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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-4813-4

  eISBN 978-1-64700-058-5

  Text copyright © 2021 Margot Wood

  Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura

  Published in 2021 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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  Dedicated to all my mistakes. I wouldn’t be here without you!

  CHAPTER 1

  Elliot McHugh, beautiful, charming, and upper middle class, with a mediocre wardrobe and a hyperactive disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and she had lived nearly nineteen years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s back that shit up right here. It’s super weird to be talking about myself in the third person, isn’t it? It makes me sound like I’m some sort of omnipotent narrator of my own life, which is partially true, because technically this is my book, but I don’t think I could write this whole thing from a third-person POV. Don’t get me wrong, I’m vain but I’m not third-person-narrating-my-own-life vain. Here’s how this is gonna go. I’m gonna tell you a story—probably a semi-unflattering one—and most of it will take place up here.1 So, let’s just go ahead and start this thing all over, shall we?

  * * *

  1 But sometimes I’ll be down here. What can I say? I’m a girl with a healthy footnote fetish.

  CHAPTER 1

  Hey, hi, hello there. My name is Elliot McHugh, I’m eighteen years old and hail from Cincinnati; I’m a Leo, a (mostly) chaotic-good extrovert, a freshman at Emerson College in Boston, and I have no idea what the hell I am doing right now.

  You know those epic battle scenes in fantasy movies when hundreds of dudes are fighting and it’s total chaos and the young, inexperienced main dude is in the middle of it all, looking like he’s about to shit his pants because he’s just trying to figure out what the hell is going on while also, you know, not getting killed? That’s a lot like what the first day of college feels like. I mean, that’s what I think it feels like. I obviously have no experience fighting in fantasy battles, but the terrified look on those characters’ faces is roughly the same as the one I am currently sporting, so I can only imagine that my current emotions parallel theirs.

  Here I am, in the bright, marbled lobby of my new dorm, the Little Building, nestled on a pile of black trash bags filled with my crap while I wait for my dad to park the car and help me move in. The lobby right now is eerily similar to an airport on Christmas Eve when a snowstorm has just canceled all the flights. Stressed-out parents are arguing with purple shirt–wearing, moving-day volunteers over who gets to have the next empty moving bin; visibly nervous students run in all directions, towing swollen suitcases with wobbly wheels behind them as they try to avoid tripping over loose Bed Bath & Beyond bags; and small siblings loiter in everyone’s way as they scan the crowds for the families they’ve been separated from.

  It’s hard to tell if everyone knows what they’re doing or if they’re just pretending to know and they’re actually just as confused as I am. There’s a girl five feet to my right, sitting alone on top of a red duffel bag, crying. I would go to her but I don’t think I’m qualified to console anyone as I am dangerously close to crying myself and that’s not a thing I do very often.1 I am two seconds away from asking a purple shirt to help me when my dad finally strolls into the lobby. He slips out of the way of a luggage cart and casually leaps over a row of suitcases.

  “What took you so long?” I ask as I struggle to stand from my trash pile. He extends a hand and pulls me up, and I notice this goofy, triumphant grin on his face—a look I am, unfortunately, very familiar with. “Seriously?” I deadpan. “You’ve been playing Ping-Pong all this time?”

  His grin widens as he starts gesturing wildly with his hands. “They have a brand-new table in the dorm down the street, I think it’s called Piano Row? Have you been there yet? Anyways, I was walking by and saw a table in the lobby and no one was using it so I got this other dad to play and I totally smoked his ass. It was great.” I honestly do not know how my dad got through college, let alone medical school, because he is the most ADHD adult I have ever met. He’s more easily distracted than I am. Under normal circumstances, having the Fun Dad is pretty fucking great, but moving into my first dorm room is not a normal circumstance. He looks at my bags on the floor and the frenzy around us and says, “So is this where you’ll be sleeping or do you have an actual room in this building?” He bounces on the balls of his feet, itchy to do something.

  “I’m on the third floor, room 311,” I tell him, and I wonder how we’ll get there. For a brief moment, I think about snagging one of the big luggage carts, but considering I saw two adults nearly come to blows over one five minutes ago and the line for the elevator is nine miles long, I think it’s best to do this by hand. “If you want to stay here and guard my shit, I can do this in about four trips,” I say, kicking one of my lumpy garbage bags.

  “What are you talking about? We can do this in one trip,” he says confidently.

  I narrow my eyes at him. “There is no way we’ll be able to carry all these—” I start to say but the words die on my tongue as I watch my dad squat down and easily lift three bags and sling them over his shoulder.

  “Will you be able to manage?” he teases, watching me mimic his squatting technique beside the remaining bag.

  “Yes,” I scoff. “Of course I can.”

  “First one up the stairs wins!” he shouts and then takes off ahead of me.

  I try to lift the last garbage bag but it’s heavy as balls, so I drag it behind me as I follow him up to the stairwell, the bag knocking against my heels with every step. It takes me a week to climb two flights of stairs because a) I’m out of shape and b) my bag ripped open somewhere along the way, leaving a trail of thongs and socks in my wake, but eventually I reach the top and step out onto the third floor—my new home.

