed her sooner. If you hadn’t been pretending to be me when you had those deep, late night conversations.”

And- well. She’d be lying if she said she’d never thought about it, wondered about the could-have-beens in the quiet of a late night. But those were the thoughts of freshman Ellie, lonely in a strange place and clinging to the slightest shred of familiarity; she hasn’t thought about Aster like that in many months. “I don’t know,” she says, honestly. “Maybe if things had turned out differently, I wouldn’t have gone to Grinnell. Maybe I wouldn’t have become who I am today, maybe I could have been someone different. But there’s no use dwelling on it, you know? I don’t think either of us would have wanted to give up on our dream schools just to make whatever we had work out, when we didn't even know what we had. And we wouldn’t have wanted the other to give up their dream school, either.”

“Bad timing, I guess,” Paul agrees, throwing another fistful of rootless beansprouts into the bowl.

“Besides,” Ellie continues, a little drily, “I have a girlfriend now, one I’m happy with. So no, I haven’t really been thinking of a potential relationship I could have been in with another girl.”

Paul is silent for a while. “Well,” he says at last, scooping up the last of the beansprouts. “I guess that’s a fair point.”

~

It’s a Friday night, nearly a month into her return to Squahamish, when she finally works up enough courage. Paul’s eating dinner at home today (“The boy has an actual family, you know,” her Ba had said dryly in Mandarin when she caught herself pulling out three sets of chopsticks from the drawer for dinner) so it’s just her and Ba, curled up in the two squishy armchairs in front of the television.

The house smells like the chicken soup Ba had made in deference to the rainy weather that’d persisted all day, bringing a slight damp chill to the air rather at odds with the warmth of the summer season. He’d bought a whole chicken and let it cook in his soup pot for pretty much the whole day, and when Ellie’d come in in the evening from helping the Munskys unload their latest meat delivery she’d been hit right in the face with the warm, comforting smell of ginseng chicken soup.

An old movie’s playing on the television, the one she remembers watching a number of years ago with the woman running along the platform after a train, watching her lover pull away from the station as she keeps running and running. Back then, she’d thought it was a little stupid – even Usain Bolt wouldn’t be able to keep pace with a train, let alone a woman in dress and heels. But now, she imagines herself on the platform and Blake on the train, perhaps on her way to begin some long-term journey that’ll take her far away for an extended period of time, and wonders if she might just run after the train as well, watching it until she can’t see it any more.

“Ssh,” Ba says as she gets up to wash her bowl. He motions gently to the screen. “Best part.”

She clutches her empty bowl, sits back down, and watches as the scene fades and the credits begin to roll. “You’ve seen this movie multiple times, Ba,” she says. “You don’t need to hold your breath for that scene every time.”

“It is a good scene," he says. “Shows the power of love.”

Ellie hums noncommittally, and reaches over to pluck the unwashed soup bowl from his hands. “I guess so,” she says.

His gaze drifts back to the screen, but his attention’s not focused on it now, and the silence grows, broken only by the soft chatter of the television. Ellie thinks about chasing after someone you love as they pull away on the train, laughing and crying and breathless. She thinks about the words curled into a lump in the back of her throat, that have been wedged there for the better part of two months now, aching to be spoken yet always firmly swallowed down for the fear of the reaction. She thinks about a cat in a box with a radioactive particle, waiting. She thinks about the warm crackle of bad-wifi static, an understanding smile, Paul’s voice, tinny over the speakers: “he’s the best kind of family”.

“Ba,” she says, and winces as her voice cracks.

He turns his head to face her, eyebrow raised. “Hm?”

“I-” She stops, licks her lips, tries to swallow to moisten her suddenly-dry throat. “I met someone. In college.”

There’s a pause, and when he replies, it’s in Mandarin: “Oh, a classmate of yours?”

“…No,” she replies in the same language. “Someone from a different major.”

And, well, okay. Maybe she’s a little bit of a coward, taking the easy way out and not clarifying to her Ba. Or maybe it’s easier to hide behind the soft, smooth tones of Mandarin. Easier to hide behind the fact that in Mandarin, the third-person singular pronoun sounds the same when spoken aloud, whether it refers to a man or a woman. So she clings to it, the last corner of the security blanket just before it slides off her shoulders, revealing the truth below.

“Mm,” Ba says. “Have the two of you been together long?”

“Not very,” says Ellie, and pretends to ignore the little lump of guilt burning like something acidic at the back of her throat. “Maybe about half a year or so. It’s still kind of new.”

“And do they make you happy?”

Ellie thinks, unbidden, of cool nights huddled together in front of a laptop screen, stolen sweaters and cardigans squirrelled away in her closet, kind eyes and warm kisses on her forehead. “Yes,” she says, and almost doesn’t realise that a little soft smile has made its way onto her face. “They make me happy.”

“That’s good,” he says, and nods decisively. “Do they know how to make dumplings?”

Ellie blinks. “Uh,” she says. She thinks about the gnocchi alla sorrentina she and Blake had made one afternoon, rolling out what felt like millions of tiny potato dumplings and dumping them straight into boiling, slightly salted water. “Not the kind we make, but something similar.”

“Good, good,” he hums. “Bring them home one day, and I will teach them.”

And there’s easy acceptance in his tone, just like that, and Ellie swallows. “That’s it?” she asks. “You’re not going to ask about who they are, or what they’re like?”

Ba shrugs, looking entirely unconcerned, but his eyes are warm as they gaze at her. “They make you happy, yes?”

“Yes, they do.”

“Then that is enough for me,” he says. “If this person can make my daughter happy, then who am I to judge them further?”

Ellie bites her lip, hard, and she can feel the choking feeling of the lingering guilt, the one truth she hasn’t said, welling up in her throat and causing her eyes to prickle with the promise of tears. She’s grateful that Ba’s accepted this new development in her life this easily, but she also knows he’s most likely under the impression that she’s got a new boyfriend, and part of her wonders if he’ll still react this way if she disabuses him of that notion.

She’s at the precipice of a cliff, looking down at the drop below with wings attached to her arms, wondering if she’ll hit the rocks below if she jumps. But she’s no Icarus.

“Ba,” she says. She takes a deep breath, and she takes a running leap. “Ba, I have a girlfriend. I’m dating a girl.”

He cocks his head at her, and she can almost see him processing the information as he goes quiet for a while. “Okay,” he says at last. “Bring your girlfriend home one day. I will teach her how to make dumplings. Our family recipe.”

“You’re not… mad?”

“Why would I be?” he asks, and she can see genuine confusion in his eyes. “I trust your judgment, Ellie. If they make you happy, then they must be a good person, and that is enough for me.”

“Oh,” she says, and there’s nothing else she can say to that, nothing else she can say in the face of that easy acceptance. (Best kind of family, indeed.) Ba gets up from his seat, pads over to where she’s sitting frozen with a soup bowl in her hands, and puts his arm gently around her shoulders.

“You worry too much, Ellie,” he says quietly, and she slumps into his familiar warmth. “It will be fine.”

~

It’s the last week before she’s due to return to Grinnell for the start of her senior year. She’s been to see Mrs Geselchap around five times by this point, but every time her old teacher’s been bogged down marking summer school homework, so their coffee chats have all been reduced to Ellie quietly reading a book or helping Mrs Geselchap pick out spelling and grammar errors in students’ essays, while their takeaway cups of coffee sit cooling on the table.

Today’s no different, Mrs Geselchap’s red pen swiftly slashing its way through a dwindling stack of essays like the swift flick of a fencer’s foil, and Ellie quietly flipping through the lesson plans Mrs Geselchap has made for the upcoming term.

“Animal Farm again?” she asks, tapping her pencil on the second page of the lesson plan, and Mrs Geselchap snorts.

“Easier that way,” she says. “We don’t get nearly enough government funding to change up the assigned literature books frequently, you know. At least this way I can re-use the same copies every year, save some money.”

“Hm,” Ellie says thoughtfully. “Little bit of a pity.” She thinks of an afternoon’s discussion with a young middle-school-aged girl, animated eyes and waving hands, discussing themes that bear relevance even to every day life, and wonders if the young children of Squahamish deserve to have their horizons widened a little, even if it’s only through a class that almost none of them pay attention to.

“To Kill A Mockingbird would be good, if you ever want to consider changing it up,” she says. “Or maybe The Colour Purple. Not that Animal Farm was bad or anything, just- I think most people were too distracted by talking animals to consider the historical parallels.”

Mrs Geselchap laughs dryly, placing another essay on the ‘finished’ stack. “You think too highly of them,” she says. “It’s hard to beat an appreciation for good literature into children who’d much rather be looking at their social media accounts during class, so the talking animals at least keep their attention some of the time.”

“Hm,” Ellie says. “I guess.”

“If you wanted to teach interested students,” Mrs Geselchap continues, “your best bet is to go teach in college, where the students choose your degree. Most of the time, at least.”

They sit in silence for another half an hour before Mrs Geselchap finishes marking the last paper and caps her red pen, leaning back in her chair to stretch and sigh in relief. “So,” she says, reaching for her cold coffee and looking across the rim of the cup at Ellie. “One more year left in Grinnell, hm?”

“Yeah,” says Ellie. She’s already regaled Mrs Geselchap with tales of her past three years in college on previous visits, but Mrs Geselchap looks like she’s got more questions to ask, so Ellie patiently waits.

“And what do you plan to do after?”

When Ellie blinks in surprise and doesn’t answer, Mrs Geselchap snorts and leans forward. “If you don’t want to be stuck in a school like this teaching books about talking animals to children who aren’t interested in listening, you might need to start considering what else you can do with that English degree of yours to get out of that career path, you know?”

Dimly, Ellie remembers four years ago, Mrs Geselchap pushing across a Grinnell application form to her after class, telling her: Grinnell was the best years of my life, and wonders.

“Did you ever?” she asks, instead of answering. “Consider what you were going to do after Grinnell?”

“Not soon enough,” says Mrs Geselchap, and her smile is rueful. “I made up all sorts of excuses to put it off – I wasn’t sure yet, I wanted to finish my degree first, I didn't want to take up additional student loans – and before I knew it I’d been back here for a couple of years, teaching in this school. So that’s my advice to you, Ellie: plan early, before you regret. You have immense potential, and you shouldn’t waste it.”

“But I don’t know yet, what I want to do after college. I’m enjoying learning in college so much, sometimes I feel like I don’t want to have to leave.”

“Hm,” Mrs Geselchap says. She reaches over to the second drawer at her desk and rifles through a stack of papers, eventually pulling out what appears to be a crumpled brochure, and Ellie stares. She distinctly remembers Mrs Geselchap pulling out the Grinnell application form from that very drawer, and wonders if it’s some kind of dimensional subpocket which provides her teacher with the exact college information the student seeking her advice requires.

It’s a brochure for Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and it’s open to the page detailing the PhD programme in English and Comparative Literature. Ellie finds her throat suddenly dry and she swallows, mind swirling as she stares at the simple course outline set out on the page. Her mind’s racing, thinking about further research and analysis into literature, the very things she enjoys in college now; thinking about the requirement for doctorate students to teach undergraduate classes. She remembers the excitement of watching one student discover the depth of themes in a written work, the joy of bouncing ideas back and forth with a contemporary, and considers.

Mrs Geselchap’s watching the play of emotions across her face, and smiles. “You’re tempted, aren’t you.”

“PhDs are expensive,” sighs Ellie, but it’s a half-hearted protest at best. She’s already in Grinnell on scholarship, and it’s not impossible to imagine that a similar scholarship may be available in Columbia. Admissions open in September, reads the very last line of the brochure, and she runs her fingers along the inked line once, twice, trying to calm the excitement welling up inside her.

“I’ll think about it,” she says slowly, fixing the image of the Columbia school crest in her mind. “I’ll think about it.”

She pockets the brochure.

Chapter Text

Fall of senior year dawns like pulling a freshly-baked loaf of sourdough from the oven: crisp, and exciting with a hint of the unknown. Ellie steps onto the now-familiar campus grounds with a new denim jacket ( Ma shrunk it in the wash by accident, but it looks really good on you , Paul had said, grinning, draping it around her shoulders like a cape) and a suitcase full of tentative dreams. It’s surreal, almost, to think that this is going to be her final year among these tree-lined walkways and warm brick buildings, which once seemed intimidating to her but are now familiar sights, rich with memories and learned routines.

All around she can easily identify the new freshmen, gawking young almost-adults with too-new backpacks and too-crisp textbooks, wandering around the campus and trying to find their way around.

It’s only been three years since she was in their position, but somehow to Ellie it feels like a lifetime ago. She can relate, though - senior year feels like the runway before the takeoff to a brand new unknown once again; though unlike the new freshmen, she doesn’t have any map ahead of her just yet, only a hopeful maybe clutched close to her chest. (She hasn’t told anyone but Paul yet about the Columbia brochure, a folded mess buried at the bottom of her backpack. Somehow, she’s not sure if she could survive the weight of the expectations that would result therefrom.)

And yet, despite the unknown road ahead, some things remain the same, familiar and warm. Exhibit A: Priya in their room when she arrives, slightly winded from dragging her heavy suitcase up the stairs. Priya’s in another faded band tee, her riotous hair once more cut into the pixie cut that she’s taken a liking to since sophomore year, a new helix piercing gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight streaming in from the window.

“Hey,” she says, grinning, looking up as the dorm room door scrapes open. “Look who the cat dragged in.”

There’s soft piano music coming from the device in her hands, which Ellie realises upon closer inspection is a Nintendo Switch. As Priya fiddles idly with the joystick, the piano music becomes more and more frantic, before suddenly there’s a loud, incongruous honk that blares out from the device.

“...Um,” says Ellie.

“Dude, get over here,” Priya says, lifting a hand from the controls to flap in her direction and wave her over, patting it on the spot on the mattress next to her. “It’s a bit old, but I just found this goose game pre-installed when I got this Switch secondhand and it’s amazing . You so have to try it.”

Amused, Ellie lets go of the handle of her suitcase and sits down on the bed next to Priya peering at the screen. There’s a cute game on screen, and she watches as Priya controls a goose running around what appears to be some sort of quaint English town. The goose onscreen appears to be sneaking up on an unsuspecting young boy, before Priya smashes one of the other buttons on the device and the goose honks loudly, startling the boy into dropping his spectacles, and some sort of to-do list appears in a corner of the screen, showing an item being struck off.

Priya cackles.

“This is everything I have ever wanted,” she says, pretending to wipe a tear from her eye. “Here, you try. You press this button to honk, this one to flap your wings, and this one to pick up stuff in your beak.”

Ellie picks up the device, somewhat lost. “Look at us responsible adults, cackling over a cartoon goose wreaking havoc on an innocent village,” she says dryly, giving the joystick an experimental flick.

“Please,” Priya says. “It’s precisely because we’re responsible adults that we can cackle over a chaotic neutral cartoon goose. It’s not even day one of lessons yet, we’re allowed to live a little.”

Tentatively, Ellie begins to move the goose around, picking up a glass bottle from the trash bin onscreen. She makes the goose honk into it, and the sound of the resulting honk that blares through the speakers takes on more of an echo-ey quality. “The attention to detail is amazing,” she marvels, making it honk again. She drops the bottle and has the goose pick up a walkie-talkie from a nearby bin; when the goose honks into it, the sound comes out of a corresponding unit placed halfway across the screen, startling the bespectacled boy again. It’s schadenfreude in the best way, and she can’t stop grinning as she tests out the different buttons.

