Brynn
“Did you miss the hectic excitement of all of us getting ready at the same time in the morning?” I ask my uncle Nick the Tuesday after New Year’s Day, stepping over his outstretched legs in the kitchen on my way to the coffeepot.
He yawns and rubs the rust-colored stubble on his chin, which he hasn’t had a chance to shave yet, since Ellie is still in the bathroom. We’ve been back in Sturgis for more than three weeks, but with school starting today, it’s the first time everyone in the house has been on the same schedule. “No. Did you guys multiply overnight? I swear there were two girls when I went to sleep, and at least four fighting over my bathroom this morning.”
“Our bathroom,” I remind him, draining the last of the coffee. Then I turn for the refrigerator, until I’m stopped short by Uncle Nick’s outstretched hand.
“You weren’t about to take the last of the coffee without replacing it, were you?” he asks in a tone that aims for forbidding but doesn’t quite pull
it off. He pushes his Buddy Holly glasses up on his nose and adds, “There are rules in this house.”
I duck past him, open the refrigerator, and grab the half-and-half. “Your rules are not my rules, beloved uncle.”
“Then my coffee is not your coffee, cherished niece. Give it back.” “Too late.” I pour a healthy dollop of cream into my coffee and hold it
up. “This coffee is no longer lactose free.”
“You’re the worst,” he says with a long-suffering sigh, and I stick my tongue out at him as I dash upstairs to finish getting ready.
Uncle Nick is only seven years older than me, and he’s always been more like an older brother than an uncle. My grandfather and his second wife, Uncle Nick’s mom, retired to Costa Rica when Nick was in college, so he moved in with us. A year later we left for Chicago, and my parents, who decided to hang on to the Sturgis house in case they needed to come back, asked Uncle Nick if he wanted to keep living there.
He did, and for the most part it worked out, except that Dad spent a lot of time on the phone with Uncle Nick nagging him equally about home maintenance and college, since Uncle Nick couldn’t settle on a major. He tried coding, film studies, and political science before finally graduating with an accounting degree, which he’s never used, because it turns out he hates accounting. Now he’s enrolled in a master’s program for teaching, which I think he’ll be great at—he used to help out at Saint Ambrose when he was in college—but Dad can’t give him a break.
“When are you going to start collecting a paycheck?” he asked Uncle Nick last week. I love my father, but he can be a stereotypical scientist sometimes; blunt to the point of being cruel. He doesn’t realize how demoralizing it is to watch him dismiss someone who doesn’t have their entire life mapped out by the age of twenty-four.
Uncle Nick is doing his best to put up with us, but he’ll probably move out soon, which is yet another strike against the Sturgis house. I forgot how drafty and cold it is in the winter, how small the closets are, and the fact that the electrical system wasn’t built for the twenty-first century. Every time I
enter my bedroom, I worry that the chain of power strips I’ve plugged into my single outlet will have blown a fuse.
Not today, though; the laptop on my desk still displays the Saint Ambrose website. I logged on last night to double-check my class schedule, and then went down a rabbit hole of scrolling through old photos from 2017 to 2018, when Mr. Larkin taught there. After his death, the police interviewed all our administrators and teachers, which made sense—Mr. Larkin had last been seen in his classroom, and he’d died in the woods behind Saint Ambrose. Even Uncle Nick, a lowly classroom assistant, had to give a statement. But nobody ever truly questioned whether one of Mr. Larkin’s colleagues had had a problem with him, any more than they ever suspected Shane, Charlotte, or Tripp.
“Stronger together,” I murmur, my gaze lingering on a picture of our head of school, Mr. Griswell, pointing to a banner with the school motto. “Were we?”
“Were we what?”
I glance up to see Ellie entering my room, a towel wrapped around her head. She doesn’t actually care about the answer, though, because she immediately follows that question up with “Hey, do you have a white T- shirt? I forgot how see-through the uniform shirts are. My only clean bra is black, and this school does not deserve to see it.”
I get up and rummage through my dresser. “Sounds like you’re as excited as I am,” I say, extracting a shirt and tossing it into her waiting hands.
