The cottage faces a shore of broken rock. Knots show through the pine underfoot, and most days the windows stand open. A breeze brings the scent of conifers and salt through the rooms, stirring the pale linen curtains. Coffee gurgles in the kitchen. We carry our hot mugs onto the stone terrace, where the cold air fills my lungs.
Livia and Bianca have been my favorite people since our first year at Alderbrook College. Livia is tall and fair, with honey-colored hair; Bianca is slight, with a tiny silver ring at her septum and box braids dyed another shade at the ends.
How did I ever go through life without knowing them? We hadn't met when Alderbrook's housing committee put us in the same room. Somewhere in western Massachusetts, people who knew nothing about us made the decision that gave me my closest friends. We joked that a research grant must have paid someone to find the least compatible roommates imaginable.
Livia came from a wealthy Seattle real-estate family. Her clothes were immaculate and carefully chosen; her bookshelves were crowded with horror novels. Bianca was an illustrator from Santa Fe, raised by a community-radio host and a documentary filmmaker. She arrived in paint-spattered coveralls and worn vintage boots.
I came from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where my mother was a public librarian and my father repaired buses. Alderbrook was small and prestigious, but its reputation wasn't what settled my choice. It offered more financial aid than any of the other colleges. With years of veterinary training still ahead of me, I needed to take that into account.
Before our first night as roommates was over, Livia had gathered us on her bed with a teen comedy playing on her laptop. We ate popcorn and gummy worms from the same bowl, finding a decent balance between salt and sugar. By the end of the following week, she'd had three shirts made around our first private joke.
The shirts turned us into a mock film crew. Livia's cast her as a romantic lead awaiting her first sex scene—and a ride to the set. Mine made me an equally untried understudy, but one who could drive herself there. Bianca got the part that required experience in both departments: leading lady and stunt driver. In real life, Bianca was a good driver and the only one of us who'd slept with someone; Livia was the only one who couldn't drive.
Those shirts got plenty of use, though none of us wore hers beyond the dorm. I was fond of our musty room in its rambling white-sided building, and of our walks through the fields and woods around campus. When the first fall day mild enough for an open window arrived, we did our homework over ginger tea or warm cider. The smell of drying leaves reached us as they curled and fell outside. Above the door, Bianca had hung her final figure-drawing project, a nude painting of Livia and me. It was our last glimpse of the room whenever we left for class. Around it we'd taped instant photos: all three of us at parties, picnics, and coffee shops in town.
A neon-green scrunchie holding back Bianca's braids, together with the turpentine on her clothes, told me she'd been absorbed in her art. A frightening passage could make Livia throw back her head and cackle, knocking her shoes against the end of the bed. I spent those hours over biology textbooks. Choosing what to highlight was hopeless when every detail mattered, and the pens kept running dry. If an assignment defeated me, I took a break and cleaned the whole room, top to bottom.
The quiet never lasted. A message from Bianca's prospective girlfriend could set us all giggling; a slasher film chosen by Livia had us screaming behind our hands. I joined in, making more noise than I'd ever made at home. Ours had been a quiet house, except when my sister turned up with a dubious new piercing or a new love interest, sometimes both. Shouting followed, then a hush I dreaded more than the argument. I'd try to prevent the raised voices because I knew what came afterward, and how slowly every second of it would pass.
With my friends, I could sit without talking and have nothing to fear. We knew one another well enough to leave a silence alone. We could be noisy, too, for no reason beyond how glad we were to be alive and together.
Back then, greater happiness seemed impossible. So did finding another place I could love as much as Alderbrook.
Then Livia brought us here, to her family's summer place, a cedar lodge near Cape Lark on the Washington coast. And I met Rhys.