  Annnnnd, holy shit my new home is LOUD. The halls are clotted with a menagerie of families either hugging, crying, or fighting over the proper way to build IKEA LACK tables. There are empty cardboard boxes, open suitcases, and half-built furniture scattered everywhere. A person wearing a vampire cape sits in the middle of the hall playing on a Nintendo Switch. The soundtrack to Hamilton blasts out of one room and Black Sabbath booms out another, a roll of toilet paper whizzes by my head, and someone in a Scream mask sprints down the hall in one direction while a girl vlogging on her phone with a selfie stick passes by us going in the other direction.

  Dad and I pick our way through the gauntlet until we find my room, #311, all the way at the other end. Dad walks right in, the weighted door closing behind him, but I don’t follow, not yet. This feels like a Pivotal Life Moment®—a rare and particular subtype of moment that seems more significant than other, reg
ular moments—and I have two choices here, so let’s make this an interactive reading experience, shall we?

  THE ELLIOT MCHUGH INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE!

  OPTION A: Should I embrace this Pivotal Life Moment®, stare at my reflection in the shiny metal door handle, and do the Disney princess thing where time slows down, music swells, and I ruminate on the fact that once I walk through this door, I leave my past behind and step into my future?

  OPTION B: Or should I just open the damn door already and walk through?

  If you selected option A, please proceed to the next footnote.2 If you selected option B, please proceed to the next sentence.

  For most things in life, I like to set the bar real low, that way I am never disappointed—it’s my patent-pending method of living and it works in nearly every situation, including this one.

  This room is, essentially, a ten-by-fourteen-foot box of blah. I am very glad I did not succumb to the expectations of what a college dorm room should look like based on what Hollywood (and the Emerson catalog) have tried to sell me, because otherwise this big reveal would have been a major bummer. Everything is painted this bright, kinda yellowish, kinda off-white color: the walls, the floor, the ceiling. It’s a fluorescent-lit beige shoebox and the monotony of it is only interrupted by one window facing a brick wall four feet away, a collection of unnaturally shiny wood furniture, and two twin bed frames with blue vinyl mattresses bunked in the corner. It’s quaint, in an insane asylum kind of way.

  The first thing I do upon entering my room is climb inside the ugly wooden wardrobe and close the mirrored door behind me. It smells like mothballs and wet feet but that’s beside the point, which is if it’s big enough to hold me, it’s big enough to hold all my shit and I won’t have to make a last-minute online purchase for more storage. I know I was supposed to spend the summer planning for this day, but, well, I kinda put it off and since my mom was in charge of moving my older sister, Izzy, to medical school last year, it was my dad’s turn this time around, and let’s just say he spent more time planning weird excursions to pepper our Cincinnati-to-Boston road trip than he did making sure I got everything I needed. “Meh, we’ll figure it out when we get there,” he said as we hit the road three days ago, and that’s why I have only four bags full of unfolded clothes and an unopened bedding set my mother bought in bulk from Costco five years ago when my little sister, Remy, was going through her sleep-pee stage.

  Satisfied with the size of my new wardrobe, I step out of it and politely announce, “After careful research, I am comfortable declaring that there is no passage to Narnia in there.”

  “That’s because it’s Narnia business,” Dad says and starts laughing at his own awful joke. “Do you get it? Narn-ia business, like none of ya—”

  “Yes, Dad, I get it,” I groan.

  He glances around the room and sits on the bottom bunk bed, bouncing a little to test the mattress. “So what do you think? Should we keep ’em bunked?” I shake my head no because bunked beds give me middle-school summer camp vibes, so we work together to lift the top bunk off and arrange it against the opposite wall. “You’re lucky your mother stayed home,” he says as we maneuver the bed I have chosen into place. “Last year when we dropped Isabella off at Columbia, your mother tried to sage the room while Remy rifled through Izzy’s clothes and put a pair of underwear on her head just as Izzy’s roommate showed up.”3

  I would say I really wish my mom and sisters were here to move me in but that would be a lie. The truth is, I am relieved to be doling out my goodbyes in installments. As much as I like to pretend they all annoy me, it would be too painful to say goodbye to my whole family at once—it’s easier on my heart this way.

  I look around the room, unsure of what to do next. Since I didn’t bring anything to decorate with, I decide to unpack first. I tear open my designer trash sacks and dump all my belongings on top of the rock-hard mattress with a mysterious stain in the center that I’m just going to pretend isn’t there. A week ago, my mother suggested I organize my clothes by type and label them in those vacuum-seal ziplock bags. Naturally, I chose to ignore her, and now I deeply regret that decision because I can already see I did not bring enough underwear and also seem to have forgotten a winter coat, but whatever, that’s a problem future Elliot will deal with in a few months when it gets cold.4

  “What’s that?” Dad asks, as I stare at my clothes mountain, willing it to put itself away. He points to a lump hiding beneath my unopened comforter. I reach under it and pull out a gift I didn’t notice before but immediately know is a present from Remy by the glittery unicorn wrapping paper that has now unintentionally glitter-bombed all my clothes. I unwrap the box and find a purple box of dryer sheets inside with a note attached to the front. I can’t help but smile as I read the note my little sister left for me:

  Hey Big Sis,

  You’re a college student now! That’s so cool! I wish I was in college too because then I wouldn’t have to be away from you. We could be roomies again, like when I was little! I wanted to write you a letter and hide it in your bag so when you got to school you would find it and then you wouldn’t feel alone. I got you some new dryer sheets from this limited edition scent collection. I had to use my allowance to buy it so you better use it, Smelliot. Don’t forget to put one inside your pillowcase so your dreams smell nice. Okay, that’s it. Love you, kthxbye!

