Fire with Fire (Burn for Burn #2)

“To the future!” Mrs. Lind says, waving her glass in the air.

“To our babies!” my mom says, clinking her glass to Mrs. Lind’s.

Mrs. Lind touches the top of Alex’s head. Mournfully she says, “Where have our babies gone?”

I swear, everyone in the restaurant is looking. That’s when they start sharing stories about us. My mom tells the table about the time she took me to the zoo. I was scared of all the animals, and when Mom paid for me to ride one of the elephants, I completely lost it and peed on him.

“She ruined her dress,” my mom chokes out, sputtering with laughter. “It was the sweetest dress, too—it was white, and it had a lace pinafore and puffy sleeves. I bought it in Paris when she was tiny. . . . She looked like an angel in it. Lilli, do you remember that dress?”

I cross my arms. “No.” In a lower voice I say, “Please, no more stories, Mom.”

“Ooh, wait, I’ve got a good one,” Mrs. Lind shrieks. She proceeds to tell us about how hard it was to get Alex to stop breastfeeding, and the whole time Alex is glowering at her like he wants to take her out with his salad plate.

While the moms are busy cracking up, Alex kicks me under the table. He mouths, They’re so wasted.

I mouth back, I know.

We share a secret smile, and I wonder—what would it be like if we were here together? At the same college, I mean. I think it would be like having a piece of home with me.

The next night, Alex and I are hanging out in the den of my family’s Boston apartment, the TV flashing a show that neither of us is really watching. I think it’s because we’re so beat. Thank God we go home tomorrow. Even if I have to go straight to school.

Alex is in the middle of the couch, his legs folded underneath him, in a pair of his track pants and an Academic Decathlon T-shirt from last spring, when we lost the championship by two stupid questions. I’m draped sideways on my dad’s favorite leather armchair in leggings and a baggy sweater, under one of the snuggly cashmere throws my mom is obsessed with. She’s bought at least ten of them, all in cream.

We’re flipping through the glossy university brochures that we got on our tours today, laughing at the obviously staged photos. We went to Tufts in the morning; then we split up so Alex could go suit shopping and I could go to Wellesley, the girls’ school.

“Oh, come on,” Alex says, and presses his lips together to stifle a laugh. “Lil, tell me what’s wrong with his picture.” He turns the brochure around and points at a page-size photo of a student in a lab coat and goggles, proudly holding up an empty glass beaker.

I crack up when I figure it out. “Oh my gosh. They couldn’t even put anything inside the beaker? Don’t they have a prop guy or an art director?”

Alex starts laughing so hard he can’t breathe. “It’s like, dude, I don’t know what you’re smiling about. You’re going to fail your experiment unless you put something in that beaker.” He shakes his head and then puts the brochure down on the coffee table with the others. “Pass me a cookie?”

I toss him a new sleeve of Chips Ahoy!, since mine has only five left inside. The brochure in my lap shows pictures of students in their dorm rooms. There’s one where four girls are smiling up from a pair of bunk beds inside a room that looks about as big as a prison cell. “I don’t know how I’m going to live in a dorm. My bathroom is bigger than that room we saw today.” I take the last sip of milk in my glass and kick off my blanket. “You want something to drink?”

Alex nods. “Water, please. You’ll probably join a sorority, don’t you think?”

I shrug. “Maybe. It depends on where I end up, I guess. What about you? Do you think you’ll pledge a fraternity?”

“Ah, I don’t know. I think a lot of those guys are meatheads.” Alex watches me get up. “Maybe you could live here. This apartment is sick, Lil.”

“Shhhh,” I say, and nudge my chin toward the hallway where the bedrooms are. My mom’s in the master bedroom; Mrs. Lind’s sleeping in the guest room. “Mom’s already freaking out about me leaving, and my dad would love to keep me under lock and key here with him.”

Alex reaches for the remote and puts on sports. “I doubt anything will wake our moms up tonight.”

He’s probably right. They popped open a bottle of red wine once we got back at the apartment. I swear, they’ve probably consumed more alcohol in the last two days than the freshmen we saw in the dorms. Their wine glasses are on the table, still relatively full, with two different colors of lipstick on the rims. I stick them in the dishwasher, empty what’s left from the bottle, and put that in the recycling bin. Hopefully, my dad won’t be mad at my mom for opening it. Every word on the label is in French. He keeps all his best wine and champagne here. They both need it.

On the way over to Tufts this morning, I could tell my mom was getting annoyed at Mrs. Lind. Mrs. Lind was running the GPS on her phone, trying to navigate us out of traffic, even though my mom knows Boston like the back of her hand and obviously had the best way to get across town. Mom had wanted to get us there early, so we could park at one end of the campus and walk to the admissions hall, but Mrs. Lind kept saying that the spots Mom tried to park in were too small for our SUV. We were almost late, so Mom used the valet parking at a nearby restaurant and tipped the guy big since we weren’t actually eating there.

It takes me a few tries to remember which kitchen cabinets have the glasses. I pour us both waters. I haven’t been to the apartment in over a year, but Dad’s here all the time, working at the hospital. We have a cleaning lady, and a person whose job it is to keep the house stocked with food and stuff, so he doesn’t have to worry about anything. God forbid he’d actually have to go to the store and buy a carton of milk.

When I get back to the den, Alex is up, staring out the windows at the city below. I put our glasses down and stand next to him. It’s snowing again.

“It’s pretty out there,” I say, leaning forward so my forehead is against the glass. We’re on the thirtieth floor of a huge highrise, and you can see everything. It’s still another weeks until Thanksgiving, but lots of people have holiday lights already strung up on their roofs or their balconies. The trees down in the park are all bare and spindly, and the sky is super inky black with flecks of white. The people walking around look like tiny ants.