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Samir is five years old and it’s his first day of kindergarten. All he’s ever known is the brick-and-mortar house that he’s spent his whole life inside and now, suddenly, his whole life has exploded into bright colors, brighter lights, a million screaming voices. He doesn’t quite know what to do with it all.
He stands before the long row of cubbies, frozen like the statue in the park his teta takes him to every afternoon, and then feels inexplicably sad when he realizes that he won’t go today because he’ll be here, in school. Hot tears well in his already burning eyes. He searches the room for his teacher—a kind woman with long, shiny hair and big, round glasses who he met last week at what his mom called kindergarten orientation—but finds her surrounded by parents who are talking increasingly louder and faster to be heard over the one next to them. He’d been terrified that morning when his dad left him on the sidewalk in front of the school with a clap to his shoulder and a stern “Make me proud, Samir” but now he’s quietly glad that neither of his parents are here right now. The parents who aren’t swarming the teacher are rocking their children in their arms and wailing into tissues. At least he isn’t the only one crying.
“Why are you standing here crying?”
Samir’s head snaps in the direction of the voice and pulls up short when he finds a wide-eyed girl with two blonde pigtails bouncing on top of her head. She has a scrape on one of her knees, and has somehow already spilled something orange down the front of her shirt, and Samir doesn’t know it now but he’s just met his very favorite person in the world.
She reaches out one pudgy finger and pokes it into his arm hard enough that it momentarily distracts him from crying. “Ow. What’d you do that for?”
“You didn’t answer me.” The girl frowns at him, like the answer should have been obvious. “Why are you standing here crying?”
“I’m sensitive,” Samir replies. It’s what he always hears his mom say when she thinks his dad is being too tough on him. Samir is sensitive. He’s our sensitive boy. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“I didn’t say there was,” Billie says, and then her hands come flying toward him. He thinks, for one very scary second, that she’s going to hit him, but when they land on his cheeks it’s gently. She does not hit him. She wipes his tears away. “Just stick with me, okay? I’ll take care of you.”
So he does.
* * *
Samir is nine years old when he’s called into the office for the first time.
He’s still reeling from the recess debacle that got them—him and Billie, of course, it’s always him and Billie—here. One minute they’re playing pirates, camped out at one of the picnic tables, peering through the end of a paper towel roll he pilfered from the recycling bin. The next, Billie is flying across the air and tackling Joshua Simkins into the grass, her fists wailing against his back.
He’d never seen her like that, so feral, so wild. He can’t imagine what possessed her to do it.
He shoots her a sideways glance where they sit side-by-side in uncomfortable plastic chairs, then looks back at the door to the principal’s office, Mrs. Howard’s name written across the back of it. It’s still closed. Joshua Simkins and his parents sit inside. Billie and Samir’s parents have yet to arrive. Their fate, and his life, hang in the balance.
“You have to tell me what happened,” Samir whispers, gaze fixed on the door ahead of him, like they won’t get caught if they just pretend they aren’t talking. “You have to tell me why you did it.”
“Because Joshua Simkins is a huge, giant jerk and he deserved it,” Billie hisses, her hands still balled into tight fists where they rest on her thighs.
Samir slowly stretches one of his hands to the side and clasps it on top of hers, something unspooling in his chest when her fingers relax under his. He doesn’t like seeing her like this. “Bills. Come on.”
Billie is quiet for a long time, but then her hand flips over and clutches onto Samir’s hard and he realizes that she’s just as scared of whatever consequence is about to come as he is. “He said something about you.”
Samir’s eyebrows twist in confusion on his forehead. “Me?”
They don’t get any further. The door to Mrs. Howard’s office opens and they fly apart, like they were never touching at all. At the same moment, Samir and Billie’s moms come rushing into the office. Samir eyes the clock on the wall. At least their timing is convenient, their moms were together anyway for their standing lunch date. Not only have Billie and Samir’s lives become intertwined over the years, but their families have, too. It usually works in their favor, but right now it just makes him feel like they’re in twice as much trouble.
