1. The Five-Year Plan and the Broken Futon

Nora had moved into the apartment with forty-three dollars, two suitcases, a box fan that had stopped oscillating sometime during the previous administration, and a five-year plan typed out in twelve-point Times New Roman and laminated at the FedEx near her mom's house. The lamination had been her mother's idea. "So you can't back out of it," her mother had said, which was simultaneously the most pessimistic and most accurate thing her mother had ever said about her. The plan was: finish her associate's degree at Hartwell Community College by December. Transfer to Caldwell University on the merit scholarship she was going to earn by working harder than she had ever worked. Graduate in three years with a business degree. Get a job that paid enough to clear her family's medical debt before her thirtieth birthday. Everything else was noise. The apartment was in Millbridge, which was technically a twenty-minute bus ride from Caldwell and practically a different universe. Her new roommate, Sofia Vasquez, had posted the listing with the subject line "looking 4 a sane person (serious inquiries only)" and a blurry photo of what turned out to be the kitchen. Nora had responded because it was three hundred dollars cheaper per month than anything else she'd found, and "sane" was a bar she could clear. Sofia, it turned out, was twenty-one, studying art, chaotically warm, and constitutionally incapable of being in a bad mood before noon. She had welcomed Nora at the door with a hug that lasted long enough to be slightly alarming and then immediately began apologizing for the state of the futon in the living room. "It's broken," Sofia said, gesturing at the futon, which was folded at a forty-five-degree angle that served neither its couch nor its bed function. "My brother was supposed to fix it like two weeks ago but he's — you know, he has a whole thing going on. It'll be fine, I'll get him to do it this weekend." "I don't need the futon," Nora said. "I have a bed." "Right, right, but it's like — visually offensive, I'm sorry. It bothers me on behalf of the room." Sofia stared at the futon with genuine personal affront. "Anyway! Welcome. Kitchen is small but the oven works. Bathroom has good water pressure. Wi-Fi password is on the fridge. The guy upstairs plays drums sometimes but only until ten. I feel like we're going to be great." Nora felt a cautious tentative warmth toward Sofia, which she immediately quarantined behind the part of her brain that handled five-year plans. Friendship was fine. Friendship was good, even. But she was here to study, and she could not afford the kind of semester that started with great-feeling things and ended with failed classes and emergency calls to her mom. She had one of those already. She was not having another. She spent the rest of the day unpacking, which took three hours because she had learned, in her twenty-one years of living, how to keep only the things that mattered. Her books were alphabetized by the end of it. Her desk faced the window. Her planner — paper, not digital, because she had discovered that she remembered things better when she wrote them by hand — sat open on the desk to the first week of September. That was when she heard the front door and then a voice that was not Sofia's. "The futon is still broken," the voice said. "That is because," Sofia said, from the kitchen, "you still haven't fixed it." "I was going to. I had a thing." "You always have a thing. Eli, I have a roommate now, can you please for the love of all things not be a disaster for like forty-eight hours." Nora looked up from her planner. The man in the living room was not what she would have described as a disaster. He was tall, maybe six feet, with dark hair that looked like it had been pushed back impatiently and left to decide its own direction. He had his hands in the pockets of a jacket that was slightly too large and worn in the elbows. He was looking at the futon with the expression of someone confronting a problem they had fully intended to address at some unspecified later time and were mildly annoyed to be confronted with now. Then he looked up and saw Nora in the hallway. She registered two things in quick succession: that he was objectively very good-looking in a way that her brain filed automatically under "irrelevant," and that his expression, when he saw her, did something complicated — a kind of recalibration, a shifting from mild irritation to something more guarded. "Hi," he said. "Hi," she said. "Eli," Sofia called from the kitchen. "That's Nora. She's smart and she has a plan and you're going to be nice to her." "I'm always nice," Eli said, in the tone of someone who had heard this before and found it entirely unreasonable. Nora looked at the broken futon. She looked at Eli. She turned back to her room. "Nice to meet you," she said. She sat back down at her desk and opened her planner and wrote the date at the top of the first page. She did not think about the way he'd looked at the futon, or the worn elbows on the jacket, or any of it. She had a five-year plan. She was going to stick to it. The futon remained broken for eleven more days.