“At least you only have to go to Saint A’s for five months. I have
years.”
“Maybe Dad will transfer back before then,” I say. She sighs. “Here’s hoping.”
My phone buzzes, and I pick it up from my rumpled bedspread to see a new text. Mason: Ready for today? Excited to have you back!
I smile and send back a heart, feeling a quick burst of relief. Most of my former friends from Saint Ambrose aren’t there anymore, but Mason Rafferty and Nadia Amin still are, and when I met up with them for coffee
last weekend, it was easy and comfortable and fun. Which is exactly what I need if I’m going to make it through this semester.
Ellie is right, I only have five months, but five months is an eternity if you don’t have anyone except your fourteen-year-old sister to hang out with. Especially when all my friends back home in Chicago are blanketing social media with nostalgia already: Last winter break! Last softball season starting up soon! Who’s ready for the last MLK weekend at Four Lakes? Sign-ups coming for the senior trip! Izzy, Jackson, Olivia, Sanjay, and Quentin are all going along with life like nothing has changed and I wasn’t ripped from our supposedly unbreakable group of six.
I know I can’t blame them. It’s not their fault I had to move, and it’s not like I expected them to start wearing all black and boycotting social events. It wouldn’t kill them, though, to tag me with an occasional We miss you! Especially Quentin, who asked me out right before the Sturgis news broke, and then immediately backtracked once he learned I was leaving. “Long distance, right? Who needs it?” he said.
Fair point, but not exactly an ego boost.
I change into my Saint Ambrose uniform, frowning when my favorite gold charm bracelet catches on the polyester plaid of the skirt. The bracelet used to be Mom’s when she was in high school, and I like the randomness of the charms—a hummingbird, a skull, a shamrock, a star, and a snowman. “These remain the cheapest uniforms ever,” I mutter, smoothing down the thread that sprang loose from my skirt.
“And the ugliest.” Ellie whips off her towel turban and grabs my hair dryer. “It’s a good thing you didn’t have to go to your Motive interview straight from school. They’d have taken one look at this prep school nightmare and sent you home.”
“Accurate,” I say, plucking my Saint Ambrose blazer off the bedpost.
Ellie plugs in the dryer and turns it on. “Are you going to tell our classmates that you’re spying on them for your internship?” she yells over the roar of hot air.
“I’m not spying,” I say, giving myself a critical once-over in the mirror. Ellie and I are both slight and shorter than we’d like to be, with a
A sprinkling of freckles and thick auburn hair that we have to tame with a straight iron. We’re nearly identical, except for our eyes; hers are brown like Mom’s, and mine are green. They’re also smudged with makeup, so I lean forward to carefully wipe away the extra mascara. “I’m observing.”
That’s the same excuse I gave my parents, who were excited about the Motive internship until I mentioned pitching Carly a story about Mr. Larkin. “We want you to have every opportunity, Brynn,” Mom said. “Especially after what happened with—well, you know.” The incident with the photos is still a sore point at the Gallagher dinner table. “But you need to understand the potential impact of what you’re doing. If a show about Mr. Larkin actually airs, it could be very disruptive for the Saint Ambrose community. And for you.”
“I’m already disrupted,” I reminded her. The move was easy for our parents; Dad’s been at the same biotech company our whole lives, so he’s still with his regular colleagues. Mom’s always worked from home as an illustrator. Most of our family is here, along with many of their old friends. They didn’t get fired, put on a waiting list, or become a BuzzFeed headline. “Anyway, it’s not like Carly agreed to it. She barely even agreed to think about it.”
Eventually, they gave their blessing and let me attend Motive’s orientation—but only after making me promise that, as Dad put it, I’d be “ethical about what you share.” I’m pretty sure he meant about Saint Ambrose students, not with them. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t need to share anything with people I’ll never see again after five months.
“So, that’s a no, then?” Ellie asks, turning off the hair dryer. She grabs an elastic from my dresser and pulls it through her still-damp hair, twisting it into a messy bun. No time left for straightening. “You’re just going to keep everyone in the dark?”
“It’s a no,” I admit, and Ellie grins. “Undercover,” she says. “I like it.”