“That’s them,” Mrs. Simkins says, pointing a trembling finger in their direction. “The cretin who tackled my little boy and the monster who put her up to it!”
“Cretin?!” Mrs. Schaeffer shrieks at the same time that Samir’s mom scowls and says “I know you’re not talking about our children.”
“Let’s all take a breath,” Mrs. Howard says, raising her hands in front of her. “I’d like to give Billie the chance to speak for herself. Did you attack Joshua?”
Billie’s face scrunches up, and Samir recognizes the expression that she’s wearing as the one she makes when she’s trying to wrestle her way out of something. This time, she comes up short. “Yes.”
Mrs. Howard frowns, no doubt thinking about how strange it is that this smart, quiet girl who’s never so much as stepped a toe out of line is in front of her like this, admitting to something entirely out of character. He’s willing to bet most of the people in the room are wondering the same thing.
Billie’s mom is the one that finally asks “Sweetie, why?”
For the first time, Samir sees fear flash across Joshua’s face. No, not fear. Guilt. Samir speaks before he can think twice about it. “To protect me.”
Mrs. Howard turns her gaze toward Samir, eyebrows furrowed in concern. “What do you mean, Samir?”
“I don’t know what he said,” Samir says quickly, his cheeks growing warm at the sudden attention. “Billie won’t tell me. But I know she wouldn’t have done that over nothing.”
Billie’s hands are balled into tiny, shaking fists again. “He was talking about Samir, about his family. I know Mr. and Mrs. Rahman. They would never-” She cuts herself off harshly, clamps down hard on her tongue.
Mrs. Howard reaches a hand forward to gently touch Billie’s shoulder. “I think you need to tell me what he said, Billie.”
“I don’t want to say it,” Billie says, sounding nothing short of agonized. Samir grimaces. Joshua must have said something awful. Billie seldom knows how or when to bite her tongue.
Mrs. Howard squats down beside Billie and holds a hand up to her ear. “Will you whisper it? Just once, then you never have to say it again.”
Billie’s gaze cuts to Samir for just a moment, then she nods and leans in close. Samir doesn’t hear the words that she says. He never finds out what Joshua Simkins had to say about him, and he never dares to utter the words again. All he knows is that it doesn’t take Mrs. Howard long to make up her mind.
“While I can appreciate your sense of judgement, I cannot condone your actions today. Next time, tell a teacher instead of taking it into your own hands. Mrs. Schaeffer, please sign Billie out for the day. I’m afraid my hands are tied as far as consequences for physical violence go. Mr. and Mrs. Simkins, I think we’re due for a larger conversation about how our student handbook defines harassment.”
Samir is left unscathed by it all, which makes his mom press a proud kiss to the top of his head and ruffle his hair. “You have a good friend in her, Sami, you know that?”
Samir casts a glance in Billie’s direction and she smiles on instinct when she catches his eye. “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
* * *
They’re twelve when Billie’s whole world falls apart.
She’s been gone for a week at science camp. It’s not so secretly the worst week of Samir’s life. He writes her a letter the first night she’s gone, even though he knows it won’t make it to her in rural Pennsylvania before Friday. At night, he tiptoes to his bedroom window and peers up at the stars and wonders if Billie is looking at them, too, through a telescope during the campout she told him about. He feels every mile that separates him from Billie in his bones, the distance between them cracking him open wide like the Grand Canyon his dad had insisted they drive three days to see two summers ago.
He’d missed Billie something fierce back then, too. He still remembers the way his eyes stung as he watched the shape of her grow smaller and smaller through the back windshield. Even when she was long gone, he refused to turn around.
Her homecoming is supposed to be the best day of his summer. Instead, Billie’s parents ruin everything.
It’s called a divorce, that’s what Samir’s parents say when they sit him down the day before Billie comes home. It means that her parents aren’t going to be married anymore, which Samir didn’t even realize was an option. He has to swallow back the panic he feels about his first brush with impermanence because this isn’t about him.
