Page 171 of Wild Card 13

She looked like prom.

I looked like I was pretending not to monitor the mailbox from the second-story window.

Naomi noticed, because she knew me far too well. “You checked twelve minutes ago,” she said.

“I was looking outside.”

“Sure.” She leaned back on her hands, unimpressed. “The mailbox just happens to be the one you’ve been emotionally stalking all afternoon.”

“I have not been stalking it.”

“Lucy, you paused with mascara in your hand because you heard a truck three streets over.”

“That could have been anything.”

“It was an Amazon delivery van.”

“You don’t know that.” I looked down at the mascara wand in my hand and carefully scraped the excess product against the tube. My fingers were steadier than the rest of me. They usually were.

Naomi’s teasing softened around the edges. “They said letters went out this week, right?”

I nodded once.

“And St. Croix already said yes.”

“That’s different.”

“I know.”

The way she said it made my throat tighten.

She had seen the brochure tucked inside my sketchbook sophomore year, watched me reread the writing program page until the crease down the middle started wearing thin, listened to me pretend Boston was just an interesting option instead of the place I pictured whenever Northbend felt too small to breathe inside.

“It’s probably not coming today,” I said. “And even if it does, itmight not be…” My voice caught. It was too scary to say out loud.What if I jinx it?

“Luce.” Naomi’s expression gentled. “You’re allowed to want it.”

I looked toward the window again before I could stop myself.

Aldenmere University.

Even the name still felt like something I should not say too loudly.

I had found it for the first time when I was eleven, sitting on the floor of the public library while Dad was at a Frosthawks event two blocks away. I had pulled a college guide off the bottom shelf because the building on the cover looked like it belonged in a storybook. Old stone. Tall windows. Ivy crawling up brick walls. A courtyard dusted with autumn leaves. Students crossing beneath bare trees with books tucked against their chests.

It had seemed less like a school and more like a doorway.

My dream school had one of the best writing programs in the country. Small workshops. Literary journals. Professors whose names appeared in the backs of novels I read under the covers long after I was supposed to be asleep. It sat just outside Boston, close enough to the city that I could imagine coffee shops and used bookstores and brick sidewalks shining after rain, far enough from Northbend that nobody would look at me and see Ezra Thomas’s daughter before they saw anything else.

I had wanted it before I fully understood what wanting could cost.

Then St. Croix State had accepted me two months ago, and everyone had acted relieved.

It was a good school. A practical school. A Minnesota school. Close enough to come home on weekends. Close enough to see Dad. Close enough to see Ty if St. Croix kept circling him the way everyone expected them to.

Aldenmere made St. Croix State look like clown college in Tampa. A plane ticket and a time zone away. Old brick and ocean air and a future where I had to learn how to be myself without a safety net.

A car slowed outside. My entire body went still. Naomi’s head turned toward the window at the same time mine did.