Priya laughs. “I know, right?”

Ellie won’t say it out loud, but as she continues to maneuver the goose around the town, stealing toilet paper and groceries from a nearby store and terrorising an electronics salesman, she can feel the stress of grad school applications, senior year and the unknown future ahead evaporate from her, even if just for a single warm afternoon. 

~

It’s the first week of fall term, and Blake texts her to say she’ll be in the library. Which is in itself a strange thing - first week is usually reserved for introductory classes, and the library is nearly devoid of students, since there’s nothing substantive to study for just yet. And Blake is a hard worker, but not even she is inclined to do pre-reading in the first week of classes.

When Ellie finds Blake sequestered in a corner of the library, she’s got her head buried in a book decidedly not related to her major; instead of the diagrams and thick chunks of text of her psychology textbooks, she’s got a tiny book with Japanese characters printed in black and red, a transparent sheet of red acrylic sticking out from the middle of the book.

“Hey,” Ellie says, plopping down next to Blake and resting her chin on Blake’s shoulder for a brief second, taking advantage of the empty library to indulge a little. She hasn’t seen Blake since that day on the train platform at the start of summer break, and she can already catalogue the changes in her girlfriend’s appearance: she’s gotten a haircut, her eyebags have gotten darker, and her slouch has gotten slightly worse.

Blake looks up at her and her eyes fill with warmth, as they crinkle into a smile. “Hey,” she says, leaning into Ellie’s side for a moment. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“New extracurricular?” Ellie jerks her head over at the other 3 Japanese-language reference books scattered across the table, including what looks like a thick dictionary. Blake laughs, lifting an ink-stained hand from her notebook to run it through her hair absently.

“Sort of,” she says. “I, uh, signed up for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test on impulse, at 2am one night. It’s in December, but the material is a bit more academic than I’m used to, so I’ll need to catch up.”

Ellie snorts, shaking her head. “Not sure why you would voluntarily sign up for more studying in senior year, but alright.”

Blake flashes her a quicksilver grin, and Ellie thinks she catches a flicker of some other emotion in her eyes, but she blinks again and it’s gone, Blake now capping her pen and pulling all of the reference books into a neat stack.

“Let’s go eat,” she says, shoving the books into her bag. “Mum packed me a whole bunch of food and there’s no way I can finish it all. We can squish in my room and you can catch me up on your summer.”

Ellie snorts, reaching across the table for the dictionary so she can carry it, not trusting the thin straps of Blake’s book bag to hold the weight of the thick volume. “I already told you about most of it, by text.”

“Maybe I just want to be able to watch my girlfriend’s face as she tells me about all the fun she had this summer,” Blake grins, and Ellie can’t resist a smile pulling at her lips at Blake’s warm, teasing tone. 

“Well, who am I to say no to that?”

They traipse up to Blake’s dorm and spend 10 minutes figuring out the setting at which to microwave the homemade focaccia bread from Blake’s nonna , and debating whether or not it’s worth reheating the dumpling soup from Blake’s mother, at the risk of overcooking the delicate dumplings. Eventually, they end up with mostly warm food as they sit on the floor of Blake’s dorm, eating out of the same container with their legs curled under a single blanket. The ending credits of a documentary about Osakan street food roll on Blake’s laptop screen, a Netflix prompt popping up asking if they’d like to proceed to the next episode.

Ellie reaches into Blake’s still-half-full open suitcase lying on the floor and fishes out a cardigan, sticking her arms through the sleeves and relaxing as the thin layer of knit chases away some of the early evening chill. Blake laughs fondly, nudging Ellie’s foot with her own.

“You cardigan thief,” she says. “Don’t you still have the ones you pinched from my closet over summer?”

Ellie shrugs, pulling the long arms of the cardigan down so only the tips of her fingers are visible, and nudges Blake’s foot back. “I had to put them through the laundry at some point, and now they smell like soap instead of you. I’ll return them to you - they’re in my suitcase but I forgot to bring them down.”

There’s a pause, before Blake turns and buries her face in Ellie’s shoulder. “That’s not fair,” she mumbles, voice muffled through the fabric. “Stop being so cute.”

(Ellie doesn’t know it then, but the hazy memory of that evening, the faint chill of an early fall night perfumed by rosemary and thyme, is the last time in a long while that she’ll feel this warm.)

~

It’s a cold early winter night, just before curfew, when Priya finds her in the kitchen. Ellie’s hands are moving feverishly, stirring through the half-empty bowl of raw pork mixed with shredded cabbage and a blend of soy sauce, sesame oil and ginger. In her other hand she’s got an empty dumpling skin, and with smooth practiced motions she stuffs the skin with meat, seals it with a few quick folds, and places it on the tray next to her.

“Girl, what on earth,” Priya says, and Ellie jumps.

“P-” Ellie starts, but her voice catches on her dry thought and comes out as a cough. She clears her throat, hoarse from an entire afternoon of tight-lipped silence, and tries again. “Priya.”

“The freshmen told me the kitchen was being haunted by a dumpling-making ghost,” Priya says, her mouth in a wry tilt, a touch of dry humour in her voice. “I gallantly volunteered to lead the expedition to investigate the matter.”

Ellie blinks at her, another half-made dumpling already in her hands as they continue to move on autopilot. “It’s just me,” she says, for a lack of anything else to say, and Priya snorts.

“I figured, when they said the dumpling ghost was wearing a plaid shirt.”

Sighing, Ellie drops the completed dumpling on the floured tray, and picks up another skin. Priya casts an eye over the other two trays covered with damp tea-towels sitting on the table, and the veritable mountain of empty dumpling skin packets stacked in a corner by the sink, before turning back to Ellie with an eyebrow raised.

“Do I want to know how long you’ve been standing here making dumplings?”

“Probably not,” Ellie says, defeatedly. “I kind of lost count after the eighth packet of dumpling skins.”

“ How on earth do you still have meat left to stuff those with?”

Ellie shrugs. “I replenished it, I think. At….8pm, maybe?”

Priya sighs. “Girl,” she says, “consider this an intervention. Put down that dumpling. Why are you making enough to feed a hungry Asian family for the next month or two?”

Ellie worries the dumpling in her hands, creases the folds in the top one by one with the pad of her thumb until all the filling is sealed away. She herself isn’t too sure how this frenzy started, except a vague hazy recollection of frustration, defeat, and the overwhelming need to do something to take her mind off of her application for grad school. That overwhelming need had led her to her dumpling-making stash, recently replenished from her and Priya’s latest jaunt to the Asian supermarket; she’d been desperate for something familiar and comforting, and the mindless rhythm of stuffing and folding dumplings, of shredding cabbage and mixing the meat filling, had been a very welcome distraction.

“I just…” She breaks off, sighs, and puts down the completed dumpling. She doesn’t look Priya in the eye, focuses on picking a bit of raw pork from under her fingernail, as she says, “I guess I just needed to do something that I know I’m good at.”

“Mm,” says Priya, her voice softer now. “Ellie, look at me. You’ve never had a problem with confidence in yourself before now. What brought this on? Is it the grad school application?”

Ellie turns to look at Priya, at warm brown eyes soft with worry and understanding, and her shoulders sag a little. “I don’t know,” she says, honestly. “I know I’d be a good fit for the programme. I know I would have fun doing it, and I really want to get in.”

Priya nods, but doesn’t say anything, and Ellie takes the time to organise the swirling mess of thoughts in her head back into some form of order. 

“I guess maybe I just want the spot in that programme too much,” she continues. “It’s such a dream placement that I’m terrified of how much I want it, and I’m even more terrified of the disappointment I might feel if I don’t get it. I’ve been thinking about the programme at Columbia ever since the end of summer, and I’ve not thought of where else I might go other than Columbia. I’ve been so terrified that it feels like if I talk about it aloud I might jinx my chances of going there, so I haven’t told even my Ba about applying. Only you and Paul know.”

Unbidden, her mind goes to Mrs Geselchap’s advice: plan early, before you regret . She wonders if Mrs Geselchap might have forgotten to mention that even planning early would feel like standing at the edge of a cliff before a bungee jump, gazing down into the canyon below and wondering if the tension of the rope would be strong enough to withstand the jump down.

Priya hums, and reaches out past Ellie to begin placing the empty chopping-board into the sink, and wrapping the half-full bowl of meat with cling wrap to place back in the fridge. “Ellie,” she says, as she works. “As the queen Hilary Duff once said, don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game .”

Ellie, who’s for the most part grown up on a steady diet of black-and-white films and (far more recently) some selected Japanese anime titles from Netflix, doesn’t recognise the quote, but nods along anyway. (This, at least, is routine for interactions with Priya.)

“Sure,” Priya continues, now reaching out to stuff all of the kitchen waste into the bin. “It’s not guaranteed that you’ll get a spot at Columbia. There’s a million colleges out there in the United States, and there’s probably a ton of people all applying for that programme. I’m sure they’re all smart and stuff as well. But, Ellie, if you want this spot so much that the thought of not getting it scares you, then I need you to know that not applying for it will guarantee that you won’t get the spot.”

Ellie nods. “I know,” she sighs. “I’m being irrational, I guess.”

“You might be,” Priya allows, “but that’s entirely valid. Come, Ellie, let’s put these dumplings in the freezer. Wash your hands. That’s it, come on.”

She guides Ellie’s hands to the sink and turns on the tap, and Ellie begins to scrub off the fat and residual meat on her hands on autopilot as Priya shoves the finished dumplings into the freezer. (“God, Ellie, there’s another three trays of them in here already, I think you could probably feed the entire dorm for a month .”) Once they’ve restored the kitchen to some semblance of order, Priya gently tugs her back upstairs to their room, with the laptop Ellie had abandoned in the mid-afternoon. Dimly, she can hear the sound of Priya opening the window, letting in the cool night air.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do, okay? You’re going to sit here and take a deep breath.”

Ellie does, feeling the cold air rush into her lungs, and lets it all out in a slow whoosh . She does it again, and a third time, and then she hears the dial tone on Priya’s phone.

“What-” she starts, looking down at Priya’s phone just as the contact, simply labelled Ellie’s sausage boy , picks up the call.

“Hello?” comes a voice through the other end, familiar even though the static of long-distance phone calls, and Ellie can feel the tension seep out of her shoulders a little, unbidden.

“Paul,” she croaks.

“Ellie? Wait, isn’t this Priya’s number?” Through the fog in her mind, Ellie’s heart warms a little at the fact that Paul can apparently recognise her voice even when it’s speaking through a different person’s phone.

“Sure is,” Priya says, leaning towards the mic on the phone. “Ellie’s worried about her grad school application, and had a brief panic that led to her making five hundred dumplings in the dorm kitchen.”

“Oh, Ellie,” Paul’s voice sounds a little sorrowful, “Columbia, right? Why are you worried? I thought you had everything ready already. Mrs G told me last week that she’d uploaded her supporting statement for you and everything, and I know you got the other two from your Grinnell professors.”

“I’m still working on the personal statement,” Ellie sighs. “It reads like the world’s most boring person wrote it.”

“I’m sure that’s a lie,” Paul says drily. “You, Ellie Chu, cannot possibly be boring.”

“What if I am, Paul? What am I going to do, if I’ve had a taste of a dream like Columbia, and then it turns out I can’t really have it?” Ellie takes a deep breath of cold air, in and out. She thinks of how Squahamish is set in its ways, practices and attitudes that had seemed merely odd before now confining and suffocating after she’s had a taste of the world beyond her well, the world beyond this small town. “I love Ba, and I love you, but I don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life in Squahamish. I don’t think I can spend the rest of my life in Squahamish.”

“Ellie,” Paul says calmly, and she can almost hear his quick eye roll, almost see the quirk of his lip as he’s preparing to settle in for a long argument. “You’re like, super smart and super talented. You were a literature god when you were in high school. Why wouldn’t they take you?”

Ellie huffs a sigh. “You’re just biased because you know me,” she says, wryly. “It’s such a prestigious programme, and I’m sure people brighter than me are all vying for spots.”

“Yes,” comes the patient reply, “but do you know what they aren’t?”

Ellie blinks. “What?”

“They aren’t Ellie Chu.”

Ellie almost wants to snort, almost wants to put her face in her hands, but Paul continues. “They weren’t analysing the required reading from 10 different angles in order to write 10 different essays in high school. They weren’t holding sophisticated discussions about literature past midnight all through senior year while pretending to be an entirely different person. Ellie, you were born to do something like this, and it would be a waste if they didn’t take you. I’m sure they will see that.”

His words are warm with confidence, and despite herself Ellie can feel that warmth trickle into her bones, driving away the winter chill. For a moment, she imagines she’s back home at the dining table, Paul grinning while cooking sausages for dinner while Ba reads the newspaper. Sighing, she reaches out and opens up her laptop, the screen lighting up to reveal her half-finished personal statement.

“I believe in you, Ellie,” Paul says. “You don’t need to lie, or pretend to be someone you’re not in order to come across as interesting. You should just be yourself, and I think that’s already more than interesting enough.”

“I’m going to make you sanity-check this once I’m done,” Ellie warns.

“Of course,” Paul says immediately. “I’m not sure how much help I’ll be, but I’ll ask Mrs G for her opinion as well. We’re both cheering you on, you know. Us and Mr Chu, of course.”

“Okay.” Ellie takes another deep breath for good measure, stares at the unfinished sentence on the Word document, the cursor blinking at her. “Okay.”

She lets out the breath in a slow whoosh , winter-cold air warmed by her lungs. Dimly, she can hear Priya bidding goodbye to Paul and hanging up, but she filters out the sound as she begins to think about Columbia, about herself, and about why she wants so badly to get into the graduate programme.

Ellie sets her fingers to the laptop keys, and begins to type.

Chapter Text

A couple of weeks after Ellie sits down with Paul murmuring support over the phone and submits her Columbia application, she’s leaning against the foot of Blake’s bed and watching as her girlfriend frantically tries to scoop various reference books into the small suitcase she’s bringing with her into Colorado for the Japanese proficiency test.

“Blake,” she says, after Blake has picked up and put down the same book three times, considering if it’s worth stuffing into her suitcase, “it’s only a few days more before the test. Bringing too many of those with you along to Colorado is just going to stress you out.”

Blake groans, drops the book back onto her bed cover and flops down face-first onto the bed, her legs hanging awkwardly off and toes dangling slightly above the floor.

“I don’t know why I’m so nervous ,” Ellie hears a muffled whine from Blake’s direction, through three layers of cloth and mattress. “All I need to do is pass, and I just need to get a 60% to pass. I’ve studied for this and I’ve done the mock papers online, this shouldn’t be a problem. But I’m still so nervous and I can’t figure out why.”

Ellie scooches over and reaches out to gently pat Blake’s ankle, the part of Blake’s body closest to her. “You’ve studied for it really hard,” she says, partly because it’s true, and partly because she’s not sure what to say in this situation - it’s been an age since she was properly nervous for an exam. “I know you can do it.”

Blake groans, and rolls over in bed so she can grab her pillow and hurl it up towards the ceiling. It arcs in a gentle parabola and comes back down to earth, landing neatly on top of Blake’s suitcase with a soft puff of dust.

“You always make sense, Ellie,” Blake grumbles, without any real heat.

There’s a pause, while Ellie watches soft motes of dust swirl around in the late afternoon sun. “Why are you so nervous?” Ellie asks at last, keeping her hand warm on Blake’s ankle.

