to eight?” Huit heures moins le quart. Eight o’clock minus a quarter. I love French.
“Bien.” And then he leaves, his limp more pronounced.
When I get back to my room, I find Alice back on her bed, scribbling furiously in her notebook. I don’t even bother trying to decode her garbled response to my entry. My body still feels achy from sitting in class for so long, my muscles buzzing from the sugar and caffeine. I exchange my cute first-day-of-class skirt and top for leggings and a tank, and then stretch to warm up. I’ll take a short run—je vais courir—and that will ease the agitation in my body. L’agitation? I quickly flip through my dictionary. Yup.
“Sorry,” Alice murmurs, closing her black Moleskine. Her voice is craggy, like it’s still an effort to dislodge the words.
“No worries, I know how it is.” Ne t’inquiète pas.
Urgh. My autotranslate is going psycho. Mon auto—Shut it. Tais-toi.
I’m losing my mind.
“You okay?” she asks, slipping the notebook back into her brown leather messenger bag.
“Yup.” I smile. “Just need to get my mind off class. What are you up to?”
Alice shimmies across the bed, and it’s only then that I realize she’s in pajamas.
“Didn’t you go to class?”
She scrunches her nose and her shoulders rise and drop. “I might have gotten back into pajamas after class?”
Seriously, it’s like looking in the mirror.
“Come on, let’s get outside. I was going to go for a run since it seems like a gorgeous day.”
“I don’t run,” she says without moving. As though this might be the line in the sand.
“Well, do you walk?”
We’re just finishing up a leisurely stroll around the campus when my phone rings. Well, not so much rings as sings. Actually, sings is too kind for what it does. It screeches and bellows and squeals through a very annoying version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
“What the—” Alice’s face is horrified, and her gaze darts around, as though she’s trying to find the drunk guys who are butchering the song.
Lucky for me, I know they are far from here right now. “I can’t effing believe you changed my ringtone again,” I growl into the phone.
“Abby! How’s life in New Hampshire cow town?” My brothers are laughing hysterically and in the background there’s the sound of a batter being called up. Must not be the Cubs, because otherwise they wouldn’t interrupt a game.
“Number sixty-four, Kelsey Ryan,” I hear over the loudspeaker.
The Nationals. They must have stopped for a game. God, how I hate the fact that I know this stuff. It only proves that it is possible to learn by osmosis. I should just play French recordings during every waking hour and then maybe—
“—up four nothing and Santos isn’t up yet,” Si updates me.
“Shut up,” I hear Jed yell. “You’re going to jinx it.”
“You can’t jinx a team that doesn’t miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” I mutter, though I’m quite sure now they’re bickering with each other, and Si doesn’t even remember he’s on the phone with me.
“Si!” I shout as loud as I can, startling passersby. “I’m hanging up! Hope the Cubs continue hitting well! Hope Santos homers!”
“Shit, Abby! What the hell? You know better than to jinx them like that!” Now I can hear them both yelling at me through the phone, and I do what any good younger sister would do. I hang up.
“Your brothers?” Alice guesses as I make a face at the phone and slide it in my bag.
“Yup. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb. Each one more addicted to baseball than the other.”
“And yet you’re grinning like an idiot.” Alice laughs, and I turn my sour face on her.
It’s true. Talking to my brothers usually doesn’t put me in a good mood. Maybe it’s the distance. Or maybe because they are so completely, unabashedly themselves.
“They’re good guys.”
“How old?”
“I think twenty-five and twenty-eight? I have a hard time remembering, especially since they act like they’re fourteen.”
There’s a comfortable silence while I find us a cart selling iced coffees.
“It’s sweet. The way you are with them,” Alice adds.
I shrug. “Just before my mom got pregnant with me, she and my dad bought a small sports paraphernalia store. So a lot of their time gets sucked in to trying to make it successful. Si and Jed were really the ones who took care of me. I mean, not in a bad way, but they were home to make dinner, even if it was corn dogs and French fries. They read me stories,