Chapter 10: The Year After – Real World Reckoning

Spring brings pollen and questions, both of which collect in the apartment’s corners, choking the air with their invisible weight.

By the first week of May, every surface glistens with stress—art show postcards stacked on the coffee table, glossy med school acceptance letters stuck to the fridge, textbooks and packing tape fighting for real estate on the kitchen counter. Nawana’s most recent commission (a vinyl wrap for a local bakery van) stares accusingly from the bay window, the colors too bright for how she feels. There’s a new rule in the apartment: whenever either of them says the word “future” without immediately following it with “fuck that,” they owe a dollar to the communal wine fund. The jar fills fast.

They haven’t fought since the gallery night, not really. Instead, they orbit each other with wary affection, wary because love doesn’t erase what happened; it only covers it in a new layer, like paint over old graffiti. Nawana gets up at five every morning to sketch in silence, Jordan asleep and snoring softly, breathing in the warm dark as it belongs to her alone. She likes that—likes watching Jordan’s hands twitch, her eyelids flicker, the subtle way she drools when the dream goes sweet. Sometimes Nawana draws her in miniature, a pocket-sized Jordan with all the same scars but none of the sharpness. Sometimes she draws her as a wolf.

Jordan’s schedule is terminal now, a countdown to the day she leaves for orientation at Northern Heights. She has a planner —two planners, really—one digital and one spiral-bound, with pages color-coded and cross-referenced —and she guards them both with religious zeal. There’s no “us” block in the schedule, so they make their own: cheap pizza in the park on Wednesdays, shared silence on the Fire escape on Fridays, Sunday morning phone calls to their parents, alternating who has to lie.

This is how it goes:

Monday night, two weeks before graduation, the air was thick with the promise of rain. Nawana hunches over her laptop, eyes flicking between a half-finished commission and her own portfolio website, toggling back and forth as if momentum could be forced through brute will alone.

Jordan enters, late, the usual scent of hospital hand sanitizer riding high over her own citrus perfume. She drops her bag and stands in the doorway, watching Nawana type.

“Am I interrupting?” she asks.

Nawana waves her in. “Only the world’s shittiest freelance gig.”

Jordan slides onto the red velvet couch beside her, peeling off her jacket and letting it drop to the floor. “Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to pretend it’s not real for an hour?”

“Let’s do both,” Nawana says, and leans into her, head tucked under Jordan’s chin, careful not to transfer charcoal dust from her hands to the perfect blue of Jordan’s shirt.

Jordan traces circles on Nawana’s shoulder with the callused pad of her thumb. “I got an email from Elena today,” she says.