“I don’t know,” Blake sighs. “I just- It’s stupid.”

Ellie hums but stays silent. Sure enough, after a bit more rolling around her bed, Blake continues: “I guess, I just really want to get that qualification this year. And I’m just scared of not getting it.”

“You could take it again next year, right?”

Blake sighs. “It’s possible. But it’s also possible that I might not be able to. I might not be-” She cuts herself off, and kicks her food idly against the bed. “We’ll be working by then, you know. We’ll never be this free again. Can you imagine studying for something on top of working an office job?”

Ellie can honestly say she hasn’t had that thought cross her mind before, since her post-Grinnell plans consist of applying to do 6 more years of studying. But now doesn’t seem like the time to bring that up, so she idly pats Blake’s ankle a bit more.

(A small part of her wonders, what Blake had initially been planning to say.)

“It’s okay to want something very badly,” she says after a while, and she can hear Blake stop shuffling around to listen. “It’s okay to want something so badly you’re scared of not getting it.” (She’s learned this herself, a few weeks ago on a cold night desperately making comfort food in a dorm kitchen, trying to avoid thinking about the dreaded what if .)

Blake sighs, and pulls her ankle from Ellie’s grasp, flopping around on the bed until her face is level with Ellie’s. “I truly don’t deserve you,” she murmurs, pressing her lips briefly to Ellie’s hand before rolling off the other side of the bed.

Ellie snorts. “It’s not about deserve.”

Blake turns to look at her from where she’s moved to squat by her suitcase, neatly organising the books inside. Her smile is a little crooked, a little wry, and the shadows from the setting sun cast dark, creeping fingers across her face, setting her half in shadow. “No, Ellie,” she says, softly. Her voice sounds a little sad, though Ellie can’t fathom why. “Sometimes, it really is.”

~

Ellie’s packing her things the day before Christmas break begins - she’s been invited to the Giulianis’ for Christmas again this year, and she wonders whether Blake’s mother will eventually start to wonder why her daughter keeps inviting the same one friend over during term breaks.

Her phone rings, vibrating violently from where she’d left it on top of her laptop, and she looks over to see an incoming video call from Paul. This in itself is rare; they usually talk over voice calls unless they’ve specifically arranged beforehand to do one with video, after the one time their video call had been unceremoniously interrupted by one of Paul’s brothers coming home, half-naked and more than half-drunk with an equally intoxicated girl in his arms, clearly not having expected anyone (let alone his big brother) to be home. (She’d spent the next month trying to bleach that visual from her memory.)

She reaches over for her phone, and accepts the call.

“OH MY GOD,” booms out of the phone the moment the call connects, even before the video has finished loading, and Ellie nearly drops her phone in startlement.

“What,” she says.

The black loading screen finally resolves itself into a relatively grainy image of an exuberant-looking Paul, grinning ear to ear.

“OH MY GOD,” he yells again. “ELLIE, PINCH ME.”

She snorts. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t,” she says drily, but she gamely lifts her hand up to the screen to show Paul her thumb and index finger pinching together tightly, and he whoops.

“Attagirl,” he says, still grinning, bouncing around in a gradually-descending expectant silence.

Ellie lets the silence stretch a few seconds longer than necessary (if only to watch Paul squirm, which is hilarious) before she bites. “So, what is this about?”

“Guess,” he says, grin dialling back up to shit-eating levels. She rolls her eyes. “Ba finally adopted you as the favourite son,” she says jokingly, and as expected he cackles, swatting at the air.

“ Ellie, ” he says, laughing, “be serious!”

She raises an eyebrow and looks at him meaningfully. He’s clearly got some surprise that he’s too excited to wait too long to share, and she knows that by now he’s probably dying with the need to tell her what it is.

She’s right. Within 3 seconds, he breaks.

“So okay, alright,” he says. “Remember the reviewer from Wenatchee?”

“The one who invited you to the food fair in New York a few years back?”

“Yeah, that one,” he says. “Well, he’s been speaking to other reviewers in Brooklyn, right, and they’ve been speaking to reviewers in other parts of New York, who’ve all been checking out my Instagram and some stuff about ratings and engagement that I didn’t really understand when he told me about it, and he just called me yesterday to ask if I’m interested to go to New York again, with my sausages!”

“For another food fair?” she asks, impressed.

“No,” he says, slowly, like he still can’t believe the words about to come out for his mouth. “Ellie, they asked if I’d like to set up a store in Chelsea Market . Like, a permanent one .”

She gapes for a second, two, three, before her brain catches up. She’s not a New York native and even she’s heard of Chelsea Market, heard of how big it is and the wide variety of food that it offers for customers. “Oh my god,” she says. “Congratulations! How did your family take it?”

Paul shrugs. “Ma was a little put out that the one son with any interest in the sausage business has now shown so much interest that he’s leaving to make sausages elsewhere,” he says, “but she’s coming round, you know? She always does, eventually.”

Ellie smiles. “I’m proud of you,” she says, and means it. “Living your sausage dream.”

“Living my sausage dream !” he echoes, laughing, and pulls back the camera so he can fist-bump it.

“So, when are you heading up to New York?”

“Not for a while,” he says, scratching his chin. “There’s still a tenant at the stall I’ll be taking over and their lease is still valid for a few more months, and then I’ll need to settle things over on my end here as well before I can pack up and move to New York. So I told them I’ll come up in the summer to set things up, settle in.”

“Sounds good.”

“Hey,” he says, and smiles at her, eyes crinkling. “Maybe, you know, we’ll get to move up to New York at the same time, hm?”

“Admissions results are out only in spring, and don’t you dare get my hopes up,” she says.

“Okay, I won’t,” he says, “but you’re not going to stop me from looking for flat-share places in New York that are looking for two tenants.” He pauses, then, “Well, wait. I guess that’s assuming you want to share a place with me. Platonically.”

Ellie snorts and rolls her eyes. “I’m definitely not going to complain about sharing with my best friend, you dork. Not when it also saves me rent.”

He beams. “It’s a deal then, Chu. If we’re both heading to New York.”

“Hm,” she smiles. “Deal.”

~

Spring term, the last undergraduate term of Ellie’s life, opens with a quiet whisper. Nervous seniors frantically studying in a last-ditch attempt to raise their grade-point averages fill the library, and Ellie more often than not finds herself having to study back in her room to get away from the frenetic energy. She’s seen this trend in past year, final-year students filling the library in spring term, but now that she’s in the same graduating batch it hits a little different than before.

She also sees much less of Blake. This is a realisation that blindsides Ellie in the fourth week, that she’s gone two weeks without seeing Blake because they’ve both been busy, they’ve both not been texting each other as regularly as before. (Except- except it’s not a sudden change; when she thinks back about it, thinks back on Blake’s cryptic half-smiles and her own admissions crisis which she’d for the most part quietly dealt with by herself, and she thinks that maybe, there might have already been a slow-growing distance between them since last term.)

She’s still lost on what to do about it, when the letter comes. Halfway through spring term, a letter with her name printed on a thick envelope comes through the dorm’s mail slot. Ellie’s not around when it happens, being stuck in a lecture, but Priya is, and quickly snatches the letter up to their room before anyone else in the dorm has noticed the crest of Columbia University adorning the top left corner of the envelope.

Ellie walks out of lecture with three unread texts from Priya. The first of them is a picture of the envelope, unopened, on Ellie’s desk, followed by an OMG GIRL. 10 minutes after that is another message: girl i swear you’d better come back and open this straight after lecture the suspense is KILLING ME

The breath catches in her throat and she stops walking in the middle of the hallway, staring at the photograph of the envelope on her phone. All around her, her coursemates mill about after the lecture, laughing and discussing, but she can feel ice starting to creep up her spine, and her ears feel hot. She wants to type something, tell Priya she’s on the way, but her fingers are numb and won’t move on the keyboard.

(It’s Schrödinger’s cat all over again, Schrödinger’s cat as the instrument of dread, and her staring at the unopened flap of the envelope, too afraid to find a dead cat, too afraid to find a rejection letter, to think about opening the envelope.)

She takes in a breath of the stale corridor air, and another, and breathes out slowly, puts one foot in front of the other. She’s bested Schrödinger’s cat once before, coming out to her Ba, and she can do it again.

It’s 20 minutes before she arrives at the dorm, barely managing to push down on the door handle before Priya yanks it open. “Ellie,” she says “I thought you ended your lecture hours ago.”

Ellie shrugs. “I’m here now,” she says. “Sorry. I was woolgathering.”

Priya smiles a knowing smile, and reaches across to pull Ellie’s books and notebooks from her arms. “No need for excuses. It’s okay to be nervous, you know.”

Numbly, Ellie walks to her desk and plops down onto her chair, its plastic joints groaning softly. She picks up the envelope and fingers a corner, weighs it gently in her hand. It definitely has substantial heft to it, but that alone betrays no clues about the contents of the letter. Schrödinger’s letter, paradoxically both an acceptance and a rejection at the same time for as long as the envelope remains shut.

She can feel Priya nearly vibrating in anticipation on her bed, but she stays silent, lets Ellie take her time. 

Eventually, eventually , Ellie sighs and flips the envelope over. She gently runs her finger down between the flap and the envelope, gently prying open the paper, making sure that the glue doesn’t tear any part of the envelope. It takes her a little longer than she likes because her hands are shaking, but eventually she’s rewarded with a cleanly opened envelope, a neatly folded sheet of paper inside. 

She takes a deep, fortifying breath, holds it for a moment, and breathes out; reaches into the envelope and unfolds the letter.

Dear Miss Ellie Chu , it reads, and her eyes go no further, stopping at the gentle curve of that first comma. She folds the top down and looks at Priya, who nods encouragingly, reaching out to pat her knee. Ellie sighs, and looks back at the letter.

Dear Miss Ellie Chu, we are pleased to offer you....

She can feel the breath catch in her throat, her fingers numb as her eyes scan the rest of the letter, idly taking in details about acceptance deadlines that only barely register over the ringing she can hear in her mind.

“...So?” Priya asks carefully, breaking the silence. Numbly, Ellie hands her the letter, still too busy processing to respond verbally.

Priya reads the letter, does a double take, and then reads the letter again. “Girl,” she says, voice swelling into the beginning of a delighted laugh. “ Girl . You’re going to be a Columbia graduate student .”

“I’m going to be a Columbia graduate student,” Ellie parrots, and saying the words make this feel a little more real, a little less like she’s still living in a dream. She can feel the edges of her mouth curling up into a giddy smile. “I’m going to New York.”

“You’re going to New York ,” Priya says, and shakes Ellie by the shoulders. “I am so proud of you.”

Ellie smiles. “I’m a little proud of me, too,” she says.

“Duh, you should be, like,  so proud.”

Priya hands her back the letter and she places it on the table, weighing it down under her pencil-case. Her hands fly to her phone, texting Paul: Guess I’m going to need those recommendations on flat-shares in New York, after all .

His reply is near-instantaneous. OH YM GOD , followed by a second message that consists of five party popper emoji, three dancing women emoji and two of the caterpillar wearing glasses. Barely a minute later, her phone vibrates with an incoming video call.

“I KNEW YOU COULD DO IT,” booms through the phone as soon as she picks up. The video resolves itself to show Paul running, the focus shaky but just clear enough to pick up his wide grin. She hears a door slam open and sees the lighting dim as Paul enters a building.

“Oh, Paul-” she hears a familiar light male voice say from the other side of the camera, but it’s cut off as Paul swings the camera around to show Ellie’s Ba, looking startled at Paul’s sudden intrusion into the kitchen, knife still held loosely in one hand and a chicken thigh in the other.

“Ellie,” he says, squinting at the screen, and she sees him quickly drop the chicken onto the chopping board and wash his hands. He takes the phone from Paul and she sees Paul walk up behind her Ba, hovering in the background.

“Hi, Ba,” she says, sticking to English for Paul’s benefit.

“Ellie,” he says again, also in English, “why are you calling?”

“Ba,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “I applied to graduate school in New York. Columbia, for their PhD programme. They just sent me their acceptance letter today.”

Overwhelming displays of pride aren’t common in her family, and she’s not expecting her Ba to jump up and down or yell the way Paul had. And indeed, he remains seated, but she sees his eyes crinkle up into a warm smile, sees his head give a small nod. “Good,” he says. “I am proud of you. You will surely do well, wherever you go next.”

She can’t help but smile, a warm glow in her chest. “Thanks, Ba.”

They hang up soon after, Ellie promising they’ll discuss more details over the weekend, and soon Ellie’s back to sitting in the silence of her dorm room, phone warm in her hand and acceptance letter cold on her table. She wanders over to her bed and lies down on the coverlet for a while, next to Priya, just quietly absorbing the adrenaline of the past half an hour, processing the fact that she’ll be moving to New York in the summer.

She , a small-town girl from tiny Squahamish, will be going to New York for graduate school next fall. She’ll be living in New York, a city far more bustling and lively than anything she’s seen in Iowa, far from the familiar streets she’s walked down many times.

(She’ll be living in New York, a city located a substantial distance from where her girlfriend lives.)

The realisation hits her all at once, a shot of cold water down her spine. 

“Oh,” she says aloud, as it occurs to her that her girlfriend doesn’t know that she’d applied to go to school in New York at all, let alone that she’s been accepted. “Blake.”

“Hm?” Priya asks, rolling over on the bed. “Yeah, you should tell her, too.”

“I haven’t,” Ellie says. “Not even about the application, because I was so anxious about it, and then she was anxious about her own exam and it just never seemed like the right time to bring it up after that.”

Priya stills, and sits up abruptly. “Ellie,” she says, “you need to tell her. This is a big life decision.”

“I know,” Ellie says, but she feels the numbness coming back again, the worry and the nerves. How is she going to phrase this, now that a good time to tell Blake about the application has long passed? “I don’t know how I’m going to, but I need to tell her.”

Chapter Text

Ellie’s been up to Blake’s dorm room many times in the months since they’ve known each other, but the closed wooden door has never looked quite as uninviting as it does now. It’s been a week since she’d received the acceptance letter, a week of hemming and hawing about how she’s going to break the news to her girlfriend while Priya gently pats her back and gives her quiet encouragement. Even now, after she’s worked up the courage to come all the way here, she’s still been frozen like a statue outside the door for what feels like hours, hand coming up as though to knock on the door before coming back down again, shaking.

Ellie’s not sure why this feels even more terrifying than when she’d opened her letter from Columbia. She’d felt frozen then, too, the fear of the unknown waiting beyond the flap of that letter paralysing her beyond the reach of reason. She knows Blake, though, knows her girlfriend to always have been kind and warm, and there’s logically no reason why she should feel this scared about what awaits her beyond that door.

But, it’s still terrifying. Somehow.

As she raises her hand again, trying to make herself knock on the door this time , the decision is made for her - the door swings open, and Ellie’s suddenly face to face with a pyjama-clad Blake.

There’s a pause as they both stare at each other, both startled, though for different reasons.

“...Ellie,” Blake says, breaking the silence first. The corner of her mouth quirks up into a little smile and the look in her eyes softens, and despite herself, despite everything, Ellie finds herself unconsciously smiling back.

“Um,” she says. “Hi.”

“I was, uh, just about to go brush my teeth,” Blake says, motioning awkwardly to where she’s got her toothbrush clutched in one hand.

“Oh,” Ellie says. “I, uh. Came to talk to you about something.”