  ~ Remy ~

  PS: I’m taking your room now that you’re at college. Mom said I could.

  It almost hurts, smiling this much. I’m not at all surprised to find dryer sheets hidden in my duffel bag. It’s sweet that my little sister loves me enough to give me a whole box instead of just one sheet. Remy has been obsessed with dryer sheets ever since she was four years old and Mom found her playing inside the dryer one afternoon. Since then, Remy has had this semi-unhealthy infatuation with them. She likes to put them in everyone’s dresser drawers, purses, and backpacks. She’s even taped the sheets to the front of every fan and air conditioner in our house and car.

  “Whoa, Remy gave you an entire box of dryer sheets?” Dad looks shocked when he sees the box.

  “I know, I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  “She’s going to miss you, you know,” Dad says in a surprising display of tenderness.

  “I know,” I tell him. “I’d miss me too, I’m awesome.” I take a few sheets and use them to line my dresser drawers so my clothes will smell like Lavender Dreams™—a vast improvement over the dresser’s previous rich bouquet of stale armpits and mothballs. I finish lining the bottom drawer just as I catch my dad checking his watch, and it sends a wave of panic through my system.

  His spidey-senses must be tingling or my face is betraying my emotions because he takes one look at me and says, “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.” He takes a seat on the unmade bed and starts rifling through my stuff. “Where are all the road trip snacks, or did we eat all of them?”

  I toss him the snack bag. He reaches in and pulls out a box of Cheez-Its while I go back to prolonging his departure by taking my sweet fucking time putting my clothes away in the dresser. With one hand he’s eating Cheez-Its and with the other he starts throwing articles of clothing at me from across the room, forcing me to put them away faster—a ritual for us ever since he taught me how to do laundry when I was a little kid and fuuuuuck, this memory is making me feel very anxious again. This would be easier if he weren’t here, if he had just dumped me on the curb, called out a line like, “Don’t screw up!” and taken off. I hate this, I hate the buildup. I’d rather just get it over with and rip the Band-Aid off. He checks his watch again and fuck fuck fuck. I’m acutely aware that we have only minutes, maybe half an hour left before he leaves and I know he’s not leaving forever. I’ll see him in a few months when I go home for winter break, but I can’t stop counting the seconds as they tick by, wishing I could make them last longer. I have waited so long for this day, the day when I would be officially free to start my new life
as a college student, a life without parents and curfews and a forced daily serving of vegetables, but now that it’s here, now that the time has arrived for me to say goodbye to him, to my family, to that old life . . . it feels like I’m not even remotely ready for this.

  Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

  My dad tosses me the last pair of socks and I shove it in the back of the dresser. I look around for some other excuse to stall him, to keep him here as long as I can, but I’m short on ideas—and time. He stands, brushing orange crumbs off his lap, and pulls his car keys out of his back pocket.

  I have a lump in my throat, my heart is beating so fast my limbs are vibrating, and I am scared. I have this urge to kick and scream, cry and beg my dad to stay and never leave like I did when I was a little girl and had trouble with separation anxiety. But at the same time, I really just want him to get the fuck out of here already.

  I deeply dislike this. TOO MANY FEELINGS.

  I pace around the room and decide the best thing to do right now is to avoid emotions and wash my new sheets. I should have done this before I got here—everyone knows you should wash new sheets before using them for the first time. Yes, this is exactly the best moment to do some laundry. I start ripping open the bedding set when Dad comes over and drops a heavy hand on my shoulder to still me. I look up at him, fully prepared to laugh at whatever dad joke he’s about to crack, but oh shit.

  He looks . . . somber.

  He’s being serious.

  He is never serious.

  Last year, we were dining out as his favorite restaurant when an elderly gentleman at the table next to us started choking on a piece of overcooked meat and even as my dad was giving the guy an emergency tracheostomy right there, in the middle of the Outback Steakhouse dining room, he was cracking jokes with the old dude’s family and making casual conversation with the terrified waitstaff. The only time I have ever seen him look this way was when I was thirteen and he told me my grandfather, Pappy, had died. So yeah, this look he is giving me right now? It’s scaring the shit out of me. It means I can’t hide from this. I can’t just rip the bandage off and get it over with. I have to give my dad a proper goodbye. I know I will regret it if I don’t. I take a deep breath, turn into his big chest, and hold onto him.