Chapter Ten: Six Weeks, Give or Take
"Don't open it until I text you I've landed," Felix said, pressing a folded piece of paper into her hand at the departures curb, Grant already idling at the wheel with the patience of an older brother who had clearly decided to give them exactly one more minute and not a second longer. "I mean it. Not one second before."
"You're being very dramatic for someone who'll be back in six weeks," Harper said, though she was already turning the paper over in her hands like it might answer questions on its own.
"I contain multitudes," Felix said, and kissed her once more before Grant leaned on the horn, unsubtle as ever, from the driver's seat.
That was the last Friday of the school year, early morning, the airport drop-off lane thick with the smell of jet fuel and cut grass from the median. First, there were the three weeks between the auditorium and this curb, which had gone, against every anxious prediction Harper had made about them, remarkably well.
Mr. Okafor's grade had posted quietly, no fanfare beyond the A-plus itself sitting in the online portal, and true to his word, the comment field beside it read simply: See me if you'd like to know what the script actually said. Neither of them had taken him up on it. Some things, they'd agreed, were better left unread.
The district's decision about the unit's future had come down two weeks after the auditorium, a memo forwarded to Harper by Maren with considerably fewer exclamation points than the original article. The committee had voted, by a narrow margin, to keep the assignment in the curriculum, with minor revisions to the observer policy and a formal note thanking Mr. Okafor for what one board member called, apparently without irony, "an unusually persuasive defense of experiential learning." Harper had read it once, felt a small, satisfied warmth on her old teacher's behalf, and mostly gone back to the more pressing business of counting down the days she had left with Felix before Cherub.
Jessica had become, somewhat to Harper's own surprise, one of the people she texted most in the weeks that followed, the two of them meeting for coffee twice without either Felix or the assignment as an excuse, trading college essay drafts and complaints about AP exams like they'd been doing it for years instead of weeks. It was Jessica, in fact, who'd talked her through the worst of the pre-departure nerves, the ones Harper hadn't quite admitted to Felix directly.
"You're allowed to be sad he's leaving and still be fully certain you're not going to lose him," Jessica had told her, over iced coffee the week before, with the blunt, clear-eyed confidence of someone who had recently done a fair amount of her own emotional recalibrating. "Those aren't contradictory. I spent three years thinking they were the same feeling. They're not."
"When did you get so wise about this."
"Watching you two idiots figure it out took notes for me, mostly." Jessica had shrugged, unbothered. "Silver lining of the whole humiliating public spectacle. I got free relationship advice out of it."
They'd spent those three weeks doing all the small, ordinary things they'd never quite gotten around to during the two weeks of the assignment itself, the two weeks that had somehow, impossibly, turned into an actual relationship instead of a grade. Prom, which Felix had approached with the same nervous, overprepared energy he brought to everything he actually cared about, showing up with a corsage that matched nothing and apologizing for it so many times Harper had eventually kissed him just to make him stop. A last, sprawling group dinner with Jessica and Maren and two of the debate team regulars, loud and easy in a way Harper wouldn't have predicted a month earlier, back when Jessica's name had still made her stomach tighten with old, unearned jealousy. An evening at the Marsh family's kitchen table where Grant had produced, with great ceremony, a printed itinerary for Felix's entire six weeks in Chicago, annotated with unnecessary commentary in the margins, most of it about how often Felix was contractually obligated to call home.
They'd also kept the journal going, voluntarily, well past the assignment's actual deadline, a habit neither of them had planned to keep and neither of them had wanted to stop, filling page after page with the small, ordinary honesty the assignment had first forced out of them and that they'd since decided, on their own, was worth keeping. Harper's final entry, written the night before, had been short.
Day thirty-four, unofficial. Still choosing this. Still going to choose it every day he's gone, and every day after that.
Felix's answering entry, left just below hers that same night, had been shorter still.
Same. Obviously. Ask me again in six weeks and see if the answer's changed. Spoiler: it won't.
The night before he left, they'd sat on the same back porch where he'd told her about Cherub in the first place, and for a while neither of them had said much at all, content to just be quiet together in the particular, unhurried way they'd learned how to be over the last month, no performance left in it, nothing to prove to anyone but themselves.
"I keep trying to figure out what I'm actually scared of," Felix had admitted, into the dark. "It's not the program anymore. I think I actually want to go, all the way through, no asterisk on it. I think it's just the plain, ordinary fact of missing you for six weeks, which feels like a very small, very human thing to be scared of after everything else this month."
"That's allowed," Harper had said, leaning into him. "Missing someone isn't the same as being scared they'll leave. I'm figuring that part out too, a little late, but I'm getting there."