There’s a pause then, as several emotions flicker through Blake’s eyes too quickly for Ellie to catch, before she smiles again and steps back, pulling the door open. “Well, you know you’re always welcome, Ellie.”

The moonlight’s shining through Blake’s window straight onto the pillow as Ellie walks in, and the room is in its usual state of disarray. Blake sets down her toothbrush on the desk and, with the ease of long practice, plucks out the spare beanbag chair from somewhere behind a pile of laundry and sets it down in front of Ellie.

“So,” she says, sitting on the bed as Ellie sinks into the beanbag chair. “You said you had something to talk about?”

“...Yeah,” Ellie says. She looks down and fiddles with the hem of her shirt to buy herself a little time. “It’s, uh, about my plans after graduation.”

“Oh.”

There’s an odd catch to Blake’s voice, but Ellie’s not sure what to make of it, so she just takes a deep breath and pushes on. She recalls the warmth of Priya’s joy at the news, of the exuberance of Paul’s and the quiet firmness of her Ba’s, and reminds herself that she’s not about to be the bearer of bad news, necessarily. (Perhaps just… good news with uncertain consequences.)

“I, uh, was applying for post-graduate studies,” Ellie says, gaze still on the hem of her shirt. “They wrote to me last week, confirming my acceptance. I’ll be going to Columbia on one of their Ph.D programmes, starting this fall.”

Blake says nothing, but the words are out of Ellie now, and it feels like a great weight’s been taken off her chest, so she keeps talking, the words tripping over each other to be set free into the still air. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you, either when I was applying or right after I got the letter. I guess my head was in a little bit of a mess before I gathered enough courage to even think of applying, and then you also had your exam so I didn’t want to distract you from that, and then after too much time had passed it felt like I couldn’t really find a good explanation for why I hadn’t told you any sooner. But I’ve been accepted, now, and it just hit me that I’d be living so far away from Iowa, and from you. I looked it up on Google Maps, you know, and it says Iowa and New York are a 17-hour drive apart, and then I realised that we’d be having a pretty long-distance relationship.”

Ellie sighs, spent, all the words out of her system now. She looks up cautiously to meet Blake’s gaze again, and sees her girlfriend staring back down at her, a small smile on her face but a sad look in her eyes.

“First off, I’m really, really proud of you for getting in, Ellie,” Blake says. “Columbia is really, truly, an amazing achievement, and a Ph.D really does suit you. Thank you for telling me. I guess I did wonder, when you didn’t mention anything about concrete plans for after graduation, since you usually have plans for everything else.”

“Well,” Ellie says, with a short laugh. “Not everything else. I have no clue what to do, how we’re going to have a long-distance relationship.”

“It’s-” Blake starts, stops, and looks away for a moment, a look of frustration flashing across her features. “It’s not going to be a long-distance relationship with a 17-hour drive, Ellie.”

“...It’s not?”

“No.” Blake sits up on the bed, runs a hand through her hair, and there’s guilt on her face now, plain as day, as she squirms a little uncomfortably. “You said you didn’t know why you didn’t tell me about the application, Ellie, but I can fully relate to that. You see, our relationship, it won’t be a long-distance relationship with a 17-hour drive, it would have to be a long-distance relationship with a 17-hour flight and a 15-hour time difference, because Ellie, I’m moving to Japan this summer, and I didn’t know how I was going to tell you about it, either.”

“...Japan,” Ellie repeats, faintly.

“Yeah.” Blake sighs, and the words continue to tumble out of her mouth, one after the other, like a chain of dominos set into motion. “Um. There’s this programme where people from all around the world can apply to teach English in schools in Japan. I was feeling a little lost about what to do with my degree after grad, and this seemed like the perfect choice - it lasts for a couple of years, by which time I’d have settled into myself more and figured out what I want to do with my future, and in the meantime I get to keep my Japanese in practice and also teach kids, which I love doing. But it’s not easy to get a spot in the programme, and I didn’t want to freak you out or anything by talking about moving halfway across the world if there wasn’t going to be a good chance that I was going to actually have to move, so I just kept telling myself that I’d tell you if they accepted me. Then the acceptance email came in earlier this week, and, well. I guess I knew my time was up, and that I had to tell you.”

It’s odd, Ellie thinks faintly, to hear the same thoughts that had haunted her spoken out loud by Blake. It hurts a little, being on the receiving end of it, but she also can’t say she blames Blake when she herself had been going through the same thought process.

“15 hours, huh,” she says instead, and tries to imagine what that might be like, tries to imagine only ever seeing Blake on video call screens at odd hours of the day or night in order to fit both their timezones, tries to imagine not being able to physically hold her hand. It’s an odd feeling, and despite herself, she shivers a little.

“Yeah.”

They lapse into silence for a while, before Blake sighs. “Ellie, look. Long-distance relationships are scary, and the 15-hour time difference is really daunting. I know this isn’t what you signed up for when I first asked you out, and I really don’t want to tie you down to it.”

“...But what does that mean, for us?”

Blake places her face into her hands and sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Ellie, I’ve always felt like meeting you was fate, that you were the right person for me. But I’m beginning to wonder if maybe we met at the wrong time in our lives. I’ve loved being with you, holding you close and giggling at Netflix with you, but I don’t know if we’re at the stage of our lives where we could have a long-distance relationship over the span of a few years, when we’ve both got our sights focused on our own futures as well.”

“Hm,” Ellie reaches down and starts fiddling with the hem of her shirt, thinking. “I guess we didn’t really make these big decisions about our futures with each other in mind, did we,” she says wryly.

“Not that that was wrong,” says Blake, quickly. “I would never dream of holding you back from your dreams, Ellie, and I know you’d never want to hold me back from mine. I wouldn’t want you to stop yourself from applying for something because you think that you’d need to stay in Iowa with me, or something.”

“Yeah,” Ellie says, her voice dropping to just above a whisper. What Blake’s saying makes sense, but she can sense the conclusion that this will lead to, and she can’t help but feel her heart sinking at the thought of it. “It’s just that we didn’t factor each other into our dreams of the future, I guess. So as we chased our dreams, we left each other by the wayside, back here in Grinnell.”

Blake slides off the bed and to the floor, coming over to sit just in front of Ellie with their knees almost touching. “Maybe when I come back,” she says, whispering to match Ellie, “maybe then, after we’ve done some more chasing of our dreams and some more growing up, maybe then it’ll be the right time for us. I don’t want to let go of you, Ellie Chu, but I think maybe we both need the space to grow on our own for a bit before we do any growing together.”

“Mm,” Ellie sighs. “But what if we end up growing apart?”

Blake smiles a little crookedly, but doesn’t answer. They sit in silence for a long while in silence, on the messy floor of Blake’s dorm room only half-illuminated by the cold silver light of the spring moon.

“I’m sorry,” Ellie says a long while later.

“Oh, Ellie,” Blake says, and makes an aborted moment as though to reach out to hold her hand. Their fingers brush just for a moment, and despite herself, Ellie shivers. 

“Ellie,” Blake says again, “there is absolutely nothing to apologise for.”

Ellie sighs. “This feeling sucks, though.”

“Yeah,” says Blake, heavily. “It really, really does.”

~

The day of the Commencement ceremony dawns bright and warm, the late May weather already teasing the warmth of the summer months to come. Ellie sits on a plastic chair on the massive lawn in the central campus of Grinnell, fidgeting in the satiny material of her graduation gown; one of many, many Grinnell graduates sat in the lawn on rickety plastic chairs, all fidgeting in their satiny graduation gowns.

It’s odd, not having Priya next to her after four years of being practically inseparable. But they’d had to sit sorted by discipline, and then by last name, so Priya’s seated somewhere closer to the back, while Ellie’s seated right at the end of the very first row of students.

The atmosphere is alive with the chatter of excited parents and friends - Ellie knows that her Ba and Paul are in attendance today, and while she hasn’t caught sight of them, she feels the warmth in her heart knowing that they’re here. (She also hopes, fervently, that Paul has not actually brought along a vuvuzela to cheer for her like he’d been threatening to.)

If asked, later, Ellie won’t be able to recall much of what went on during the ceremony. Everything still feels so surreal - the reality that she’s graduating from Grinnell, the boxes in her room packing up her life for the past four years, the nebulous future waiting ahead for her - and it feels like she’s living what should be an entirely memorable day in a bit of a haze. They call her name and she walks up to the stage, accepts her medal and degree scroll and poses for a photo from the official photographer, but even then it feels like she’s walking through water, all sound and sensation muffled around her.

After the ceremony, she doesn’t find Paul and her Ba; they find her first.

“Yooooo, Chu!” comes a yell, and the next thing she knows, Ellie’s being lifted off the ground by a pair of football–trained arms, her legs kicking in the air. “Ellie, dude, you never told us you were getting a prize .”

“Paul,” Ellie says, her voice muffled as her face is squished into his shoulder. “Put me down, please.”

“Oops, sorry.”

Paul places her down, and she pulls back to study him, the warm grin on his face and the excited look in his eyes. “A prize, Ellie,” Paul repeats, laughing. “That’s something you totally should have been bragging about! I read the programme booklet for the ceremony, it says the prize you got was for having the highest GPA in the entire school!”

Ellie laughs a little self-consciously, reaching down to where the medal she’d received hangs around her neck, and runs her fingers around the triangular shape of the medal. The Archibald Prize for the highest GPA of the graduating batch wasn’t something she had been consciously aiming for, but it does feel like some sort of validation, a solid weight of reassurance. “You know I don’t really like to brag about stuff,” she says.

“You worked so hard, though. I truly can’t think of anyone who deserves that medal better than my best girl.”

“Thanks,” Ellie says. “I couldn’t have done it without your support.”

“Oh, Ellie,” says Paul, looking amused. “I think you really, really could have.”

The crowd shifts again, and walking sedately towards them, probably having been left behind when Paul had charged forward at full speed, is her Ba. He’s wearing a blazer that looks slightly oversized, and Ellie doesn’t remember her father ever owning any vaguely formal clothing; the blazer must have been borrowed from Paul or one of the other Munskys. But beneath that is the familiar polo shirt, the same spectacles, and the same Ba he’s always been.

“Congratulations,” he tells her in Mandarin, and she smiles.

“Thanks, Ba.”

“Too many people,” he continues, switching to English. “Very noisy, here.”

“We can go someplace quieter,” she says, but at that very moment, she hears Paul go, “Woah, Priya! Over here!”

Ellie spins around and sees Priya, her graduation gown crumpled and her mortar-board already askew, running towards them with a bright grin. “Ellie, my girl!” she crows. “Sausage boy!”

“Hi, Priya,”  Ellie says, smiling in response to Priya’s exuberance. “This is my dad.”

“Hi, Mr Chu!” Priya says, before turning to wave at an older Indian couple looking cowed by the crowd. “My parents are here, too,” she says as they walk up. “ Appa, amma , you remember Ellie, right? She came to stay with us that one summer.”

“Ah, yes,” says Priya’s mom, her eyes crinkling up into a smile. “I remember you loved to eat my dosa .”

“Priya tells us that you will be pursuing further studies in New York come this fall,” adds Priya’s dad.

“Yes,” Ellie says. “I’ll be moving to Manhattan, and studying at Columbia.” (It still feels a little surreal, to say out loud, and her heart does a little flip in her chest.)

“Well,” says Priya’s mom. “Please do not ever hesitate to come and visit us. You are our Priya’s friend, and that means that you are always welcome in our home. The next time you come, maybe I will teach you some of our recipes.”

“Thank you,” Ellie says, and smiles back. “That really means a lot.”

“So, Ellie,” Priya says, sidling up to nudge her in the shoulder. “What’s next for you? Heading straight to New York?”

Ellie hums, lets her gaze slide out over the student body still milling about the lawn. Over in a far corner she catches sight of Blake and her family, all laughing and posing for photos; her heart twinges a little, and she averts her gaze quickly.

“I think,” she says, pulling her gaze back to focus on Priya, “I’d like to go home, first, to Squahamish. Just for a bit, just enough to say goodbye.”

Paul laughs, and throws an arm around her shoulders. 

“Ellie-girl,” he says, “that sounds like a great plan.”

~

It’s odd, Ellie thinks, to be back in a place that was once so familiar, knowing that she’s leaving it for good in a few days’ time. Most of her stuff from Grinnell is getting shipped directly to the tiny apartment she’ll be sharing with Paul in Manhattan, and being here in her childhood bedroom, which has pretty much been left as-is since her last day of high school, feels a little like being trapped in a time capsule.

She’s got a half-open box by her feet, packing up the last things from this house that she wants to bring to New York: her old guitar, a collection of photographs of her with her Ba and Ma, some favourite childhood books. Her fingers linger over the dusty cover of The Remains of the Day ; she hesitates once, twice, and then slips the book into the box before she can second-guess herself.

She haunts the halls of their small house like a ghost, drinking in the sight of things once everyday and familiar which she knows she won’t get to see for a long while. Of course, it’s not like she had been staying here all through Grinnell, but college had felt more like an extended hiatus from home, rather than a final goodbye. But now, the sight of their old TV, their squishy couch, her Ba’s knife-rack and the old phone booth out by the train tracks - she’s not sure when she’ll be able to see them again next, and it feels bittersweet.

“Ba,” she says one day. “Won’t you come to New York with us? You can stay in our apartment.”

“It is alright,” her Ba says, with a small smile, his hands never stopping their practiced motion of preparing meat for dinner. “I am content, here. I am not as young as I used to be, and I do not think I could get used to a big city now, the way you can.”

Ellie sighs. “I just…. I’m worried that you’ll be lonely, here.”

“Paul’s family will come over, I am sure,” he replies, calmly. “And everyone here is familiar, after all. If you are worried that I will be lonely, Ellie, then just make sure you come back to visit from time to time.”

“I will,” Ellie promises quietly. “I promise, Ba, I will.”

Another day, she goes to visit Mrs Geselchap. It’s summer, now, and she’s not on campus, but Ellie finds her in her little house a short walk from the school, and she’s welcomed in with a warm hug and the promise of cool lemonade.

“ Columbia ,” Mrs Geselchap exclaims, savouring the word like it’s a fine wine. “Ellie, I am so, so excited for you.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten it without all of your help,” Ellie says, “so thank you. I promise I’ll do my best there.”

“I’m confident you’ll blow away everyone else there,” says Mrs Geselchap, with a warm smile. “Graduate school is a time to work hard, harder than when you were an undergraduate, but Ellie, dear, don’t forget to live as well. New York is a city ripe with potential and opportunity, and it would be a waste to let that all go by while you’re buried in books and essays.”

Ellie hums. “I won’t,” she says. “At the very least, I’m sure Paul won’t let me stay at home all the time.”

“Ah, yes, Mr Munsky, also chasing his dreams,” says Mrs Geselchap. “Not what I imagined he would go for, back when he was my student, but he seems happy, so I’m glad.” She chuckles, and shakes her head.  “All my students are growing up and leaving the nest. Why, Ms Flores came to see me just last week as well, and she seemed to be flourishing, too, pursuing her dreams of art!”

Ellie feels something cold creep up her neck for a quick second, and she blinks, at the mention of a name she has not heard in a long while.

“Oh?” she says, keeping her voice level.

“Did you not know?” Mrs Geselchap asks, and there’s a weird knowing twinkle in her eye that Ellie doesn’t entirely like. “You were close back in the day, weren’t you?”

