LITMIR.BIZ

       TWO

      In the quiet sanctuary of my temporary home, all I want to do is forget the total disaster that was the first day of what’s probably the biggest mistake of my life so far. Mom’s teaching a class and won’t be home for another two hours, so I have unsupervised time to kill.

      There are very few perks that come with living in Georgia, but a big, refreshing one is the pool in the backyard. I can practically hear the pool pump hissing, “Come swim in me, Nes.”

      I tear to my room and rip open a box labeled Summer Clothes, then a box labeled Vacation, then, in a desperate last-ditch effort, I peel back the tape on one labeled Random Fun Stuff. I find a pair of denim overalls I don’t remember buying, some really old family pictures from the summer we went on vacation to some hokey middle-America theme park, and three yo-yos from my brother’s obsessive yo-yo-collecting days back when he was a nerdy middle schooler (instead of a nerdy college sophomore). I get nervous because I’m not sure where else to look for my lone piece of missing swimwear. I own exactly one bikini.

      There’s not an especially long swim season in New York, so one will do. But it’s January here. January. The time of post-Christmas blizzards and sticking to resolutions you made for New Year’s, if you’re all about that. And it’s now hotter than it was when we arrived this hellish December.

      I may need more bikinis. In the dead of winter. Unbelievable.

      Our Realtor said this was an “unusually hot one” as she fanned her sweaty face and bemoaned every house we looked in that hadn’t switched on the central air. I expect bikini shopping and sweltering heat in Santo Domingo over summer break; this is just madness.

      I continue to frantically pick through the cardboard box ziggurat in my room and finally snag the stretchy material of my lone bathing suit in a box labeled Underwear. Fair enough. And I can’t even blame the movers’ crazy box identification because I packed that one myself. Just as I’m about to change, my phone rings and I realize I may have to pick up and talk intelligibly to another human being when all I want to do is dead man’s float around the pool and feel sad for myself. The groan I bite back is a knife of guilt that twists in my gut.

      Ollie wants to FaceTime.

      My bleary, makeup-smeared image reflects back at me on the screen, and I want to sob. Again. But then I’ll look even worse. It’s all pretty chicken-and-egg.

      “Olls, I look like a gargoyle!” I screech the second she connects.

      Her gorgeous face, moon round and ethereally peaches and cream, takes up the entire screen, and my throat feels all clawed down both sides because I’m not sitting in her parents’ modern, artsy apartment, gorging on the Vietnamese sizzling pancakes Ollie is a genius at whipping up and sneaking sips of rice wine from her parents’ enormous collection before we get down to our homework and daily two-person merengue party.

      “Shuddup! You look like a goddess.” She gnaws on her lip. “Hey, I checked your Insta this morning...”

      “Right.” I shrug. “Call me melodramatic, but it was surprisingly hard to scroll through all those pictures of everything and everyone I was leaving behind.” I take a second to steady my voice, the same way I steady my raw heart every time I flip through my winter photo folder—which is full of pictures of people and places that are a thousand miles away. “I promise I’ll get a new one going soon.”

      I guess Ollie hasn’t checked Snapchat yet, or she’d be calling me out about that too. I deleted my account late last night after getting shocked by another surprise Lincoln cameo in a mutual friend’s post-winter-break video. If pictures are hard for me to look at, there’s no way I can handle seeing and hearing video footage of everything I’m missing back home... Plus Lincoln would be like a ghost haunting every Newington clip.

      “You really should. Your Insta pics were goals. Plus I want to know what things look like down there. Are there all those mossy trees like in Scooby-Doo? And plantations everywhere? Are they haunted? Did your mom buy you the Mystery Machine to drive around in? Are you wearing ascots and miniskirts? Did you get a Great Dane?” Before she can yell zoinks, Ollie’s eyes dart over my shoulder and go wide with worry. “Wait. You still haven’t unpacked?”

      “It’s ‘asylum chic.’ Like it?” She shakes her head and sighs, so I confess. “Truth? It’s a reminder that I won’t actually have to live here forever.”

      I wave a hand at the mattress on the floor, covers and pillows piled on it. That, my docking station, and a few choice boxes with the flaps permanently open make up my entire bedroom decor. The movers put all my boxes in my room for me, but I declined when they offered to put my bed frame together. That felt too permanent. Mom made several passive-aggressive comments about how she wouldn’t have bothered to pay an arm and a leg to move all my furniture if I wasn’t even going to set it up, but I stared at the ceiling until she left me to my misery. She was excited to finally have a space bigger than a couple hundred square feet to decorate, and she didn’t get why I wasn’t revved up to be in a new room that’s almost triple the square footage of my old room.

      Because I miss my tiny, cramped, perfect old room.

      “I miss your old room,” Ollie admits, echoing my internal thoughts with her freakish bestie ESP. Her shoulders slump, and my heart follows their lead.

      “It’s okay.” No one brings out my reluctant optimist like Ollie. I hate seeing her down, so I put on a good game face no matter how crappy I feel. “Mom and Dad had been planning to sell our place when I moved to college anyway, and it went for way over asking price, like, the first week it was on the market. They were pretty psyched about it, and I...I’m trying to accept my fate at this point. You know I’m a ‘rip off the Band-Aid’ type when it comes to dealing with emotional stuff.”

      “Um, yeah you are!” she laughs. Then gets dead serious. Lecture-time serious. “Speaking of college...”

      “I got all my applications in by the deadlines, I swear

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