Poor Billie. That’s all he can think for the rest of the day, the long night he spends tossing and turning under his sheets. Poor Billie.
Samir is the youngest of three, with two older sisters, so he’s never really alone when it comes to matters involving his parents—the good, the bad, the frustrating, the zany. No matter what they do, no matter how he feels about it, there’s a high likelihood that either Yara, or Nisreen, or both will have felt that way once, too. But Billie is all alone, her parents’ only child. She doesn’t have anyone. Samir knows it’s his job to be there for her.
The problem is, nobody will let him. His mom says that it’s best that they give the Schaeffers “a wide berth” right now, whatever that means. Definitively, that he cannot go over to her house. He’s left to walk laps around his own instead, wondering if they told her on the car ride or if they waited until they were home, if they pretended everything was normal or if they stopped somewhere to eat ice cream before lunch and break the news to her. He hopes they were gentle with her, though he doubts that they were.
After dinner, he reaches the final stage of desperation: bargaining with his sisters.
The same knot tangles in the pit of his stomach that always does when he walks into their room knowing that he’s putting himself entirely at their mercy. He always gets what he wants, but he very rarely comes out on top in the grand scheme of things. But tonight, he’ll do anything.
“I need you to get me to Billie’s house,” he says in a rush, standing between their matching twin beds. It’s a humiliation ritual for him, a dynamic his sisters are visibly enjoying. “Please. It’s an emergency.”
Yara and Nisreen exchange a look that he isn’t quick enough to decipher. They’ve no doubt heard about the divorce, too, and are trying to figure out how much their involvement is worth.
Finally, Yara says “You have to do our chores for the rest of the month.” That’s how much.
Samir opens his mouth to argue and then snaps his mouth closed again, remembering what their dad always says about beggars and choosers. “Fine.”
Yara looks at the clock on her nightstand. It’s already past seven, and Samir’s curfew is earlier than theirs. “Let’s hurry. I can only get you so far, Sami.”
Samir, still a preteen, has yet to master the delicate art of lying to his parents, so he lets the girls take the lead. Nisreen, in a stroke of genius, says “We’re talking Samir out to get frozen yogurt” which guarantees their success because their dad is currently on a kick of insisting that frozen yogurt is a healthy dessert on account of the yogurt, and there’s nothing their mom likes more than the girls doting on their baby brother.
“Okay, we’re going to actually get frozen yogurt,” Yara says once they make it down the stairs. “You have forty-five minutes.”
Samir takes off.
His heartbeat thrums hard in his ears as his feet pound against the pavement. He weaves his way through the neighborhood on autopilot, following a path he’s carved hundreds of times. It’s a part of him. No matter which direction he’s walking, he’s always going home.
He knows there’s no chance that he can get inside without getting caught. The minute that Mr. or Mrs. Schaeffer lay their eyes on him, he’s as good as dead. He’ll be doing chores all summer for nothing. He has to get Billie out to him.
He wishes that he’d had the foresight to pack a flashlight. They’d learned morse code last year when they got in too much trouble for talking during class and had to devise a way to communicate silently. He could flash a message into her room if he’d brought it. Instead, he’s forced to crawl around in the yard looking for pebbles to toss up at the glass. It takes an embarrassing number of tries to successfully land where he wants them to but then Billie is there, drawing up the blinds and looking down at him. Her expression changes the moment she sees him there; Samir would recognize that relief from a mile away. He waves then emphatically points at her, then down to the grass, and finally clasps his hands together in a pleading gesture. She nods, and appears at the back door only a handful of seconds later. She’s barreling into Samir’s arms by the time that the latch clicks shut.
“I’m so sorry, Bills,” he says, wrapping his arms around her as tight as he can. She’s always liked deep pressure touch like this, nine out of ten times a big bear hug fixes everything.
Of course, this is the rare one out of ten times where absolutely nothing in the world can fix what’s going wrong. Even as Samir holds her as tight as he can, she dissolves into trembling sobs as she goes “It’s all my fault.”
