Begin Again

The next morning Milo beats me and Shay to the studio. I barely make it through the doorway before he strides right up to me and hands me his familiar beaten-up thermos with the Blue Ridge State logo on it. I take it from him, glancing up into eyes that look every bit as tired as I feel.

“This is tea,” Milo tells me. Then, after a beat: “Allegedly.”

For a moment neither of us speaks, his eyes careful and searching mine. He may have apologized yesterday, but I feel the full weight of it now. It’s in the caution behind his gaze, the faint shame in the curve of those tall shoulders. I’d already forgiven him. But I feel a warmth seeping into my chest just the same.

Shay strolls in behind me, eyeing the thermos curiously. “Why don’t I get a random tea?”

Milo turns back around abruptly, heading for his stool. “Because I wasn’t an asshole to you yesterday.”

My ears burn warmer than the thermos in my hand. Shay raises her eyebrows at me with a clear “we’re going to discuss this when we don’t have a show to run” in her eyes before attending to the computer.

“Then can you be an asshole to me today?” Shay asks. “I love free beverages.”

“I’ll try to pencil you in,” Milo quips.

I press the thermos to my chest, feeling its steady heat through my jacket. “Thanks, Milo. But you didn’t need to do this.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I’ve never brewed tea in my life.”

I take a sip. It’s got enough sugar in it for an entire batch of one of Gammy Nell’s famous snickerdoodles and the half-and-half is so thick I can barely detect anything even adjacent to tea. But as terrible as it is on the tongue, it’s infinitely warm on the heart.

“Wait.” I look down at the thermos, then at his empty hands. “What about your coffee?”

Milo waves me off. “I can survive an hour without my first cup.”

I almost feel ridiculous for the way my chest seems to swell at this small but strangely personal gesture. But then Shay blinks, looking at each of us in turn, every bit as stunned as I am.

“Well, I guess even in the Upside Down the show has to go on,” she says, peeling the notes off the printer and sticking them in front of Milo. “You’re up in five.”

After he finishes the show, Milo lingers by the recording mic, his eyes skirting to mine. Shay pats me on the shoulder and ducks out for class. I take the few steps over to Milo, the room suddenly feeling smaller than it did when Shay was still here, and offer him back the thermos.

He opens his mouth and I shake my head, already knowing what’s about to come out of it.

“Seriously, Milo. You don’t need to apologize,” I insist. “I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place.”

He lets loose a sheepish breath, taking a step back and sinking onto the stool. Even with him perched on it, I have to look up at him to meet his eye. He takes back the thermos, careful to hold it from the bottom, not to let our fingers graze. His next words come out in a mumble.

“I didn’t give you much of a choice.”

“Still. It probably wasn’t my place.” I lean in closer, willing him to meet my eyes so he can see the teasing glint in them. “Just my, uh—fix-it thing, as you and Shay call it.”

But when Milo looks at me, his expression is surprisingly serious. “I shouldn’t have said that, either. I don’t think you have a fix-it thing.”

I feel a sliver of my composure slip out from under me. “You don’t?”

“No. I think you love to help people.” His voice is steady, with no trace of the quake from yesterday. Like he’s been thinking about having this conversation ever since, or maybe even longer than that. “But I also think you put a lot of pressure on yourself about it.”

I feel an unfamiliar kind of itch under my skin. The too-close feeling of someone seeing things that you don’t want them to see.

“Well, it is what I want to do for a living,” I say, my voice high in my own ears. “I want to do my best.”

“No, I don’t mean like that. I mean . . .” Milo reaches a hand for the back of his neck, his jaw working like he’s considering his next words carefully. When he decides on them, he looks down at me and says, “You know you don’t owe anyone your help, right? Like, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”Property of Nô)(velDr(a)ma.Org.

My throat tightens. “I’m not—I know that. That’s not it at all.”

He doesn’t back down the way I expect he will, letting me say the words but not letting them sink in. “Maybe it’s not, but I think you need to hear it,” he says.

My palms are so sweaty that I can’t help rubbing them against the edges of my coat. I scramble for something to say, some way to dismiss him, but it’s almost as if my lungs won’t let me. They can’t seem to find the air.

“Sometimes your friends will need help. And sometimes you’ll need it. But that doesn’t mean that we have to solve everything for each other.” His mouth twists to the side. “That’s the point of having friends, plural. A support system. Everyone helps when they can. They don’t spread themselves too thin.”

