Page 78 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
I don’t want to talk to her, and I know I don’t have to. I’m done here: I’ve said what I needed to, and I’ve done the best I can with the only piece of this that’s mine to control.
“Rose,” she says, so long after we pass her that I don’t think she’s going to say anything at all. We’re almost at the end of the hall when I turn back to her.
She’s not smiling, but she doesn’t look angry, either. More than anything, she looks like I’ve surprised her. And I recognize something else in her: that same resolve I felt after reading theNewYork Timespiece, when I knew what it was that I needed to do. When it’s all crashed down, and there’s no choice left to make but the hard one.
“You asked me, that first day, if I’d care about you without MASH.” She hesitates, and Miller brushes his thumb over the inside of my wrist. “I’ve never known how best to connect to you, and MASH made it easy. It gave us common ground.”
And now it’s gone, I think. But then she says, “I hope you know you have my admiration and support no matter what you choose to do next.”
Silence falls between us, blanketing the hallway. My mother sniffs a little, and for the first time, she looks nervous. “I don’t think I did the best by you. But I do think it’s what I was capable of then.”
I nod slowly. Because maybe she’s right—maybe she was meant to have one daughter, and it was meant to go like this. Maybe the space between what she could give me and what I wanted from her made room for my dad, and for Vera, and for Willow and Miller and even for me. I don’t know who I’d be if she’d stuck around. But what I have is who I am now. Who I became, in spite of her: this person standing backstage with Miller, knowing I’ve done all I can.
“You two go,” she says, finally. She straightens her watch, looks from me to Miller and back again. “I’ll clean this up.”
“Okay,” I say, and it is. “Thank you.”
My mother nods at me, holds my eyes over the empty length of the hallway. “Maybe I’ll see you in California someday.”
Four Months Later
“It’s funny,” Maren says. She’s smiling, all alone on the auditorium stage. “I thought I’d get all these serious photos of people with their secret, pensive thoughts. Some deep look at how we absorb into our own minds and retreat from the world in our private moments. But that’s not what happened.”
She hits a button and the slideshow starts: her beautiful, film-grain photographs, huge on the auditorium wall. The first picture is of her brothers, sitting at the kitchen table doing homework. One of them’s chewing his pencil eraser, his chin tilted to peer at the other, whose head is bent over a textbook.
The next photo is of Felix, standing in a cardigan at the back of the XLR8 kitchen. He’s swirling a spoon in a cup of coffee and half smiling at something out of frame. In the corner of the shot you can just see Jazz’s elbow, a peek of her blazer as she leaves the room.
And then, the last one: that picture of Miller and me in the snow at winter formal, his eyes focused on my face in the fallingdark. Now, sitting next to me in the last row of the auditorium, he squeezes my hand.
“Usually, when we think no one sees us, we’re still looking at each other,” Maren says. She clicks to the next slide, a full grid of photographs. I catch Autumn, and Maren’s parents, and even my dad behind the espresso machine at Beans. Right in the middle there’s a shot of Owen at the piano, his little sisters grinning at each other in the doorframe. “We’re so connected, all the time. That’s my big takeaway, I guess. Back in the fall, I titled this projectWhen They’re Looking the Other Way.”
Across the span of auditorium seats, Maren finds my eyes. I smile at her.
“But really,” she says, “we’re always just looking for each other.”
When the panel of teachers starts their Q&A, I lower into my seat and lean my head against Miller’s shoulder. His cast came off in March, and he’s been in physical therapy to get his full range of motion back. When I hug him now, he wraps both arms around me.
He didn’t get into Brown, which—all-in—has been the most incomprehensible thing to happen this year. Any school, anywhere, would be luckier than hell to have Miller. But he won’t have to pick just any school: Stanford wants him bad, and offered him a merit scholarship to come out to California.
It isn’t XLR8’s full ride, but he already has a four-year plan for getting an on-campus job, working over the summers, applying for grants. I mean, of course he does—this is Miller we’re talking about.
It didn’t even occur to me to want this, he told me when it happened. We were in his car, parked at the end of my driveway withthe email open on his phone.How is it possible that this feels better than what I’ve been dreaming of all along?
Just life having its way, I guess. A little closer to San Jose, too—which I knew we were both thinking, but neither of us said out loud.
And you’ll get to play gods forever,I told him. We’d already scrolled through the Classics department’s entire course catalog, our heads leaned close together over the center console.Just like when we were kids.
He’d grinned, a real one, just for me. No more Hidden Miller.
Sometimes I find myself missing him even though he’s not gone yet, the backward echo of a future hurt. Like he said that night in New York, we don’t know what the next year will look like, or any of the years after that. But Miller and I found our way back to each other once—we’ll do it again, if we have to.
I’m trying, these days, to take it all as it comes. After MASH shut down, that felt like the only option: one second at a time. Turns out you can make it like that the whole way.
XLR8 shuttered their Denver office in February, moved everybody that wanted to come all the way out to Mountain View. Felix and Jazz didn’t go—they’re still here, and even come up to Switchback Ridge every now and then to meet us for coffee. Jazz took a while to come around.She just feels guilty, Felix told us, the first time we saw him without her.She just really wanted to keep that job. And she knows she was wrong.
I wanted to keep it, too,I told him. Still, all these months later, sometimes it punches the air straight out of me—how much I wish things were different. How close I came to everything I wanted,and how much it hurts, still, to have gotten it wrong.
Dad doesn’t tolerate that kind of talk in the house; any time I start lamenting my losses, he reminds me of what I got from MASH instead. The knowledge that I’m capable of something so huge. The acceptances from colleges all over the country, curious to see what I’ll do next from the home base of their campuses. I have a couple more weeks to choose where I’ll go.