He wrenches back to look at her, brows furrowed. “What?!”
“It’s all my fault,” she wails again. He hates to see her cry, he always has. It physically pains him. It makes him feel like he’s being ripped open. “I left and I was—I was supposed to stay. How could I just leave them? They needed me here. Now look!”
Samir presses a hand to either side of her face and holds her firmly between his palms. “Billie Schaeffer, you listen to me. This is their problem. This has nothing to do with you.”
Billie sniffles pathetically. “If I was better—”
“You are perfect,” Samir says, his voice almost unrecognizably severe.
It draws Billie up short, too. “I wouldn’t say perfect.”
“Perfect,” Samir repeats, refusing to budge even a little bit. This time, when he wraps her up in a hug, he feels the tension bleed out of her body.
“Promise it’ll always be us?” Billie says, voice muffled against his shirt.
He recognizes this fear in her, the fear of the impermanence, this fear at the thought that everything can change or go away at any moment. Luckily, for them, that will never be the case. “I promise.”
* * *
They’re sixteen when Samir first realizes that he’s going to lose her.
Until this point, Billie is the one thing that’s always been a given. He’d been afraid when they went to high school, and Billie started getting beautiful while Samir stayed tiny and awkward, that she would outgrow him, but it hasn’t happened yet. They’re still a package deal, a two-for-one, a matching set.
The real world, of course, pushes in at every opportunity. Most recently, in the form of college.
Samir is no stranger to the college experience. Yara graduated two years ago, and Nisreen is a senior now, so he’s endured a lot of university talk in the last few years. He just kind of forgot that one day it would be his turn. Their turn.
“I want to be like her,” Billie says one night as they’re doing their homework, spread out on her bed. She’s pointing her finger at the TV screen—she insists her (undiagnosed) ADHD makes it impossible to study without background noise even though Samir is pretty sure that’s not how it works. They’ve been on a Gilmore Girls kick recently.
“I don’t know why you’d ever want to be like Rory Gilmore when you could be like Billie Schaeffer,” he retorts. He doesn’t really care for Gilmore Girls.
“Whatever,” Billie laughs, shoving at his shoulder. “I just mean, she’s going to study journalism at Yale. That’s so cool. Maybe I’ll go there.”
Dread coils in his stomach. He has no idea where he’s going to go to school, but it certainly won’t be Yale. “How far away from here is Yale?”
Billie cracks a smile. “Not far. A couple hours? Totally a doable drive.”
Even still, it feels like a thorn wedged below the surface of his skin each time thinks about the two of them living in two different places. Sharp pain radiates each time he presses down. With distance, Billie will almost certainly outgrow him.
It’s the first time he’s realized their friendship might have an expiration date, that one day Billie will leave him in the rearview like he did to her that summer when he went to Arizona—only without the inevitable reconciliation a week later. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it one bit.
* * *
When they’re seventeen, they almost ruin things.
It’s the spring semester of their senior year and Samir is spending most of his days burying his head in the sand and refusing to think about the inevitable reality that their whole lives are going to change very soon. He likes to think of his behavior as living in the moment, but Billie calls it gross negligence.
Billie is kind of his complete opposite these days, which is a hard enough pill to swallow as it is. They’ve spent the last thirteen years two peas in a pod, two sides of the same coin. Now all of a sudden, it’s like they’re living in completely different realities. Billie is the plucky protagonist of a charming coming-of-age film while Samir feels like one of the minor characters killed off in the first thirty minutes of a horror movie.
To be fair, Billie has a lot to be excited about. She was accepted to Northwestern back in January. At the end of summer, she’ll move 800 miles west, without him. He’ll be traveling a whopping four hours to Ithaca College in the fall, which is nothing fancy but better than the two years at community college and live at home plan his mom had been pushing for the last few years. He’d not-so-secretly been needling Billie for the first couple months of the school year to apply at Ithaca too, but she never did. Now that she has her sights set somewhere else, he’s almost glad that she didn’t. It would’ve hurt worse to not be picked than to not be an option at all.