The cold chill is back, raising tiny little goosebumps up and down her arms, and for a moment Ellie thinks she might have forgotten how to breathe. “Um,” she says, mind racing as she tries to work out how not to give away that she’d fallen for Aster while ghostwriting love letters to her. “Well, I guess she did date Paul for a bit, but other than that-”

Mrs Geselchap chuckles. “Oh, Ellie, Ellie. Did you know? Ms Flores never used your little essay-writing service, that much I was sure of, but in your final semester the essays she turned in began to take on a different voice. Not yours, entirely, not like the way I could hear your voice speaking to me from six to ten different essays ostensibly turned in by your classmates; but like she’d listened to your thoughts and put them to paper in her own words, transformed them into something created by the two of you, together.”

“...Oh,” Ellie says, at a loss. In the back of her mind, she hears the chatter of a noisy high school hallway, the clatter of a book to the floor. The Remains of the Day , whispers a long-forgotten voice in the back of her mind. All that longing-

“She’s a wonderful girl, isn’t she?” Mrs Geselchap says, the knowing sparkle in her eyes gleaming once more.

“...Yes, I guess she is,” Ellie says. She thinks of the copy of The Remains of the Day in her house, ready to be packed to New York. “She is,” she says, quieter this time, and sees Mrs Geselchap smile, out of the corner of her eye.

“A woman worth loving,” Mrs Geselchap says, and there’s a look in her eyes now like she’s gazing at somewhere beyond Ellie, “is hard to come by, Ellie. Don’t let her slip away through your fingers; the regret still stings, many years later.”

There’s a wistful lilt to the tone that causes Ellie to sit a little straighter. She looks closer at Mrs Geselchap, sees the bittersweet smile that curves her lips, and wonders.

“...Mrs G,” she says, hesitantly. “Did you…”

Mrs Geselchap laughs gently, and shakes her head. “It was a long time ago,” she says in lieu of a direct reply. “Don’t you concern yourself with me, Ellie; maybe seek out Ms Flores, instead, before you all go your own separate ways again. I’m not sure if she’s already left town, you know.”

For the first time in years Ellie allows herself to think of Aster, opens up that box of memories and lets them sift through her mind, dim rememberings of late-night literary discussions coloured in the warm sepia tones of first love; of floating in a hidden forest spring, surrounded only by the soft crackle of radio music. She reaches for those memories and feels a bloom of warmth in her chest, and for the first time in years Ellie allows herself to wonder .

When she focuses on Mrs Geselchap again, the other woman’s smiling at her knowingly.

“What are you waiting for?” she asks.

And so Ellie finds herself, half a cup of room-temperature lemonade and a brief 10 minute run-jog later, standing outside the closed door of the Flores house, panting slightly. The door opens on the second knock, and the wary face of Deacon Flores peeks out.

“...Ms Chu,” he says, after the gleam of non-recognition fades from his eyes. Ellie supposes she had been gone from Squahamish for four years, but surely one would think that he would have remembered the person he’d once dubbed his favourite accompanist.

“Hi, um, sir,” Ellie says. “I was just wondering if Aster might be home, and if we could have a quick word? I heard that she’d come back recently-”

Almost before she can finish, something shutters in Deacon Flores’ expression and his face twists into something halfway between a grimace and a snarl. “Nobody named Aster lives here.”

Ellie blinks, wrongfooted. “Um,” she says. “Your daughter…? Aster Flores…? If she’s moved out on her own-”

“I do not have a daughter named Aster,” snarls Deacon Flores, a little spittle flying from his mouth. “No such person lives here, and I’d thank you not to ask again. Good day to you.”

The door slams in Ellie’s face with a shudder, and Ellie finds herself staring at the smooth wood grain, lost for words.

Chapter Text

Two years later; Manhattan, New York City

The lonely beep of a washing machine echoes throughout the apartment, and Ellie groans, looking up from her thick book on Tang-dynasty poetry and casting a glance around their cramped living room, where she’d been bent over her book and laptop for the past 3 hours.

“Paul,” she says, loudly, when she can’t immediately locate his silhouette among the piles of books and boxes (some empty) of kitchen equipment that litter their common living space. “Paul, laundry’s done.”

There’s a pause, then a yelp. “Damn those sticky labels!” comes Paul’s voice, faint, from the vague direction of his bedroom. “I’ll get the laundry in a moment, Ellie, hold your horses.”

“Neigh,” Ellie says drily, just for the snort of laughter she hears from the other end of the apartment. She turns back to her book and reaches out to type another paragraph of her essay, sinking herself back into the stream of thought the washing machine had briefly interrupted.

“So,” says Paul later, when he’s folded up both their clothes and they’re sitting on the floor around their low dining table, eating chicken noodle soup with Sichuan sausage (a new invention Paul’s testing, though Ellie’s of the firm opinion that he needs to cut down on the amount of Sichuan peppercorns in the mix).

“So,” Ellie parrots back.

“Tomorrow’s Friday night,” Paul says. “I’ve got some pop-up event at a food critics’ networking dinner thing over near Madison.”

“Mm,” says Ellie, because she remembers helping him panic-grind enough sausagemeat to feed nearly 300 people, in the past couple of days. “Meanwhile I’ll be here, finishing up my essay.”

Paul narrows his eyes at her. “You’re staying at home?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“I dunno.” Paul shrugs, and takes another big slurp of noodle before he continues. “It’s a Friday night, Ellie. Aisyah was saying she wanted you to go with her for some poetry thing the other day. Wasn’t that this Friday?”

Ellie snorts, conjuring a fresh memory of an encouraging smile and flashing round spectacle lenses. Aisyah binte Osman had taken the seat next to Ellie on her very first day at Columbia, and had swiftly become her only friend there; she’s outgoing, though less aggressively so than Priya, and with an eclectic taste in headscarves and hand-painted sneakers. “Aisyah,” Ellie says drily, “is very convinced that I need to get out more and make more friends.”

“She’s right, you know,” Paul says through a mouthful of soup.

“Ugh,” Ellie says, at the thought of having to mingle. She remembers the poetry event; Aisyah had shown her an Instagram ad for an all-women’s poetry open mic at a cafe three blocks down from her and Paul’s apartment, two days ago. In theory, it should be a harmless event: close by, with a definite end-time and a subject matter that’s familiar to Ellie. But a part of Ellie prefers the comfort of home and alone , even after two years of sharing an apartment with Paul, and would rather read a book over the weekend rather than interact with people she’s never met before.

“You’re always at home,” Paul says after a beat. “We’ve been out of Squahamish for two years, now, and your only friends here are me and Aisyah.”

“And Priya, some weekends,” Ellie says, just to set the record straight, and she sees Paul give her a fond eyeroll.

“And Priya, some weekends,” he concedes. “The point remains, though. It might be worth trying to meet new people, especially since people at a poetry event would probably be interested in the same kinds of things as you are. It wouldn’t hurt to try, you know.”

Ellie heaves a gusty sigh, because she’s already heard this argument before. Paul’s not wrong, and logically she agrees with everything that he’s saying, but there’s just something about the inertia to move and try something new that’s stayed her feet. She hadn’t minded trying new things so much back in college, where everything was new and unfamiliar, but now, here in New York, she’s built up a comforting routine at home and something about the familiarity of it keeps her leashed here.

“Just this one time,” Paul wheedles, and even without looking at his face Ellie knows he’s cracked out the big boys for this one, the watery puppy-eyes to go with his pleading tone.

“I reserve the right to leave early if I feel uncomfortable,” Ellie says, feeling her resolve wither a little, and Paul perks up at once.

“Take it up with Aisyah, I’ll be preparing sausage for fancy food critics,” he says.

Ellie sighs again. “Fine,” she says, resigned, and sees Paul’s entire face light up with a grin.

~

Aisyah ambushes her after their final Friday lecture, the loose ends of her tudung  (today a soft cream with faint white embroidery of lemon slices along the edges) fluttering in the warm summer wind. “Ellie,” she says with a warm smile, wrapping an arm around Ellie’s shoulders, “I am so glad you agreed to come for the open mic. It’ll be fun! It’s a good break from all the readings, at least for an evening, don’t you think?”

Ellie swallows down her response that she quite likes doing the readings, and manages a smile back for Aisyah. “Paul said it would be a good idea.”

“Bless that man,” Aisyah says firmly. “I’m sure you’ll love it, Ellie; everyone’s really chill there, and they all love poetry and art and all sorts of creative pursuits.”

They walk out of campus, the sidewalks dyed golden by the setting evening sun, Aisyah stopping every so often to briefly consult the Google Maps route on her phone.

“I guess,” Ellie says.

Aisyah hums. “I don’t want to force you, of course. Any time you want to tap out, whether it’s for fresh air or just to leave, just let me know, alright?”

Ellie can’t help but smile. Aisyah, for all her extroverted energy, has a heart warm like the sun and a considerate streak a mile wide, and it’s little moments like this that make Ellie feel less like she’s marching to a dreaded social event. “Thanks,” she says, heartfelt.

They arrive at the cafe in short order; the faint smell of brewing tea wafts out the open door as they walk in. The cafe’s not crowded; there’s at most ten different people scattered about the premises, one or two hovering by the stage area but most sitting at various tables and cradling their drinks of choice. Standing at the counter, wiping down the espresso machine, is a slight girl with feathery bangs and her mocha-brown hair piled into a high ponytail.

“Here for open mic?” she asks as the two of them pull up, her gaze flitting over Aisyah and then stopping on Ellie, with the spark of something flickering in her eyes.

“Yeah,” Aisyah answers for them both.

“$15 door charge, covers one free drink; just tell me what you’d like,” says the girl. “The name’s Ji-Hye, but feel free to call me Jenny, if that’s easier.”

There’s the barest hint of resignation in her voice that Ellie recognises, the same resignation Ellie had felt when the school in Squahamish couldn’t pronounce her Chinese name back when she’d first enrolled and they’d had to change the school records to include ‘Ellie’ for the sake of convenience; the same resignation she’d heard in Priya’s or Rebecca’s voice every time someone tripped over the pronunciation of their family names.

“Ji-Hye’s not that hard,” Ellie says, carefully mimicking the way the vowel sounds had flowed off the other girl’s tongue.

“Not to many people in this country,” Ji-Hye says dryly.

Ellie shrugs. “It’s your name, they should make an effort anyway,” she says. “Do you prefer going by Jenny, though?”

Ji-Hye’s smile is a few shades warmer, now. “Between you and me, I prefer Ji-Hye; that’s the name my grandmother chose for me.”

“Ji-Hye it is, then,” Aisyah says, slipping gracefully into the conversation. The pronunciation of the name sounds crisp and near-perfect on Aisyah’s tongue, and Ellie belatedly remembers that Aisyah’s Netflix history is full of Korean dramas. “I’m Aisyah, I’m the one who filled in the pre-registration form; this is my friend, Ellie.”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Ji-Hye says. Her gaze shifts back to Ellie, and she adds, thoughtfully, “Ellie, Ellie…. You look a little familiar. Have we met somewhere before?”

“Probably not unless you also attend the graduate English programme at Columbia,” Ellie says, ruefully. “I really don’t get out much.”

“Goodness, no, no more school for me,” Ji-Hye says, with a quick laugh. “I do multimedia art when I’m not pulling shots; I’m not good with books at all. I really do have the niggling feeling that I’ve seen your face before, though I’m not sure why.” A pause, then, “sorry, don’t let me keep you here; please let me know what drink you’d like, the event’s about to start in the next 5 minutes.”

Ellie grabs an iced tea, and Aisyah a sparkling orange juice; they find a corner table to retreat to, not too far from the stage and yet isolated enough that Ellie doesn’t feel like she’s surrounded on all sides by strangers.

As it turns out, Aisyah and Paul are right - once the lights dim and the poetry starts, Ellie loses herself in the rhythm and cadence of the spoken word, so different from the poetry she’s used to reading on the page and yet somehow similar, like a familiar recipe reinvented. Before she knows it, an hour and a half have passed, and the small but attentive audience is gently applauding as the lights come on.

“So?” Aisyah asks, though the knowing smile playing about her lips tells Ellie that Aisyah fully knows that Ellie had enjoyed herself at the open mic.

“I had fun,” Ellie tells her, honestly, and Aisyah beams.

“Usually after the show people will stay back to mingle and talk, but I figured you’re probably not as keen on that part. We can start to leave now, if you’d like?”

They drift their way towards the door, though Ellie does stop to speak to one of the poets, a girl with huge hoop earrings and her head shaved bald, to compliment her on her poem about life after cancer. (Ellie had definitely teared up a little at the conclusion of that poem, though she’s fairly confident that the dim lighting in the cafe had kept that a secret.)

Just as they’re about to leave, they hear a voice calling out to them - it’s Ji-Hye, running out to them from behind the counter. “Sorry,” she says, as they stop in the doorway. “Sorry, this must all seem so weird and maybe mildly stalkery - Ellie, I remember why you seemed so familiar now. Has anyone painted you before?”

“...No,” Ellie says, bewildered.

Ji-Hye blinks. “Well, maybe it’s just a really strange coincidence, then. There was this independent art fair I exhibited at last weekend, and I saw this really beautiful painting on display; the girl in it looked and dressed kinda like you.”

“Oh,” Ellie says. “Um. Do you happen to know the artist…?”

“No, there were way too many artists with work there,” Ji-Hye says regretfully, “but here’s the website for the art fair, if you’re interested.” She shows a simple website on her phone, scrolling through it, Ellie quickly realises that the website offers no previews of any of the artists’ work, only yielding a brief writeup of the history of the event, and a long list of all the participating galleries.

“Thanks,” Ellie says, preparing to resign this curiosity to the back of her mind - finding a nameless artist from a long list of unknown galleries is, after all, sure to be an arduous task, and she’s not nearly curious enough about this mystery portrait to consign her weekends to combing through New York’s many galleries.

“No worries at all,” Ji-Hye says. “If I find any more information about it, I’ll let you know, okay?”

~

Priya comes to visit the next weekend, bearing with her an offering of frozen dosa and the summer’s first batch of Alphonso mangoes, ripe and perfumey and sourced by Priya’s father from their regular fruit dealer.

“Hello!” she carols, pushing open the front door as Ellie blearily looks up from where she’d been reading Shakespeare on the couch and fallen asleep. Priya visiting is, by now, not a strange occurrence; she comes once or twice a month to hang out with them and sleep on her and Paul’s couch for the weekend, and already knows where both of their spare keys are hidden; Ellie’s fairly certain it’s only a matter of time before Paul suggests just outright giving Priya a key of her own.

“Morning,” Ellie says, stifling a yawn, and Priya cackles.

“Girl, it’s past four-thirty in the afternoon,” she says. 

“I got up properly in the morning,” Ellie says petulantly, but she’s already putting the book down and dragging herself to her feet to take the cooler bag from Priya’s hands. “Then I came out to read and fell asleep again.”

“You’re studying way too hard, Ellie-girl,” Priya says with a grin. 

In short order, they’re standing by the kitchen counter, carefully peeling and cutting up the three mangoes that Priya had brought with her. Most of the mango hoard Ellie packs away into Tupperware containers to be squirrelled away in the freezer, but she and Priya sneak a few pieces of the mango each to eat while doing the slicing work; the mangoes are juicy and fresh, the perfume lingering in her nostrils long after she’s swallowed the last bite.

“Your dad really knows where to get good fruits,” Ellie says, reaching for the next mango and cutting it into half.

Priya snorts. “Sometimes I don’t even want to ask where he gets them from,” she says, “for fear that it’s some black market source. You never get good fruit this consistently from the supermarket, after all.”