"For what it's worth," Felix had added, quieter, "my mom cried a little when I told her I decided to go. Not sad crying. The other kind. She said watching me actually choose the scary thing on purpose, instead of joking my way around it, was the proudest she's felt about me in years, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I mostly just stood there in the kitchen holding a box of orientation paperwork looking like an idiot."
"You could have told her that," Harper had said gently.
"I did, eventually. Took me about ten minutes to get the words out, but I did."
"Grant says the first two weeks are the worst, and then it starts to feel normal. He was talking about missing home in general, but I think it probably applies."
"Then we survive two weeks of it feeling strange, and then it starts feeling like just another Tuesday." Harper had laced her fingers through his, steady in the dark. "I'm not going anywhere in the meantime. No more parking lot rehearsals. I promise."
"I believe you," Felix had said, and the ease in it, the plain, uncomplicated trust of it, had felt like its own small miracle after everything it had taken both of them to get there.
The morning itself had arrived faster than either of them wanted, the way important mornings always seemed to, and now here they were, at the departures curb, Grant leaning on the horn a second time with considerably less patience than the first, Felix's parents having already said their own tearful, overlong goodbyes back in the driveway twenty minutes earlier.
"Text me the second you land," Harper said, folding the paper Felix had given her into her jacket pocket without looking at it, exactly as instructed. "And the second orientation ends. And basically constantly, if we're being honest about my actual expectations here."
"Constantly," Felix agreed. "I can work with constantly." He kissed her once more, unhurried despite Grant's increasingly aggressive use of the horn, his hand finding her jaw the way it always did, careful even now, especially now. "Six weeks, give or take. I'll see you at the end of July looking insufferably well read and probably wearing a Northwestern hoodie unironically."
"I'll pretend to be surprised."
"Do it convincingly. I'm counting on the reaction for morale."
He climbed into the car, waving through the window until Grant finally pulled away from the curb, and Harper stood there in the thin early light long after the car had actually disappeared from view, the way she suspected she was going to do at various curbs and doorways for the next six weeks, before making herself turn and walk back toward the parking garage where her mother was waiting, patient and quiet, having wisely decided not to say a single word yet about the state of her daughter's eyes.
She didn't open the folded paper until that evening, once his text had actually come through, four words and a photo of the Chicago skyline out a rideshare window. Landed. Chicago's weirdly humid.
He waited exactly as long as he said he would, she thought, smiling down at her phone before finally reaching for the paper in her jacket pocket. Ten years of knowing him and he still finds new ways to be more careful with me than I expect.
She unfolded the paper at her kitchen table, the same table where her mother did her Sunday crosswords, and found, in Felix's familiar, slanting handwriting, not a letter at all, but a list, numbered one through six, one line for each week he'd be gone.
Week one: I already miss the sound of you finishing every sentence before I do.
Week two: ask me if the program's as scary as I thought. It's not.
Week three: check in on Jess for me, she pretends she doesn't need it.
Week four: I signed us both up for something for August. You'll find out when I'm back.
Week five: still choosing this, in case you were wondering.
Week six: almost home.
Below the last line, in smaller handwriting like an afterthought he hadn't quite been able to leave out, he'd added one more.
P.S. Tell your mom I said thank you, for the mushroom thing and everything else. She'll know what I mean.
Harper read it through twice, laughing softly at week three, warm and a little unsettled at week four, unable to guess what exactly he'd signed them up for and entirely certain, reading the rest of it, that she was going to spend the next six weeks looking forward to finding out.
She texted him back before she let herself overthink it. Read your list. Week four is going to bother me for six straight weeks and you know it.
His reply came a few minutes later, three dots appearing and disappearing twice before the message finally landed. Good. Gives you something to look forward to besides just me. Multitasking.
She laughed out loud at that, alone in her kitchen, and felt something in her chest settle fully into place, warm and certain and entirely unafraid, the particular feeling of a person who had finally, after a very long stretch of practicing the opposite, gotten genuinely good at staying.
She folded the list carefully and set it on the kitchen table beside her own half-finished mug of tea, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, the quiet of an empty house didn't feel like something to brace against at all. It just felt, simply and without any performance behind it, like the ordinary, unremarkable shape of missing someone she fully expected to see again.
Outside, the early summer evening settled soft and gold over the yard, the same yard that had held blanket forts and garden hoses and, more recently, a decision that had changed the shape of both their lives, and Harper sat a while longer at the table, in no hurry at all, finally, wonderfully, entirely unafraid of how much she wanted to be right there, waiting for six weeks to become five, and then four, and then none at all.