In the last few weeks of their senior year, the last few months of their childhoods spent side-by-side, Samir has this idea in his head that they’ll be doing everything together—including prom. As friends, of course.
But then, the week before the dance, Billie comes rushing up to him with a smile on her face he’s never seen before. There’s a bounce in her step that turns to an excited shimmy when she slows to a stop in front of him, and when she opens her mouth her words come out as a song “Guess who just got asked to prom by Sean Wells!”
Samir feels distinctly like he’s having a stroke. “The super, super senior, Sean Wells?”
He knows it was the wrong thing to say the moment that Billie bristles and goes. “Technically, yeah. But, I mean, he’s more than just that.”
Samir doesn’t say any of the things that he wants to say, like yeah, if more than that means a neighborhood weed dealer. Or, what could a New York state debate champion have in common with a guy who’s repeating senior year for the third time? Or have you recently fallen or hit your head? Instead, he says “Yeah, I’m sure he is. I just don’t know him that well.”
“Luckily, you’re not the one going to prom with him,” Billie snorts, linking elbows with Samir mindlessly. “Whatever, more importantly, I’ve decided that prom night is the night that I’m doing it.”
“Doing what?” Samir says, then realizes. “Doing it?! With Sean Wells?!”
Billie’s eyes blow open wide and she clamps a hand over Samir’s mouth to shut him up. He promptly bites her. “Shut up! Shut up! If you think about it, he’s perfect. Because he’s already done it before, so we’re not going to be two bumbling idiots who can’t figure out how to touch each other.”
Samir, who has always assumed that his first sexual encounter will be exactly that, frowns. “That’s really what you want?”
“Yeah,” Billie says, but she pitches it like a question. She seems to realize it, too. A familiar crease appears between her eyebrows. She tries again. “Yeah. I want to just get it over with before I go to college. I don’t want to be in my head about it at Northwestern.”
A knot forms in his stomach. He’s painfully aware of every point where they’re touching. “Right. Makes sense.”
After that, he tries to put it out of his mind. He really does. But then prom night comes and it’s like no matter where he turns, there they are. Billie and Sean, laughing and twirling around and putting their tongues in each other’s mouths. He’s working so hard to avoid seeing them that he doesn’t realize Sean is tipping his flask into her cup of punch until it’s too late.
But he’s not too late to stop her from making an even worse mistake.
When he sees Sean trying to shepherd her out the doors, he’s moving before he can think twice about whether or not it’s a good idea. She did tell him that this is what she wanted, but he knows in his heart it isn’t right. It can’t happen like this. His walk morphs into a run, and then he’s gaining on them quick enough that he catches Billie by the arm before they make it to Sean’s car.
Billie, intoxicated and clearly not expecting to be pulled in an entirely new direction, stumbles into Samir’s arms. “Sami?”
“What the hell, man?” Sean grumbles, reaching an arm out like he’s going to take her back. Samir whirls her around protectively in his arms, keeping her just out of his reach. “What are you, her dad?”
“Fuck off,” Samir spits. The anger that’s rising within him, fast and hot, feels dangerous. He feels blind with it. He doesn’t recognize himself. He’s struck, suddenly, with a memory of him and Billie waiting anxiously in the principal’s office. He sucks in a breath to steady himself. “She’s not going home with you.”
“I wasn’t going to take her home,” Sean says, lip curling. Samir hates him. He hates him. “I was gonna fuck her in the car.”
Samir doesn’t even dignify that with a response. He just tightens his arm around Billie and walks her off briskly, refusing to look back over his shoulder as a point of pride but fearing the whole way to his car that Sean is following after them. If it comes to fisticuffs, he’s definitely losing.
Mercifully, they’re alone. He buckles her into the passenger seat then climbs behind the wheel and neither of them speak until Billie says “Can I go home with you? I don’t want my mom to see me like this.”