After all of the mango is diced up and put away, and they’ve made a small bowl of mango salsa using a recipe Priya had learned from the Mexican girl she’s currently dating back in Brooklyn, they settle down on the couch with tall glasses of mango smoothie that they’d made with the mango scraps and half a tub of Greek yoghurt from the back of the fridge. (“It’s not real lassi unless you make the curds yourself,” Priya had said, sprinkling a little bit of salt into the blender, “but it’ll do.”)

Paul had promised he’d bring back Chipotle for dinner after closing shop tonight, but that’s still a few hours away, so Ellie sits back on the couch as Priya drapes herself half over the armrest and half in Ellie’s lap, idly scrolling through Instagram on her phone.

“Woah,” Priya says, “my For You page is showing me pictures of some wedding where the groom and bride are exchanging their vows on a giant mountain of gravel. That’s kind of weird, but hey, whatever floats their boat.”

“Mhm,” Ellie says, sleepily.

“I don’t even know either of these people, though, I wonder why-” She trails off for a bit, tapping at her screen, before saying: “Oh, cool, the location’s tagged as Squahamish.”

Ellie blinks, pulled abruptly back from a mango smoothie-induced half-doze. “What,” she manages.

“Some dude from your hometown’s got a post of his on my recommended feed on Instagram,” Priya says, waving her phone into Ellie’s face. “Not sure why it popped up; I guess maybe since I follow Paul it assumed I’m interested in people living in Squahamish?”

Ellie reaches out and grabs on to Priya’s hand, stopping her from waving around the phone for long enough to focus on the screen. She barely recognises the bride, but sees the cut of the chin, the grin of the groom, and though it’s been many years since she’d left high school and he looks pretty different, she’s pretty sure she recognises him.

“Trig Carson,” she says, more to herself; a quick glance at the username confirms that the photo is indeed of Trig’s wedding day, which the caption proclaims to be “ pebble-y the best day of my life ”.

“Hm?” Priya says. “Trig, like trigonometry?”

“I…don’t think someone in their right mind would name their child Trigonometry ,” Ellie says drily, and Priya laughs.

“Ellie-girl, have you not seen the latest trend in baby names? They’re all atrocious; ‘Trigonometry’ would fit right in.”

Ellie rolls her eyes, but can’t find it in her to dispute this.

Priya stretches a little, looking at the photo on her phone again. “So, this is someone you know?”

“He’s… we went to the same high school,” Ellie says slowly. “We liked the same girl. It’s, uh… complicated.”

Priya’s eyes light up with an unholy glee, and immediately Ellie regrets the words that had come out of her mouth. “There’s totally a story there,” Priya says, grinning up at Ellie. “Spill, woman.”

Ellie sighs, but this is Priya asking, and she’s never been one to deny Priya anything for long. All it takes is one look from Priya and the entire sorry tale comes tumbling out - her being Paul’s ghost-writer, falling in love with Aster through text, Aster finding out and the subsequent confrontation in her family’s church.

“Man,” Priya says when she’s finished. “I feel like I just sat through one of those Hallmark movies.”

“I thought that the protagonists tend to end up with each other in those movies,” Ellie says wryly.

“Naw,” Priya grins, “that’s what the sequel’s for. You still keep in touch?”

“With Trig ?”

“No, genius, with the pretty girl. Aster.”

“No,” Ellie sighs. “It was always Paul who had her number, and he hasn’t teased me about her Instagram in quite a few years so I assume she might have gone inactive there, too.”

Priya hums. “Well, Ellie-girl,” she says, “I’m sure you’ll run into each other again, if you’re fated to.”

Chapter Text

June comes in bright and sunny, the early summer sunlight sparkling from where it reflects off the glass windows of the many skyscrapers in New York. School is out for the summer, which means Ellie doesn’t even have the excuse of readings or grading to defend herself with when Priya comes calling.

“It’ll be fun, Ellie, you should try going at least once in your lifetime.”

“Priya,” Ellie says drily, “there are going to be so many people there.”

“It’s the largest Pride parade in America, of course there are going to be a ton of people there! That’s the point .”

“You don’t have to bring me along, you know; I know you went with other friends last year.”

Priya sighs and sits down on the couch beside Ellie, shoulder to shoulder. “I’m not asking because I need a companion to go to Pride with, Ellie,” she says. “It’s just… eye-opening, you know. To know that there’s people just like me who are proud of who they are. To know I’m not alone. To know that it’s okay to be proud of who I am as well. I just thought it might be nice if you got to experience that, too.”

Unbidden, Ellie remembers being worried about the gazes of others, back in Grinnell - so worried, that she’d not dared to hold Blake’s hand in public. She’d felt unsettled, then, in her queer identity, like a pair of brand-new patent leather shoes that squeeze just a little too tight. It’s been years since then, and she feels a little more comfortable calling herself queer, these days, but still mostly like a quiet murmur in her heart rather than a loud and flashy declaration. But listening to Priya speak, she wonders how her younger self might have felt, if there’d been an event like New York Pride to give her an extra push out of her shell.

“Okay,” she says, at length, and Priya lights up. “I’ll give it a try. But if I don’t like it I’m going to leave.”

Which brings Ellie to today, a warm and sunny Saturday morning, walking towards where she can already see people dressed in rainbow colours congregating along the sides of the road, preparing for the start of the Pride March. She’s got a button-up shirt borrowed from Priya printed all over with a cute cartoon of a unicorn farting out rainbows, a portable fan, and a cap with a little rainbow flag stuck through the loop at the back like a fancy hair-stick. She’s all prepared… or just about as prepared as she can be, at least.

The music is loud when they reach the venue, and Ellie holds back a wince as she and Priya find a comfortable side of the procession to stand, in anticipation for the start of the march. 

The press of the crowd and swell of the music should feel intimidating, suffocating, but somehow, it feels less like an oppressive crowd and more like… coming home, to a raucous family reunion. All around her she sees girls holding hands with each other, boys kissing and laughing and hugging, people of all genders decked out in bright rainbow colours with flags waving high - queer people triumphant with the relief of being around other people just like them, buoyant with the joy and freedom of being who they truly are.

Ellie looks around her, at the people who are, in some way, just like her. It’s not a stretch to imagine that if they’re queer like her, they might have had the same insecurities she’d once had about shouting out her queer pride for the world to hear. And yet - here they are, having overcome that insecurity to stand brightly in the sun, unafraid and unapologetic. For a second she almost feels like an imposter, but then she feels Priya’s warm hand squeeze her shoulder.

“Got you something,” Priya says, and she feels something drape over her shoulders. A large rectangle of cloth, patterned with stripes of red, orange, white, and pink - a flag Ellie’s only ever seen on the Internet and on the emoji keyboard, now adorning her shoulders like a cape. She looks up from the flag to see Priya grinning back at her, her own face made up with stripes of bright paint in pink, yellow, and blue.

“Thanks,” she says, pulling the ends of the flag to wrap more tightly around herself, and Priya beams back.

The flag is warm, already starting to trap the summer heat beneath it, but Ellie pays it no mind. The flag feels like armour, now, and beneath its bright stripes she feels her shoulders relax, just a little.

(Perhaps she might not be as loud and proud as the other folks here, but… she still has the right to be here. She’s queer, she’s here, and that’s all that matters.)

The contingent begins to move as the clock strikes eleven, and the two of them move with it, holding hands so they won’t get lost in the swell of the crowd. People on the street wave to them and Ellie waves her little rainbow flag back. Somehow, being part of this giant procession of confident, queer people, with her flag wrapped around her shoulders, she feels a little more bold, comfortable, settled.

A drag queen sashays past, her gown’s skirt made entirely out of rainbow-coloured silk rosettes, and she twirls in time to the beat of the parade music. Further down, a young man in tight shorts and a large feathered set of wings hoists a massive rainbow flag into the air, glittery streamers flying from the pole as he waves it from side to side.

Priya squeezes her hand twice and Ellie squeezes it back, hardly daring to believe the feeling of freedom and belonging that creeps up her throat at the sight.

Queer and here , she thinks, and for the first time, it feels like something to shout from the rooftops.

~

“Hey,” Aisyah says, slipping into the seat next to Ellie in the library one afternoon. Ellie looks up from where her head’s buried in a collection of essays about wartime poetry from the First World War, and raises an eyebrow.

“Hey,” she says back, curiously. Aisyah’s rarely in the library - she prefers to study at home, she’d told Ellie before, where she has the comfort of her fluffy ragdoll cat sitting on her lap or stretched out on the desk next to her as she works. 

“So, I got an email this morning.” She pauses theatrically.

“...From?” Ellie asks, when it doesn’t seem like Aisyah’s going to elaborate, though the wide Cheshire grin on her friend’s face unnerves her a little, like she knows something Ellie doesn’t.

“Remember Ji-Hye? From the open-mic night.”

Ellie narrows her eyes and thinks back, vaguely recalls a conversation about paintings and names, and nods. “Somewhat,” she says. “She emailed you?”

“Sure did,” Aisyah says, cheekily. “Emailed me about you, specifically. Guess you made an impression, huh?”

Ellie snorts, fishes for a ruler in her pencil-case and sticks it between the pages of the book so she won’t lose her spot. “I highly doubt it was anything saucy like you’re trying to imply, given that we only talked for like, five minutes,” she says drily. “How did she even get your email address?”

“Saw right through me, huh,” Aisyah teases. “I used it to sign us up for the open mic, I guess she had records of them.”

“Do I get to see the email?” Ellie asks, holding back a grin of her own as she stretches her arms above her head. “Or are you just going to tease me about it?”

Aisyah snorts. “Nah, you should really see it,” she says. “I’ll forward it to you, give me a sec.”

A moment later, Ellie’s laptop sends her an alert for a new email from Aisyah, forwarding a message and an attachment.

Hey Aisyah , the email reads.

Ji-Hye here, we met at the Women In Poetry open mic last month. Sorry this is so out of the blue, I hope you don’t think I’m a creep or anything, but I was hoping you might be able to pass on my message to your friend, Ellie.

I think I told Ellie when we met that I’d seen a painting of a girl that looked like her at an independent art fair. Well, the other day I was on Instagram when I noticed another painting that I remember being from the same artist’s collection. I think it was a photo by someone who saw the painting at an art gallery - she tagged the location of the gallery but didn’t tag the artist, unfortunately.  I’ve screenshot the post in case Ellie might be interested to check it out.

Thanks, and sorry again for emailing you so randomly! Hope we get to meet at another open mic event somewhere.

“Oh,” Ellie says blankly. Almost on autopilot, she reaches out for her mouse to click on the image file attached to the email, opening up an Instagram screenshot.

The painting in the screenshot is of a blank concrete wall, beginning to crack at the top and bottom. Sprouting from the deeper cracks in the wall, the artist has painted a riotous collection of marigolds, their gold-edged petals almost seeming to reflect a sunset glow. It’s a perfectly innocuous, well-executed painting, and Ellie’s about to close the image when she sees it.

Nestled in the shadow of the marigolds, almost like a hidden symbol only someone looking for it would see, are two cans of spray paint, with a blue arrow spray-painted on the wall pointing down at them.

Ellie stares at the two paint cans for a moment, feeling like her breath’s caught in her lungs for a moment. She blinks, and just for a single heartbeat, she’s back in Squahamish, looking up at a spray-painted mural she had created together with a girl she’d loved in secret.

Another blink, another heartbeat, and she’s back in the Columbia library, gripping her mouse tightly. She loosens her grip, deliberately, and studies the screenshot - the tiny location tag above the picture reads “A.I.R. Gallery”. 

Ellie breathes out, and closes the screenshot. “Thanks,” she tells Aisyah. “Help me tell Ji-Hye I’ll check it out.”

“Want me to come with you?” Aisyah asks, curiously, but Ellie shakes her head. If she’s right, if the wall in the painting isn’t just any wall with two cans of paint coincidentally placed next to it, if there’s a chance that the wall in the painting is their wall….

“I feel like I might be more comfortable going alone, this time,” she says, and Aisyah hums, nodding easily.

“Keep me updated if anything interesting comes out of it,” she says with a grin.

That weekend finds Ellie on a muggy train out to Brooklyn, studying the location of the gallery on her Google Maps. The moment Paul had heard that she’d intended to go to Brooklyn for the weekend, he’d told her to crash on Priya’s couch for the night, and had promptly dumped his latest sausage experiment on her - tofu salami, inspired by a video of Chinese tofu sausages he’d seen on Youtube but made with chickpeas instead of pork.

“Paul, I’m not going to be at Priya’s until the evening, probably,” Ellie had said, drily. “I’m not about to lug a cooler bag of sausages all around Brooklyn.”

“These are dried sausages, like salami!” Paul had said in return, holding a few sausages in one fist to demonstrate his point. “They’re good at room temperature so you can just shove them in your backpack. They’re vegetarian and they taste great, I’m sure Priya would love to try them. Please?”

Ellie had sighed fondly, but she’s never been one to deny her best friend anything, so she’d taken the sausages, double-wrapped them in plastic bags so they wouldn’t stink up her bag, and taken them with her to Brooklyn. She can feel the weight of them now, rolling around the bottom of her backpack, and she hopes fervently that the extra set of clothes she’d stuffed into her bag don’t end up smelling like sausage at the end of the day.

The gallery, as it turns out, is a short walk from Brooklyn Bridge, a white-walled building with panels of glass windows letting in the bright sunlight. Stepping into the gallery, Ellie wanders the halls quietly, looking at beautiful sculptures and intriguing works of modern art as she goes.

As she walks into the final gallery, she catches sight of the painting of the concrete wall, the very first painting that greets her in the small hall. Up close, Ellie can see the detail in the painting, the flurry of brushstrokes that make up the marigolds that stretch through the cracks in the wall, the way the shadow cast by the wall curls lovingly around the two cans of spray paint, in direct contrast to the bright blue of the clear sky visible above the wall.

Holding her breath in what feels somewhat like anticipation, Ellie steps further into the gallery.

There’s a few more paintings on display, and at a brief glance Ellie can tell that they all feature flowers as their main motif. There’s a painting of the stonework facade of an unfamiliar university building glowing golden in the sunset light, ferns of all kinds growing lush and thick up its walls. There’s a painting of a lonely phone booth at night, just barely lit by starlight, its paint peeling and its lights off. As Ellie steps closer, she sees what looks to be the shadows of a train-track going right past the phone booth, and dark indigo irises growing up from the base of the phone booth, the very edges of their petals outlined by silver moonlight. There’s a painting of a still forest-pool glimmering in the sunlight, its banks overgrown with daisies, as though waiting for a nymph of the woods to bathe in it.

Ellie moves on to the final one, and her feet stutter to a stop.

Unlike the rest of the paintings, which had been fairly large, this one is a much smaller canvas set in a gold frame. The rest, too, had featured landscapes, but this painting features a person - a girl, her facial features filled in only just enough detail to make out the vague approximation of a bespectacled face, but her hair pulled into a familiar low ponytail and a blue jacket, just like the one Ellie remembers wearing in high school, pulled tight over her shoulders. The girl in the photo is sitting in the shade of a tree, engrossed in a book; a wealth of pastel-purple lilacs grow at her feet, a delicate crown of them in her hair.

