Page 184 of On His Mind

She passes me a mug. I kiss her cold cheek to thank her, because I still can’t always find the words for it.

We stand there a while without talking, her looking out at the valley, me looking at her. We’ve always been good at this. The quiet was one of the first things we ever had.

“I keep thinking about next year,” I say.

She turns her head.

“When they’re gone. The guys. Rowan’s talking about a master’s, so maybe he sticks around, but Benson and Stanley are gone for sure.” I turn the mug slowly in my hands. “I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about what it looks like. After.”

I hear myself say it and understand that I have never thought aboutafterin my entire life. Not once. There was never an after worth building a thought around — there was only the next thing to get through, the next house, the next placement, one foot and then the other with my eyes on the ground.Afterwas a country I didn’t have papers for. And here I am on a balcony in the mountains telling this woman, out loud, in plain English, that I’ve been picturing a version of a year I haven’t reached yet. That I’ve been imagining a future. That somewhere deep and new I’ve started to believe I’m going to get one.

She hears it. All of it. The size of the thing underneath the small words. Her whole face changes.

“What does it look like?” she asks.

“For me?”

She nods.

“You’re graduating.” I look at her. “You’ll be out there doing all of it. Your whole life will start.” I make myself hold her eyes for the next part, because it’s the truest thing I’ve got and it deserves to be said to her face. “But for me… you’re in it. Whatever it turns out to look like — you’re in every version of it. There isn’t one where you’re not.”

She blinks fast. Her eyes have gone bright in the blue dark. And she doesn’t say anything back. She just steps in and puts her head on my shoulder, and we stand there looking out at the white valley and don’t say another word about it, because it’s already been said. The biggest thing I’ve ever managed to get out of my mouth, and I finally got it out. And she knows because she kisses me slowly.

The next day, we all try skiing instead, purely for the comedy of it, and it turns out the five of us are elite-level bad — our one true talent is the wipeout, taking each other out like bowling pins while Aspen and Penelope carve past us shaking their heads and the rest of the girls give up on us entirely and go get warm at the lodge.

By the time we pile into the cars for the drive home, the whole trip has quietly decided something without holding a vote: nobody’s going home for Christmas. Christmas is coming to Hawthorne. The girls already have a dinner menu going. The guys and I stop on the way back and wrestle a last-minute real Christmas tree onto the roof of Benson’s truck, and we decorate the tree that night like a pack of overgrown five-year-olds — no theme, no restraint, tinsel absolutely everywhere. The girls run lights along every wall until the whole house glows. And then it snows us in, properly in, roads gone, nobody leaving — andwe’ve got a fridge full of food and a house full of people and nowhere on this earth we have to be.

It’s the best stretch of days I’ve ever lived. The best family time of my whole life. I keep having to stop and privately confirm to myself that it’s real.

Christmas Eve, Penelope comes back from a quick run to her apartment for a few things — and she comes in through the front door.

I don’t know if anyone else even registers it. But I do. For years, this girl came into this house one way and one way only — through the side door, in the dark, silent, after everyone was asleep, a secret I smuggled in and smuggled out again before the sun came up. And now she walks in the front in broad daylight with her arms full of her own things, and the second she’s over the threshold, Gianna’s shouting her name across the house and Melly’s grabbing her by the sleeve and towing her toward the kitchen, and the noise just closes over her and takes her in.

I stand in the hallway and watch the whole warm loud house fold itself around her, and not one single person thinks a thing of it. Not one. Because she belongs here. Because she always did — I just kept her in the dark for years, too scared to find out the thing I was so afraid of was never real to begin with.

She belongs here. Same as I do. Both of us, all the way in.

Christmas morning, I wake before her and kiss her softly on the cheek. She stretches the whole length of herself against me, blinking her eyes open.

“Merry Christmas, Penelope.”

“Merry Christmas, Percy,” she whispers, still half asleep.

I get out of bed and hold out my hand. She takes it, and I lead her out to the living room, where Stanley and Aspen are already parked under the tree. Benson and Lucy are coming down the stairs and Gianna’s cross-legged on the floor in a Santa hat, and a dozen versions ofMerry Christmasgo around the room atonce, overlapping, warm, everyone talking over everyone. Blue and Melly come down last, sleepy and rumpled and pleased with themselves. Rowan stands in the kitchen’s doorway with a mug in his hand.

We settle in around the tree and start pulling presents out from under it, paper already going everywhere.

“Okay, I want to see what everybody got.” Stanley claps his hands together. “Mon Petit Percy. You first, brother. Go.”

Gianna spins around and gets her phone up, filming, as I reach under the tree and pull out the gift I got for Penelope. And at the exact same moment, she holds one out to me.

We both look down at the shape and weight of what’s in our hands. Then we look up at each other.

Same size. Same shape. Same rectangle.

We open them at the same time, and I feel myself sink back into the couch, because I know what it is before the paper’s even all the way off. I slide it out, and she’s given me a framed photo — all of us at the ski lodge, the whole crew crammed into the frame, me and Penelope in the middle, Stanley and Aspen, Benson and Lucy, Blue and Melly, then Rowan and Gianna bookending the ends. Every single person I’ve got, in one frame.

And when I turn to her, she’s holding up what she just unwrapped: a framed photo of the two of us, her and me, grinning like fools after a game, my hair sweat-soaked and her arms slung around my neck.