He reaches one hand across the center console and squeezes her knee. “Yeah. Of course.”
It’s fine. He sneaks her through the back door and tucks her into bed wearing one of his t-shirts and drapes her prom dress over his desk, and it’s all fine. Until Billie rolls over onto her side and looks at him very seriously and goes “Will you have sex with me?”
Samir chokes, the sound comes out like a strangled cough. He doesn’t say anything at first, he doesn’t know what to say to that, but then Billie’s hands settle on his chest and he’s spurred into action. The words come out embarrassingly high pitched. “Like right now?”
“Why not?” Billie says, a low timbre to her voice that Samir’s never heard before. It feels dangerous.
He wrenches himself back and swallows hard. “I can think of a hundred reasons why not.”
“A hundred?” Billie’s eyebrows shoot up on her face, and though she’s putting on a good show he can tell that he hurt her feelings.
“If there’s ever going to be a day for us it’s not this one, Billie,” Samir says, voice soft. “I wouldn’t want it to happen like this.”
Billie lays back, her expression frustratingly impenetrable. Once she’s rolled away from him, she says “You’re right. Goodnight, Samir.”
When he wakes up the next morning, she’s gone and the spot beside him has already gone cold. The only evidence she was there at all is the lingering smell of hairspray on his pillow, the fine dusting of glitter coating everything on his desk, and the text on his phone that reads “thanks for taking care of me last night. i’m really sorry about how i acted. can we just forget it ever happened?”
* * *
They live in two different cities, in two different states, in two different timezones, in two different geographical regions of the country, for the first time when they’re eighteen.
Of course, they still spend most of their nights talking on the phone. It’s a point of contention for Billie and her roommate, Willow Chambers—she’s one of those perma-first name-last name people, every time Billie refers to her in conversation, it’s as Willow Chambers and nothing else—he hears their fights over the phone whenever Billie forgets to mute herself when Willow Chambers starts snapping at her for still being on that goddamn phone at two in the fucking morning, don’t you ever get tired of talking to each other, Jesus Christ!
He prefers their conversations when they aren’t interrupted by Willow Chambers, of course. They always start the same way, with Billie calling him and saying “Isn’t it weird? That we’re adults now?”
Samir doesn’t tell her that he doesn’t really feel like an adult yet. He still feels like a kid at sleepaway camp, awkward and homesick. Sometimes he thinks it’s only exacerbated by his daily phone calls with Billie, but if he wasn’t the one talking to her every day, he’d be the one thinking about her sprawled out on her bed, kicking her feet and twirling her hair, which would be so much worse. So he says “Super weird, Bills.”
Perhaps the weirdest part of all is the subtle ways that their relationship starts to shift in the first few weeks and months of college. Maybe they’re just getting older, or maybe the distance between them makes them bolder, but their conversations now dare to stretch into topics of conversations they used to avoid like the plague. Billie laments on the fact that she never learned how to talk to boys without making a complete fool of herself, and Samir confides in her the strangest of the wet dreams that plague him in the dark nights in his new dorm room. Billie recounts the mortifying ordeal of trying to stuff her bra before her first frat party and how it felt when the tissues came tumbling out as she spun around the stripper pole installed in the living room, and Samir tells her about how he tumbled headfirst over the front of his bike when pedaling past a sorority car wash—thank god he was wearing a helmet. Billie admits that, deep down, she’s afraid that she’s always going to be too much, that she doesn’t know how to dial herself back, and Samir confesses that he missed the point where everyone got all cool and casual about sex, that he’s afraid he’s missed the metaphorical boat.
One night, rather abruptly, Billie says “Fuck it. I have an idea.”
“That we should install a stripper pole in your mom’s house?” Samir jokes, because he really hasn’t let go of that story yet.
“Shut up!” Billie whines, and Samir smiles at his phone even though he can’t see her face. “Let’s just do it.”
The conversation rings a bell, or maybe it sounds an alarm, in his mind. “It?!”