If she’d been a stranger, she probably wouldn’t have thought much of the girl in the painting, would have considered the blurring of the facial features too skilful to tell the exact identity of the girl in the painting. But Ellie knows her own face intimately well, and looking at the face of the girl in the painting, looking at the small clues thrown in by way of the hairstyle and the clothing and the slightest glint of silver-rimmed spectacles, she’s fairly sure that’s her, in the painting.

Heart pounding, she whirls around and heads back to the doorway of the gallery, where she recalls seeing a writeup about the artist and the collection on display. 

“bloom”

by a.f.

Oil paint on canvas

“Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities in the world.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“bloom” is Brooklyn-based multimedia artist a.f.’s sophomore collection of paintings. For this collection, a.f. made the decision to return to her roots in oil painting, illustrating the whimsical beauty of the everyday mundane through the blooming of flowers. 

“We all have poignant moments in our own lives, and this collection represents some of my most treasured ones,” said a.f. “But at the end of the day, they’re generic, mundane moments that anyone could have in their lives - a school building, a train track, a plain wall. I hope that, through this collection, the viewer will come away inspired to look for poignant beauty in the ordinary world around them.”

Ellie takes a steadying breath and slowly lets it out. “A.F.” are a familiar pair of initials, and though the rational part of her insists that there are probably a million people with the same initials living in New York, the less sensible part of her holds on to the unique details in the paintings, and she can feel something partway between hope and excitement begin to unfurl in her chest like a flower opening to the sunlight.

“Hi, thanks for coming by, would you like a guided walkthrough of this exhibit?”

A voice, familiar and yet unfamiliar, breaks the silence in the art gallery, and Ellie can feel herself freeze, a prickle of premonition sparking down her neck like an electric charge. She whips around, spinning on her heel, her sneaker soles squeaking against the glossy floor of the gallery. 

There’s a woman standing by the doorway to the gallery, hair neatly buzzed on one side with the long curling bulk of it swept over her other shoulder, dressed in a long floral sundress with a tan blazer thrown over her shoulders like a cape. Her chin is sharper now, the last of the youthful baby-fat on the cheeks Ellie remembers from high school now given way to high cheekbones underneath a healthy tan - a woman grown, from the girl in her memories.

“You-” Ellie breathes, and she can see the moment the woman registers who she is, the moment it clicks in her eyes.

“...No way,” says Aster Flores, standing right in front of her eyes like a girlhood daydream come alive. “Ellie Chu?”

Chapter Text

“Hi,” Ellie blurts, at the same moment that Aster says, “I didn’t know you were in New York.”

They both pause and then, without any cue, burst out laughing at the same time. It’s almost surreal, standing here in a sleek art gallery in downtown Brooklyn so far away from small-town Squahamish, a woman she thought she’d never see again standing before her now. Ellie’s not sure what it is, but somewhere between the side-shave haircut, the stylish blazer, and the impeccable makeup, she feels almost shy to be standing here in front of Aster in her thrift-store jean jacket and her backpack filled with sausages.

“Are you free this afternoon?” Aster asks, pulling Ellie from her thoughts.

“I’ve got nothing on until tonight,” Ellie says, cautiously. “I’m crashing at a friend’s place so she’s expecting me for dinner, but not before then.”

“In that case,” Aster says, a small smile pulling at her lips, “do you want to grab a coffee? I’d love to catch up, if you have some time.”

Ellie can’t help but smile back. “Coffee sounds lovely,” she agrees.

The cafe that Aster leads the way to is a small, hole-in-the-wall coffee joint just around the corner from the gallery. The fragrant smell of roasted coffee greets Ellie as Aster pushes open the door, and the barista at the counter turns to greet Aster by name. It’s cozy here, and welcoming; Ellie feels any remaining tension melt away from her shoulders as she follows Aster over to a small table by the window. Aster orders a cup of single-origin filter from the small card clipped to the front of the menu; Ellie finds herself unconsciously filing away that small detail in a dusty corner of her mind, a small tidbit about the woman in front of her that she’d not known about before.

When their orders are taken, when the chirpy barista has headed back to the counter to start making their coffee orders, Ellie feels silence fall like a blanket around them.

“You, uh,” she says, in an effort to break the silence. She’d never had trouble back in high school, back when they’d chatted endlessly about literature and their outlook on the world from their small hometown. But it’s been years since then, and this time, Ellie doesn’t have the shield of SmithCorona lending her confidence through anonymity any more. “You look different.” She hides her wince at how flat the statement sounds coming out of her mouth, but Aster only laughs, looking amused.

“It must be the new shampoo I’m using,” Aster says, a mild teasing note in her voice, and despite herself, Ellie laughs along, feeling a little more at ease at the familiar bantering tone. 

“I like the shave,” she says, raising a hand up to brush her hand over the side of her own head. “My college roommate shaved the sides of her head, too, but she had short hair; I didn’t realise it would work so well with long hair, too.”

“It was an ill-advised impulse decision I made in college, with my roommate’s boyfriend’s shaver,” Aster says. “I liked it after I’d gotten help to tidy up the shave, though, so I kept it.”

“It suits you,” Ellie says, without thinking, ignoring the way her cheeks grow a little warmer at that.

Aster laughs, her eyes curving upwards. “I’m glad of that,” she says, and takes a sip of her coffee. “What brings you to Brooklyn? You mentioned visiting a friend?”

Ellie hums. “I’m visiting a friend who lives here, yeah,” she says, not quite about to admit that she’d made the trip mostly because she had heard that a gallery in Brooklyn had had a painting of her on display. “I live in Manhattan, though, so not really all that far away.”

“Oh?” Aster raises an eyebrow. “I think Mrs Geselchap mentioned that you’d gone to Grinnell, the last time I met her. Manhattan’s a little far from Iowa, huh.”

“Mrs Geselchap told you that?”

Aster snorts. “She did,” she says, a wry smile curling at the corner of her lip. “In the way she does when she thinks she’s being subtle, you know, except she’s got all the grace of a steam engine. Not that I minded - it was nice, hearing about what you’d been up to.”

The thought of Mrs Geselchap abruptly summons the memory of the rest of Ellie’s last trip back home, two years ago - the run to Aster’s house, the acid in Deacon Flores’ voice, a door slammed in her face. Before she can think the better of it, she blurts, “I tried going by your place the last time I was in Squahamish, but the Deacon, uh, said you didn’t live there any more.”

The wry smile on Aster’s face deepens a little, bitter on the edges. “I’m sure he said something less polite than that, if you’d come asking for me,” she says. “He… I guess you could say we had a falling out, of sorts.”

Ellie takes a slow sip of her own latte, not quite sure if to push. “Oh?”

Aster shrugs a shoulder elegantly, settling back in her chair like she’s in a sharing mood. “Father didn’t like the person that college turned me into, see,” she says, wryly. “He wanted a God-fearing daughter who’d marry a rich husband, one who would faithfully take care of the housework and give him many grandchildren; but when I came back from college I wasn’t willing to fulfill any of those tasks. I’m sure a part of him thinks, in hindsight, that if he hadn’t agreed to let me go off to art school and hang out with, in his words, the ‘radical liberals’, I’d still be his ideal perfect daughter.”

A pause, as Aster reaches for her coffee to take another sip. Ellie watches her quietly, not knowing what to say - there’s a tiny undercurrent of hurt in Aster’s voice, but it’s not raw, like it’s a hurt that she’s already learned how to process and deal with over the years, rather than one that still stings.

“What Father never realised, of course,” Aster continues, putting down her cup, “is that college didn’t turn me into someone different. I’m still the same person I was before I left for college; I just became more sure of myself, less afraid of hiding who I really was. So the last time I went home, when he was giving me his lecture again about how my dabblings in sin would shame the whole family in the eyes of God and the church, I told him that if he couldn’t accept a bisexual artist as his daughter, then I could just stop being his daughter. That way, whatever sin I carry on my shoulders wouldn’t stain him any more.” She lets out a short bark of laughter, the wry smile returning to her face as she looks up to meet Ellie’s gaze. “I left the house that evening, and haven’t talked to him since. I guess he took me at my word, though, if that’s what he told you when you came knocking.”

“Oh,” Ellie says, faintly. “I’m, uh,” she scrambles for an appropriate response to someone who’s voluntarily estranged themselves from their family, and comes up short. “I’m sorry.”

Aster laughs again, a fuller one this time, eyes twinkling. “You don’t need to be, Ellie Chu,” she says, the barest breath of fondness in her tone. “I don’t regret any part of what I did or said to him. At the end of the day, Father’s still family, and I still love him. But you don’t have to like your family to love them, I guess. It’s probably better for the both of us that we don’t interact any more.”

“Hmm,” Ellie says, noncommittally. She can’t relate, herself - her Ba occupies a precious, precious place in her heart, and Ellie knows with a deep conviction that she would never be able to dislike her Ba. But this, she knows also: that every family is different.

“You look lighter,” she says instead. “Like a weight’s been taken off your shoulders.” She remembers the slight hunted look that used to lurk in Aster’s eyes back in high school, back when everyone had wanted her to be somebody to them - that look is gone now, replaced by a serene confidence and calm that almost drapes itself over Aster’s shoulders like a second cloak.

“I guess it has,” Aster says, smiling. “Some days, I feel like I could even fly.”

~ 

They end up chatting at the cafe for another two hours before Aster has to run back to the gallery; but they exchange numbers and never really stop texting, after that.

Ellie learns that Aster had moved to Brooklyn after art school, working part-time as a museum curator while trying to turn her art into a full-time job. She’s got a flatshare with a high school physics teacher, a flower-shop owner, and two cranky cats.

I’m pretty sure they’re each attracted to the other but don’t realise that their feelings are mutual , Aster says of her two human flatmates, like one of those cheesy romance novels.

Why, Aster Flores, I didn’t realise you were such a connoisseur of cheesy romance novels .

Well, they’re no Remains of the Day , comes Aster’s reply, but don’t knock ‘em.

Ellie can’t help but smile at that, until Paul, looking over from where he’s frying up their dinner, laughs and chucks a chunk of raw onion at her forehead. He’s known from the day Ellie came back from Brooklyn with a backpack smelling vaguely of sausage and a brand-new contact in her phone, that Ellie and Aster have reconnected, and has never stopped taking the opportunity to tease Ellie about it.

“You’re smiling at your phone like an idiot again,” he says, grinning.

“I’m not,” Ellie says, mock-huffily, and picks the onion chunk off the floor to rinse under the kitchen tap.

“Gosh, if you’d been like this all those years ago when you were helping me text Aster, I never would have thought I’d stood a chance with her.”

“We’re not-” Ellie gives up, sighs, and throws the rinsed piece of onion into Paul’s frying pan. “We’re just catching up. That’s all.”

Paul waggles his eyebrows at her in a gesture Ellie’s pretty sure he’d copied from Priya, and sticks out his tongue. “If you say so, Chu. If you say so.” 

Another time, they’re discussing Walt Whitman after one of Ellie’s lectures while she’s on the way home and Aster is bored on shift, and by an hour into the discussion the topic’s changed up to queer literature and poetry.

To be fair, I did read a fair amount of Sappho when I was trying to figure out whether I was actually queer , Aster says.

And what conclusion did you come to?

That I liked kissing girls as much as I liked kissing boys, but that it’s the sapphics who write all the good poetry.

Ellie smiles to herself, remembering a time when Aster had still been unsure of her queer identity, back when Ellie had kissed her on impulse on the road outside her house. They were so young, then, but they’ve both come a long way, she muses, shifting her tote bag to her other shoulder as she types. Being comfortably queer is a good look on you. I’m glad.

There’s a long pause, and Ellie watches the status message signifying that Aster’s typing for about two bus stops, before the reply comes through.

I had to do a lot of unlearning of my internalised homophobia, I think. I’m not done by any means, and I’m still trying to reconcile the queer woman I am with the faith I’ve been taught. But I don’t want to run away from who I am any more, Ellie . I’ve wasted so much time running, before; now, I just want to be proud of who I am.

Ellie remembers the warmth of a red, orange, and pink flag draped across her shoulders, the feeling of quiet belonging and security, and smiles. Queer and here , she wants to type, but it feels a little cheesy.

The waves which precede you , she types instead, fairly sure Aster will get the reference, ripple and stir the sands at my feet.

Lowell , Aster say instantly, and Ellie gives in to the urge to grin. Still plagiarising others’ words all this time, Ellie Chu?

Only for you , Ellie types out, and then just as quickly deletes before she accidentally sends it out.

One night, after repeated nagging from Paul, Ellie ends up inviting Aster over to their apartment. Aster arrives early while Paul’s still cooking up sausages for the dinner platter, a bottle of wine in her hand and a cautious look in her eye.

“Don’t mind the mess,” Ellie says, pulling the front door open wider for Aster. “Paul’s really excited to have someone new try his sausages. He’s experimenting with a new flavour to sell soon, some kind of sumac-spiced lamb sausage.”

Aster laughs, handing over the bottle in her hand to Ellie as she bends down to slip off her shoes. “I think a couple of my friends actually know about Paul’s sausage brand,” she says. “I’ve seen them follow his account on Instagram.”

“Engagement!” Paul booms from the kitchen.  “Make yourself comfortable, Aster, dinner’ll be ready soon.”

Ellie walks Aster into the living room, stopping to put the bottle of wine down on the coffee table. She senses Aster stop a few paces behind her and turns back around to see Aster staring at the corridor leading down to the bedrooms.

“That painting.” Aster points, and Ellie follows her gaze: it’s the painting she’d received from Rafael back in Grinnell all those years ago, the beautiful turquoise-and-green canvas hung lovingly on their apartment wall.

“It was a gift, from a senior in college,” Ellie says. “He painted it but didn’t have the space to keep it when he moved out of the dorms, so he gave it to me.”

“It’s lovely,” Aster says. “Like the ocean captured in a heartbeat, on canvas. The power and movement in the brushstrokes is quite something.”

Ellie startles, then, the words from Aster dislodging a dusty memory of her describing the very same painting to Rafael all those years ago in uncannily similar words. Unbidden, she remembers Paul’s teasing, asking if she’d intended to show the painting to Aster back then - years later, listening to Aster speak the same thoughts she’d held in her own heart about the same work of art, she wonders if, just maybe, Paul might have been on to something.

“Dinner’s ready!” Paul calls then from the kitchen, and the thought dissipates from Ellie’s mind like morning mist, as she goes to set the table.

~

Late autumn in New York is crisp and cold, Ellie’s fingers just beginning to freeze as she steps out into the evening air, Aisyah at her side and hands jammed deep into her coat pockets. They’re due to meet with Ji-Hye at a new halal-friendly Korean fried chicken joint close to campus - something about Aisyah wanting to organise a new open-mic night featuring poets of colour, with Ji-Hye’s help. (Ellie’s not exactly sure why they need her there, but Paul’s working late at the shop tonight, anyway, and she needs dinner.)

The restaurant is noisy, though Ji-Hye’s already saved them a table, and is snacking on a couple of plates of banchan when they arrive.

“Yo,” she says as they arrive. “Good to see you again, Ellie.”

“Hi, Ji-Hye,” Ellie says, sliding into one of of the seats and pulling off her coat. “I never got to thank you for the gallery tip, that time.”

“Oh?” Ji-Hye raises one perfectly manicured eyebrow. “Did you manage to find the artist?”

Ellie spies a shit-eating grin starting to spread across Aisyah’s face and elbows her friend hard, before she can say anything. (Aisyah talks to Paul, after all, and the two of them together are an awfully gossipy combination.) “I did,” she says. once she’s secured Aisyah’s silence. “Turns out she was an old friend.”

