Page 93 of Office Hours
We stand there, together, looking out at the world.
The future is a blank page.
I’m ready to write it.
21
I MIGHT JUST YET PASS
SIMONE
The coffee shop is old enough to have ghosts, and if it doesn’t, I supply my own. The walls are wooden—real wood, dark and varnished, the kind that remembers every humid summer and every dry, cracked winter. I sit in a battered wingback by the window, alone except for a dozen other people pretending not to notice anyone else. The glass is fogged with steam and breath. Outside, snow falls in clotted, lumpy drifts, erasing the world one inch at a time.
I’m on my third latte, which is just enough to push my pulse into the red, but not enough to make my hands shake so badly that I can’t operate my phone. The barista has written “Simone” on the cup in purple Sharpie, with a cartoon heart for the dot on the “i.” It’s dorky and a little desperate, but I’ll take it.
I’m not the only person here with a laptop, but I’m the only one here with a death grip on her phone and the Century College student portal open in four different tabs. The entire break has boiled down to this: the moment grades are posted, my fate will be decided. It’s so retrograde and high school and humiliatingthat I want to scream, but I’m trapped. If my GPA doesn’t break the right threshold, my scholarship is gone and so am I.
A woman two tables over shuffles her tarot deck, laying the cards out for an invisible client on Zoom. She murmurs about “future prosperity” and “hidden enemies.” I want to believe the cards, but I know better: the future is whatever the algorithm spits out when I hit refresh.
Jazz piano filters through the air, polite and soft enough that nobody can claim to hate it, even if they want to. The tables are a mess of MacBooks, library books, and tourists from the nearby hotel—everyone huddled in from the cold, forming a temporary family of the slightly-deranged. Every time the front door opens, a knife of January air slices through the place, scattering napkins and making the lights flicker.
I’ve been out of the hospital for a few weeks now. The scars are neat and thin, fading from angry purple to a more elegant blue. I touch them sometimes, under the table, half-expecting to find stitches still in place. The pain is less too—more of a low, persistent hum than a scream—but it’s there, a reminder that my body is a patchwork, and nothing truly heals the way you want it to.
The surgery was textbook, according to the doctor. The recovery, not so much. There were days when I couldn’t stand, days when the only thing that kept me going was Andie’s relentless cheerleading and the promise of homemade soup. There were days when even the soup tasted like dust. But I did it. I made it. I survived.
Liam visited every day, which is either a testament to his character or his guilt complex. He brought books and crossword puzzles and, once, a contraband bottle of gin in a thermoslabeled “Green Smoothie.” He never stayed long, always conscious of boundaries, never crossing the line into what we both wanted. I’m not allowed to have sex for another two weeks, doctor’s orders, but the way he looks at me sometimes—like I’m the only thing in the room that matters—makes my skin fizz.
He texts every morning:How are you feeling? Can I bring you anything?His messages are short, but the timing is always perfect. I never thought I’d miss his stupid little tics—how he refuses to use emojis, how he capitalizes every sentence like he’s writing a legal brief—but now they’re my weather, my metronome, the thing that makes my day real.
I hit refresh again. Still nothing. The portal is a black hole. I can almost see the code, mocking me from the other side of the glass.
My leg is bouncing so hard I nearly tip my latte. I slide my phone across the table and stare at it, daring it to blink first.
A man in a battered Carhartt jacket lumbers to the counter, stomping snow off his boots. The noise snaps me back. He orders black coffee and a muffin, his voice a low gravel. The barista gives him the same heart-dotted smile she gave me. For a second, I hate her, and then I don’t.
I glance at the window. The world outside is white and empty, the sidewalk erased. A pair of kids in matching parkas throw snowballs at a stop sign, missing every time but refusing to give up. Their stubbornness is contagious.
I check my phone again. The student portal has crashed, or maybe just timed out from the collective panic of a thousand other people like me, all waiting for the same digital verdict. I reload, wait, and reload again. My heart is a metronome gone off the rails.
I wonder what Liam’s doing. Of course, he knows what grade he gave me in his class, but he doesn’t know if I was able to turn my whole slate of classes around. I imagine him in his apartment, pacing the floor, reciting Keats to the furniture.
The phone vibrates in my hand. I nearly drop it.
The portal has reloaded. The grades are up.
I scroll past the filler classes, my eyes moving too fast to focus. The one that matters most to me is American Literature, the class that started all of this, the class that almost killed me and then saved me.
Next to the course code is a single letter: A.
I stare at it, not believing. Then I see it again, and again, and it’s real.
I feel the air leave my lungs. My hands go numb. For a second, I think I might pass out.
I scan the rest of the list. The GPA at the bottom is a miracle: high enough to keep my scholarship, high enough to keep me here, high enough that I might—if I want—qualify for the co-terminal master’s program at Century. I want to laugh. I want to scream.
I clutch the phone in both hands, afraid the numbers will disappear if I let go.
I look at the world through the fogged window, through the rim of my cup, through the lens of a life that almost wasn’t.