“Yeah, Sami, it.” Billie puts on her best no nonsense tone. “Let’s make a pact. This weekend, we’ll both lose our virginity. We can just get it over with.”
It’s the same way she described sex before their ill-fated prom night. He’s not sure that he shares her sentiments now, either, but he can’t deny that his v-card has started looming larger than life over all of his interpersonal interactions. Maybe getting it over with wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
The only problem is, as successful as he’s sure journalist extraordinaire Billie Schaeffer is at Northwestern, he’s not exactly taking to Ithaca like a duck to water. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t have friends. He has two.
Anton was the very first person he met here, back on freshman move-in day. They weren’t roommates—Samir had gone in blind and ended up living with a guy named Zach from Cleveland who he realized sucked really quickly—but their rooms were right next to each other. He spent his first few hours at Ithaca silently unpacking with his parents while the sounds of a family screaming at each other on the other side of the wall drowned out any conversation they attempted to have. Then, two hours later, he ran into the single sweetest person he’d ever met on his way out the door, and each kind new thing that his neighbor said only made him feel worse and worse about knowing he had to share a room with the guy he’s dubbed The Screamer (for obvious reasons) in his own mind. Eventually, it must have started showing on his face, because Anton stopped mid-sentence to frown at him and go “Why are you looking at me like a Make-a-Wish kid?” And when Samir had choked and stammered out something about the argument he had heard through the wall, Anton had just laughed long and loud before going “Honey, that was me. I have layers.”
They’d met Issa that night at freshman orientation. She’d been electrifying. Literally, his first impression of her was watching her across the quad shaking people’s hands and pretending, every time, that the touch electrocuted her. He watched, mesmerized, as she repeated the bit no less than a dozen times. She didn’t even stop when people started noticeably avoiding her.
Anton was the one who said “We should probably go save her, right?”
“Probably,” Samir had agreed, thinking only of what Billie would have done, the way she saved him, not unlike this, once.
Out of the three of them, Anton adjusts to college life the best. He befriends literally every person that they meet, no matter how brief of an interaction they share before going their separate ways. He’s known to hold court in the common room of their dorm, telling riveting stories about Extra Croutons Dining Hall Lady and Twitchy Eyed Science Professor that leave everyone in stitches. Samir is secretly glad he met Anton first, that he imprinted on him the way he did, because if he had missed that window he would have forever been Unassuming Dorm Guy.
Issa is more like him. When she’s just around the two of them, she’s great, but then they take her out into a larger social setting and she turns into what they’ve coined the Weird Little Guy. Samir, as a fellow Weird Little Guy at heart, really can empathize.
Maybe that’s why, after he and Billie make their virginity losing pact, he thinks of Issa.
He knows better than to try and put the moves on her—she’s made it clear that Samir isn’t really her type—so instead he pitches it to her like a business proposal, and somehow it works. It’s nice. Issa is beautiful and funny and he genuinely enjoys being around her, but the best part of all is that being with her doesn’t feel like he’s risking everything the way it does when he imagines being with Billie.
He doesn’t want to bring this up with her over text. The thought of her picking up her phone and reading a message from him that says “I had sex!” makes his skin crawl, but every minute that he spends withholding the information feels like he’s keeping a secret from her. He decides to wait until their scheduled call on Sunday night, and even then he spends the whole day winding himself up into such tight knots about it that when they finally do get on the phone, the confession explodes out of him. “I did it.” It’s the very first thing he says when she picks up.
Billie, for her part, is quiet for a long time. Then, slowly, she says “I didn’t.”
He can’t explain why it makes him feel so rotten.
* * *
Samir’s two worlds collide on his twenty-first birthday.
It’s the summer before their senior year, and he’s home alone while his parents chase after their new fixation of driving the entire perimeter of the country, or something. He’ll never understand their obsession with roadtrips. Yara moved to California for med school after finishing undergrad, and Nisreen is leading some kind of wellness retreat in the desert, so he’s holding down the fort solo in NYC. Inviting all of his friends to keep him company feels like a no-brainer. Honestly, he doesn’t know why he didn’t think of it sooner.