“But I’m not,” I say quietly, stubbornly.

“Aren’t you, though? I mean—you’ve been so busy trying to fix things. Shay’s major. My sleep schedule. These ribbons for your boyfriend. Every single email to the show and your old column. You’re telling me nothing in your own life is falling through the cracks?”

I need to shut this down. Need to find some way to gracefully end this conversation before it leads somewhere I don’t want to go myself, let alone with someone else.

“I just . . .” I swallow hard. Try to fall back on the same reason I gave him a few weeks ago, walking back from trivia, when he first brought the fix-it urge up. “It makes me happy, being able to help.”

But this time Milo just tilts his head at me, as if to say, Does it? As if to silently call me out on something that’s too complicated to give a name to, too closely woven into my being to define.

“I think you should be happy in your own life first,” says Milo.

My eyebrows lift before I can stop them. “Do I seem unhappy?”

Milo shrugs. “Well—yeah, sometimes. But we all are sometimes,” he says. “I think the only difference is whether you’re willing to acknowledge it. And sometimes I think your whole obsession with fixing things is you not acknowledging it.”

There’s this moment then, when it feels like something in me breaks away; some kind of barrier between me and a truth I’ve been avoiding so long that despite all my attempts, it’s buried itself in me. It’s suddenly so loud that I know if I peer at the feeling—if I really let myself sit in it, instead of pushing it down the way I usually do—it’s less happiness, and more relief. Not the addition of something good, but the absence of something else.

Because the truth is, knowing I can be helpful means that I’m not a burden. And in the years when my dad was away—the years he left me with two women who may have loved me deeply and endlessly, but certainly never imagined having to raise me in their retired years—I couldn’t help feeling like one a lot of the time. They didn’t know what to do with me. Not my dad, who suddenly just stopped being a dad; not my grandmas, who tried their best, but could never fill that space my mom left behind; not even the Whits, who could treat me like a member of the family, but only ever to an extent.

And yeah, when I was a kid, wanting to help came naturally. My mom helped with her quick tongue and ability to shed light on issues. I helped them by listening and shedding light on people. We were bonded by the mutual satisfaction of knowing we’d been able to use our abilities to make other people feel heard, feel cared for.

But after she died, after I started feeling so separate from everyone else, it started to feel less like an instinct to help, and more of an itch. A compulsion. The more people I helped, the easier it was to shove that feeling of being a burden away.

You don’t need to prove anything. Even as the words are trying to settle in me, I can’t help resisting them. When you get used to living a certain way—used to measuring your life, and maybe even your worth in a certain way—it’s so much easier to keep going in an old rhythm than to try to pick up one you’ve never known.

My eyes burn, a strange convergence of realizations all hitting me at once. Not just the mindset that’s driven me these past few years. But everything in my life that I’ve put on hold because of it.

And there it is—the heart of what Milo’s dad meant. These are the pieces I haven’t picked up. The mess I’ve been ignoring. I can’t scorch the earth and pretend it never happened. Blue Ridge State is my chance to begin again, but I still have to look back if I want to look ahead.

“I want . . .”

The two words are so overwhelming in their potential. I’ve always known what I wanted. Always had my life mapped out. But those were concrete, measurable achievements. The things that I want are things I haven’t let myself consider. Things I’m not sure I can even have.

I want to love and be loved without ever having to wonder if it’s conditional. I want a life that is sometimes just my own, without feeling like I’m responsible for anyone or anyone is burdened with being responsible for me. I want back what I lost—at least however much of it I can still get.

“What?” Milo asks quietly.

I clench my fists at my side, steeling myself with a confidence that feels borrowed. Like I’m pulling it out of the past, out of my younger self’s heart. It takes a few long moments, but then it settles in me, adapts to my new edges, to the new cracks in between.

I look him square in the eye. “I want to do the Friday show,” I say, just barely louder than my thundering heart.

Milo smiles this slow, satisfied smile, one so disarming that for a moment it takes everything in me not to stare directly at it. Not to wonder about the origin of it—if it was a smile that he used to smile often, or one that has only ever been reserved for rare moments like this.

My next breath rattles slightly, but the words are firm. “I’m not ready to do things on the fly yet. But if there’s a way to give advice as a segment—something I could record in advance—then I think I could do it.”

Milo’s smile seems to soften then. It suits him—brings out the mossy green of his eyes, the small crinkles in his cheeks and eyes that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

“Welcome to The Knights’ Watch, Squire.”