Ji-Hye nods, and to Ellie’s eternal relief, does not look inclined to pursue the topic further.

The banchan is good and the chicken excellent, and once the big plates are cleared away Aisyah and Ji-Hye get down to some serious discussion about the logistics of the open-mic event. 

“I’ll be right back,” Ellie says, getting up from her seat, and Aisyah waves a hand in acknowledgment. Lost in thought, Ellie heads towards the back of the restaurant, to where a cute sign with a dancing chicken on it points the way to the washrooms. Absently, she pushes open the door, and almost stumbles as the door is pulled open from the inside at the same time.

“Woah,” says the girl inside the washroom, “sorry about that.”

“No, my bad,” Ellie starts to say, until she looks up and sees warm brown eyes in a freckled face, strangely unfamiliar in the way time has changed the lines of a face she’d once known like the back of her hand.

“Oh,” breathes Blake, staring at her with one hand still on the door handle. “Ellie Chu?”

“Blake Giuliani,” Ellie returns, faintly, and Blake laughs.

“Of all the gin joints in the world,” she says, with a smile. “I guess I should have expected that I might run into you in New York. You went to Columbia, after all.”

“I thought you’d moved to Japan,” Ellie says, dumbly.

“I did,” Blake says. “I’m back for Thanksgiving break, that’s all. Taking a couple days in New York for myself before I take my domestic flight back home.”

At that moment, the automatic flush in one of the empty cubicles goes off on its own and Blake startles, before laughing awkwardly. “Perhaps a public washroom isn’t the best place to catch up, huh. Can I buy you a drink? I’m seated at the bar counter, we could chat for a bit there.”

Ellie hesitates, and cranes her neck over to her original table to see Aisyah and Ji-Hye, still deep in discussion. “I don’t think my friends will miss me if I’m gone for a bit,” she says, decisively. “Lead the way.”

“So,” Ellie says a while later, once she’s got a cool glass of peach soda in her hands.

“So,” Blake returns. A pause, then: “Since you asked - I’m still working in Japan, for now. My appointment with the English-teaching programme I was with is ending soon, but I was thinking of looking for a permanent job, maybe in one of the schools there, to teach English.”

“How’s Japan?” Ellie asks, curious.

“Oh, it’s wonderful ,” Blake sighs happily. “Most days I get to speak a language I love while teaching children, which is also something I love doing. I breathe in clean mountain air and eat fresh vegetables and fish every day, and on the weekends I get to just roll around my living room and watch anime . Sometimes I do get frustrated with the inefficiency and bureaucracy over there, and I always miss my nonna ’s food, but… it’s a pretty good deal, living in Japan - good enough to consider staying, at least for a few more years.” She takes a big sip of her own drink. “And how about you, Ellie?”

“I’m…doing alright,” Ellie says. “Still at Columbia, reading dusty old literature and marking undergrads’ essays.”

“New York’s been good to you, I can tell,” Blake says, with a small smile. 

“Oh?”

“You used to curl into yourself a lot, back at Grinnell, like you were holding the secrets of the world on your shoulders and you were terrified that if you stopped to share the burden, everything would fall right off. But you stand a little taller, now; your shoulders don’t hunch as deeply, any more.”

“I guess we all change,” Ellie says. “You look happier, too.”

“Mm,” hums Blake. She pauses, then says, almost all in a rush: “I really missed this.”

Ellie blinks. “This?”

Blake gestures a little helplessly with one hand. “Missed talking to you,” she says. “Missed my friend.”

Ellie puts down her drink and looks, really looks, at the girl, the woman, she’d used to love. The breakup had hurt, at first, even though Ellie had known in her heart of hearts that it had been logical - but she’s done a little growing up of her own now, these past couple years in New York, and nothing heals the sting of heartbreak quite like the passage of time. She had loved Blake, but before that, before they’d dated, they’d been good friends, and Ellie realises with a jolt that she’s missed this easy banter, too. They can never be who they used to be to each other, but Ellie realises then with a strong conviction, that they can still be something, to each other.

“I believed, back then, that you were the right person for me,” Ellie says carefully, “but you were right, in the end. It was the wrong time for us. We’re different people, now, and I don’t know if we’re still the right people for each other.”

“We don’t have to be,” Blake says, with a crooked smile. “We can just be friends, if you’d like.”

“Friends,” Ellie says, and looks into Blake’s soft brown eyes, fond and hopeful. Her heart thumps in her chest - not fluttering anxiously like it used to, but steady and sure - and she smiles. “I would love that.”

Chapter Text

Ellie smothers a yawn into her hand and ducks under yet another low-hanging branch, its leaves curling yellow-brown in the very last weeks of autumn. Beyond the tree canopy above her, the sky is still the greyish blue-black of a morning sky not yet fully awoken by the first rays of the rising sun, and she shivers a little, pulling her jacket a little tighter around her shoulders.

If asked, Ellie would be the first person to readily admit she’s never really been a morning person, that she’d much rather burrow in her blankets until her third alarm of the morning rings or until Paul yanks her quilt off the bed, whichever comes first. But last week, while they’d been hanging out at the cafe across the road from Aster’s workplace, Aster had mentioned wanting to do a hike and get some sketching done en plein air .

Do you want to come along? We can do the hike in the morning and make a picnic of it, or something , Aster had said, and the excitement dancing in her eyes had made Ellie agree before she’d fully registered what she was agreeing to. Perhaps it was something about the prospect of getting to spend time with Aster doing something she loved, something about the way her eyes had glimmered like the hike was some grand adventure to be embarked upon. Perhaps it was something about the way Ellie had dangerously realised, in that moment, that she might have agreed to just about anything Aster suggested with that sparkle in her eye.

I used to hike a lot back when I was in art school , Aster had explained, but it’s not as easy to hike around New York unless you go upstate.

I’ve not done a hike in many, many years , Ellie had replied, but I’m game.

In the present moment, Ellie stumbles over a tree root, jolting her out of her daze. Before she can react, or before she can feel herself face-plant into the earth, a warm hand wraps around her forearm to hold her steady.

“Woah, there,” Aster says, amusedly. “You alright, Ellie?”

“Yeah,” Ellie says, trying to hide the fact that she’s slightly winded. (You can take a bookworm out of the library, but you can’t fix their poor stamina overnight.) “Nice catch.”

Aster laughs. “There’s some stairs up ahead, they’re a bit slick from all the leaf litter and dew,” she says. “Watch your step.”

With Aster’s warm hand tugging her along, Ellie lets herself be guided up the stairs and over two fallen trees, Aster’s hand not letting her go until the path in front of them is relatively clear again. 

By this point, the sun has risen above the horizon, and as they round the bend the still, blue surface of the Hudson greets them, small waves along its length glittering with the reflections of the morning sun, and the dramatic rugged cliff-face of the Palisades beyond that. Despite herself, despite the lingering sleepiness in her bones, Ellie can’t help but let out a slow, long breath in awe.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Aster says, turning back to her with a wide smile. “You see the Hudson so often in the city, but somehow nature looks so much more beautiful when you’ve toiled a little to get to the viewing point.”

“It makes the effort worth it,” Ellie says. She fishes out her phone from the outdoor backpack Priya had lent her, snaps a photo or two to be shown to Paul later when she gets home. (Ellie’d asked if he might want to come along, but he’d declined - I’ve gotta go into the shop early, but you two have fun , he’d said, waggling his eyebrows aggressively with a shit-eating grin that had made Ellie roll her eyes and punch him softly in the shoulder.)

They continue the hike for a while more, following the meandering trail through tunnels and up more slopes. The sun’s higher in the sky now, filtering down through the canopy and turning the last of the autumn leaves into little coronas of fiery light, and Ellie’s privately glad Aster had suggested this hike now, and not in the height of summer.

Soon, they arrive at a larger clearing that overlooks the Hudson once again, the view stretching further in both directions - if one tunes out the sound of cars and helicopters, it might even be easy to pretend that they’ve left the city behind altogether. Ellie lets her eyes flutter closed, and concentrates on the feeling of the wind against her skin, the faint sound of birdsong from the trees.

“Here, this looks good to take a break,” Aster says. “I think this is the big clearing I saw on the map - we might want to eat our brunch here, before we go on, in case there’s nowhere else later.”

They spread out a groundsheet below one of the larger trees, and arrange their brunch on a flat rock nearby - cold coffee in a thermos, a small container of grapes, sausagemeat sandwiches Paul had put together for them the night before and left in the fridge. ( It’s pretty much a Sausage McMuffin , Ellie had said, watching him slide an omelette on top of each sausage patty. How dare you , Paul had said in reply, shoving her shoulder indignantly as she’d chortled. Insulting me as I perform free labour for your sake! For shame, Ellie! )

Ellie breathes in a lungful of crisp autumn air, takes a bite of sandwich, and leans back against the trunk of the tree. Having a picnic in the wild like this, with no obvious signs of the city around, she almost feels frozen in time - they might be in a forested park in New York City, or in a quiet forest an hour’s drive away from little Squahamish, or maybe even somewhere on the other end of the world. Unbidden, the words of an old poem she’d found in one of her readings comes to mind.

“Where we made the fire in the summer time, of branch and briar,” she says aloud, her voice quiet in the cool air. “On the hill to the sea, I slowly climb.”

Aster crooks a smile. “Is that Hardy?”

Ellie shrugs. “It’s a poem about a picnic,” she says, wryly. “It fit the vibe.”

“Well,” Aster laughs, “It is a lovely poem, just a very sad one. I’d prefer for our future picnics to be very much more joyful.”

Ellie hides a smile at the unspoken promise of future picnics, and takes another bite of her sandwich instead.

Eventually, they pack up their picnic, and Aster pulls out a small sketchbook, a pencil, and a palette of watercolour paints. “This is about as good a viewing point as we’ll get, according to Google,” she says. “Do you mind if I do a bit of sketching before we continue?”

“Knock yourself out,” Ellie says with an answering smile, pulling a battered  paperback out of her own bag that she’d brought for this express purpose - a copy of Klara and the Sun she and Aisyah had found in a secondhand bookstore near campus a week prior. Aster takes one look at the cover and huffs a laugh of her own.

“Very on brand,” she says, a fond quirk to the corner of her mouth.

The shade from the tree is thin this close to noon, but Ellie finds that she doesn’t quite mind the weak autumn sunlight shining down on the pages of her book. She loses herself in the words and the faint old-paper perfume wafting from the yellowed pages, and finds herself roughly halfway through the book before a crick in her neck reminds her to get up and stretch a little.

Looking up from her book, Ellie sees Aster using a thin water brush to fill in the surface of the Hudson on her pencil sketch, brow slightly furrowed in concentration. Ellie’s quite sure that she’ll be found out in an instant if she were to snap a photo, but there’s something picturesque about this moment that makes her wish her retinas could capture it on film - the warm afternoon sunlight gleaming off the slight copper highlights in Aster’s hair, the beautiful colours of the view in front of them captured in watercolour on Aster’s sketchbook page, the golden-yellow-brown leaves in the distance waving ever so slightly in the occasional breeze.

As though sensing Ellie’s gaze, Aster looks up, and smiles.

“What’re you looking at?”

“Um,” Ellie says, floundering for an excuse. “You’ve, uh, got a spot of paint on your nose.”

“Hm?” Aster reaches up with a hand and rubs at her nose, and in doing so flicks a bit of the paint from her still-wet brush onto her cheek, nose crinkling. Ellie laughs a little, leans forward. “Here,” she says, “let me-”

Without thinking, she reaches out her hand and brushes her thumb against the drop of paint on Aster’s cheek. As she wipes away the paint, she feels the pad of her thumb tingle for a moment, bereft of the warmth of Aster’s skin and cold in the autumn air. Swallowing, she turns to see Aster gazing straight at her, an unfathomable emotion in her eyes.

They stare straight at each other for a while in silence, Ellie with her hand still inches from Aster’s face, Aster with her brush held loosely by her side. Finally, Aster breathes in heavily. “I don’t know if you remember,” she says, quietly, breaking the delicate silence, “but I once told you that the difference between a good painting, and a great one, is just five strokes. The five boldest strokes of the painting.”

“I remember,” Ellie breathes, voice equally soft.

“The thing about that, though, is that if you place the five strokes wrongly, they could ruin a good painting.” Aster breathes out through her nose, sets her brush back down on her palette without looking. “I don’t know about you, Ellie, but I’ve thought about it on and off through the years - that when we last spoke back home in Squahamish, all those years ago, something in us rushed to make a great painting out of a good one, and we placed those five strokes wrongly.”

Ellie feels Aster’s free hand come up to wrap around her wrist still hovering in the air, tugs it down so that their joined hands rest on the warm groundsheet below them. She turns her hand palm-up, waiting for Aster to finish her train of thought.

“The thing is, Ellie, we’ve both had a lot of time since then. These past few months, it feels like I’ve gotten to know you all over again - except this time, neither of us are pretending to be anything other than our true selves. It feels like we’ve started over on a fresh canvas now, and I think it would be nice to try for a bold stroke or two again, but at our own pace, this time.” Aster smiles, then, tilts her head a little, and her gaze softens. “What do you think?”

Ellie laughs, then. “I’m thinking,” she says, squeezing Aster’s wrist, “that I might be an English doctoral student, but that doesn’t mean I like to speak in metaphors all the time.”

Aster snorts.

“What I’m getting at, Ellie Chu,” she says, “is that I spent many nights in college ruminating on the late-night conversations we used to have, wondering if things could have been different if you’d been writing to me as you instead of as someone else . We’re not the same people now as we were back then, but I think that’s let us start things over on a clean slate, and Ellie, I can’t help but fall for the version of you I’ve gotten to know in New York.” 

She squeezes Ellie’s hand, her gaze turning a little shyer. “What I’m saying, Ellie, is that if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to hold your hand in mine, and to hold you in my arms. And maybe one day, if you’d let me, I’d like to kiss you again.”

“Oh,” Ellie breathes. There’s no surprise, this time; rather, it feels like the long-awaited culmination of all the foreshadowing that’s built up through the narrative of a story - a conclusion that feels right , one that feels like a long time coming. Ellie thinks about the way Aster’s slotted back into her life easily even after the span of so many years, the way they can still talk on the same wavelength about life, art, and anything else, the way the warmth of Aster’s wrist in her hand feels just right. She looks at the woman before her - warm eyes, loose curly hairs escaping from their high ponytail, the back of her neck already beginning to tan from their hike - and thinks that she could, perhaps, get used to this view. Heart in her throat, she reaches out and brushes one errant curl back behind Aster’s ear.

“I could live in an ocean of your thoughts, Aster Flores,” she says softly.

Aster laughs, the tips of her ears turning red. “Now who’s speaking in riddles?” she teases.

Ellie lets her hand wander from Aster’s ear to the back of her neck, and leans in slowly to press her lips to Aster’s. Her lips are slightly chapped from the dry autumn air but Aster’s taste ever so faintly like cherry lip balm, and Ellie can feel Aster smile into the kiss, squeeze their linked hands.

“In case that wasn’t clear,” Ellie says softly when they pull apart, both smiling shyly at each other, “I’d really like to hold your hand too, Aster Flores. And kiss you, and go through life with you. Let’s try for that great painting one more time.”

Aster smiles, eyes soft in a way that makes Ellie just want to smile back helplessly. “Sounds perfect to me,” she says, and leans in for another kiss.

fin.