Mom said change is hard. Well, yeah. Every change I’ve ever experienced was for the worse. My parents’ divorce, my dad’s move to Canada, my mom’s diagnosis. Even Lewis leaving for school and effectively removing himself from our lives. Going to college, especially going to college far from home, is a huge, fundamental change, and, honestly, I’ve had enough of change. I’m not eager for the upheavals and uncertainty it’ll bring, not when I know exactly how not okay change can be.

It’s why this trip is a waste of time. Everyone puts unnecessary emphasis on the noneducational parts of college—the city, the “feel” of the campus, the perfect “college experience.” I only want the degree and the opportunity to learn. The rest is white noise. Instead of drowning in it, I’m focusing on where I’m truly needed.

This tour is nothing but an opportunity to observe everything I’m not interested in—while being forced into a car with the one person who should understand, who should share some of my fears and apprehensions, and who instead appears focused on getting me laid.

I look out the window and wish I were home.

   Juniper

I HEAR MATT’S even breathing beside me. It’s eleven p.m. but the lights of Boston haven’t gone out. While Matt dozes, I watch the view from the window.

I can’t figure out how to be in the moment after sex. Not because of Matt, who is a perfect gentleman. But I envy him for how completely his mind goes clear, how easily restful he becomes. He’s utterly relaxed.

Not me. My mind’s a tornado. It churns forward, picking up fragments of the future as if they were playgrounds and patio furniture. Hopes, dreams, plans. They rush forward abrupt and unbidden. It’s as if the feelings of sex unquiet everything, rushing me into tomorrow’s tour and this week’s itinerary and the year’s exhilarating and enormous decisions.

Matt brushes my temple with his fingers. “Hey, where’d you go?” he asks, no doubt noticing I’m distracted.

“Just thinking about tomorrow,” I reply.

He reaches up, pulling me closer, and I notice the sheet slip down his chest. Of course, he notices my noticing. I flush, even as I smile—knowing how moments like this go to his head—and just as I suspected, he grins. This boy. I let myself curl up next to him.

“College is going to be just like this,” he says in a low voice.

I laugh into the smooth curve of his neck. “I don’t think our dorms will be quite this nice.”

“Not the room. This,” Matt says. He traces his finger down my arm. “Us. No more sneaking around our parents, finding places to park.”

His words bring back memories of circling parking lots and playing Ten Fingers until the final car leaves, fumbling on the seats. I pull away a little. “We’ll have roommates. And, you know, studying?”

“Oh, is studying something a person does in college?” he asks playfully. “I had no idea.”

I shove his shoulder lightly. “Hey, have you thought about that yet? What you might want to study?” I seize on the new subject, not entirely feeling like discussing our college sex plans.

Matt shuffles up onto his elbows. He considers the question for a second. “I’m feeling like something in the arts,” he says.

I sit upright, pulling the sheet over my chest. “The arts?” Matt’s passionate about a lot of things. I’ve just never seen him pick up a paintbrush or play an instrument or write a haiku. When we play Pictionary, his entries are worse than cave paintings.

“Yeah,” he says evenly. “I was thinking . . . the art of seduction.”

I wrinkle my nose as Matt smirks, obviously delighted with himself. “I can’t believe you just said that.” While he props himself up, hands behind his head, I get out of bed and open my suitcase. I rummage for my pajamas and pull them out, my striped bottoms and the UMass Amherst shirt from when I did a college prep day program there my sophomore summer. “For real, Matt,” I say, tugging them on. I sit on the edge of the bed and begin to brush my hair. “When you picture yourself in four years, it’s leaving college to go do what?”

“Whoa, leaving college?” Matt asks. “We haven’t even gotten there yet.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s just exciting. Our futures are out there.” I find myself staring from the bed out the open window, onto the lights of the city, unblinking and incessant, each of them a life in motion. I swear I can see every light stretching all the way to Virginia.

Matt’s fingers interlacing with mine pull my concentration from the view. On his face when I turn back to him is a rare vulnerability. It’s the expression he gets when he’s really thought something over—the one I recognize from the day he told his dad he’d decided he wouldn’t play college baseball, and the morning he asked if he could meet my family. “My future and my past are the same, Juni, and I’m looking at her.”

I feel myself soften at his words. Okay, maybe he could major in the art of seduction. It’s one of the wonderful contradictions of Matt. Baseball jock though he is, he’s melt-your-heart-into-a-little-puddle romantic when he wants to be. In this moment, the city lights become a little less inviting, like they’re watching us now, not the other way around.

“The next four years are about you and about enjoying college,” Matt continues. “We’re going to make memories there. Memories we’re going to hold on to the rest of our lives. That won’t change depending on a job, or a degree.”

I get up and walk to the window. “I’m going to study architecture.” I say, scanning my mind for anytime Matt mentioned liking a class or finding an assignment interesting. “What about history?” I suggest. “You were really good at it. Remember?” I face the bed, where Matt’s stuffing his legs into his sweatpants. “In April, you got a ninety-five on five US tests in a row.”

Climbing under the covers, Matt yawns. “No, I don’t remember, Juniper. That class was pretty boring.”

I quell a small wave of irritation. I’ve had to learn not to be surprised when people don’t remember things the way I do. Because to me, they’re vexingly obvious. Forgetting something like that feels to me like forgetting my class schedule or who my English teacher is. When I was younger, I used to get in fights with my family over what they could and couldn’t remember. The times they promised us extra hours of TV or ice cream for dinner, then claimed they hadn’t. Disputed recollections of who said what or whose idea was whose. It took years to learn to let those things go.

Matt flips off the light near the bed. He nods toward the window, where the sleepless city still lights our room.