They end his birthday at the very same bar where he and Billie had first debuted their fake IDs, years ago. They had made a pact that night that they would come back on both of their twenty-first birthdays and do it “for real.” It was another promise that Samir kept and Billie didn’t; she stayed at Northwestern over Christmas break last year.
Samir, like the very mature twenty-one year old he is now, chooses not to bring it up. He doesn’t want to be the one to kill the vibes, because the vibes really are great. He’d been afraid last night, tossing and turning and unable to get to sleep, that trying to bring Billie into the friend group would be disastrous. He should’ve known it was an irrational fear. Billie fits in seamlessly.
“-and my freshman year I lived with this girl named Willow Chambers,” Billie is saying as he comes back from the bar with their next round of drinks, hands moving around her emphatically as she does. “A first name-last name-er, you know?”
“Oh, I looooove a first name-last name-er,” Issa drawls while simultaneously making a grabby hand at Samir until he places her drink in her palm. “I exclusively date first name-last name-guys.”
“Iss, you exclusively date fixer uppers,” Samir teases, though he’s not really joking at all.
“Do not!” Issa protests.
Anton interrupts before she can get too wound up. “I’m with Issa. There’s something sexy about a first name-last name-guy. They just have a certain presence to them, you know? They really take up space.”
“Yeah, take up space in that ass,” Billie says, then immediately goes “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.” Samir holds his breath for half a second before realizing that Issa and Anton are both laughing. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met a first name-last name-er that I liked.”
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Issa coos, rubbing a hand over Billie’s back. “One day you’ll meet a first name-last name-er who changes everything for you. Your world will never be the same.”
At some point after that, Issa convinces them all that they absolutely have to take a shot for every person they’ve slept with, which means that Samir (who only has that one time with Issa and a girl named Carly who he’s since broken up with to speak of) is the most sober at the end of the night and responsible for getting everyone else home.
It’s harder than it sounds to drag three drunk people having a “heart-to-heart-to-heart” through the streets of Queens, and though he does manage to do it, it takes so long that they’ve all crossed over into the emotional drunk side of the night. Mostly Issa and Billie, though Anton is distinctly glassy-eyed.
“I’m serious, you guys,” Billie moans as she throws herself across the couch. Anton and Issa both pick up one side of her—Anton her head and Issa her feet—to crowd in beside her. Samir squats on the edge of the coffee table. “What if I’m just a big fish in a small pond and I’ll never break out of my chrysalis?”
“That was a beautiful, if very mixed, metaphor,” Anton comforts her, petting a hand through her hair.
“I was just, like… this twinkling, shining star here,” Billie says, waving a hand around. Samir knows that she means here as in back then, when they were kids, but he privately wonders if she knows how much of a star she is here, as in Samir’s life, too. “Now I’m out there in the world with people who are actually good at this and I’m just… okay. I’m nothing special. I never should have majored in journalism. I’m never going to get a job when I graduate.”
“Well, then, join the club,” Samir says, dropping a hand to her leg to squeeze it just above the knee. Billie, predictably, squirms and swats his hand away. He knows all her ticklish spots. “I’m a CS major who’s barely proficient in coding.”
“And I’m a dance major,” Issa adds.
They all turn to Anton, who raises his hands in surrender. “Don’t look at me. I do plan on being employed after I graduate.”
“Ignore him!” Samir says, and Issa swings a pillow wildly towards his face and misses spectacularly and instead catapults toward the dining room. “If you’re unemployable, then so am I. And Issa, she’s probably worse than both of us combined. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come home.”
“Hey!” Issa reaches for another pillow, and this time she doesn’t miss.
It’s enough to make Billie crack a smile. “Don’t worry, I still haven’t forgotten your promise.”
Samir, who has made countless promises to Billie Schaeffer across his lifetime, knows exactly which one she’s talking about now. It’ll always be us. “Me too.”