Mags was talking to Pony when Noel finally arrived. Pony was in school in Iowa, studying engineering. He’d grown his hair back out into a ponytail, and Simini was tugging on it just because it made her happy. She was studying art in Utah, but she was probably going to transfer to Iowa. Or Pony was going to move to Utah. Or they were going to meet in the middle. “What’s in the middle?” Pony said. “Nebraska? Shit, honey, maybe we should move home.”
Mags felt it when Noel walked in. (He came in through the back door, and a bunch of cold air came in with him.) She looked up over Pony’s shoulder and saw Noel, and Noel saw her—and he strode straight through the basement, over the love seat and up onto the coffee table and over the couch and through Pony and Simini, and wrapped his arms around Mags, swinging her in a circle.
“Mags!” Noel said.
“Noel,” Mags whispered.
Noel hugged Pony and Simini, too. And Frankie and Alicia and Connor. And everybody. Noel was a hugger.
Then he came back to Mags and pinned her against the wall, crowding her as much as hugging her. “Oh, God, Mags,” he said. “Never leave me.”
“I never left you,” she said to his chest. “I never go anywhere.”
“Never let me leave you,” he said to the top of her head.
“When do you go back to Notre Dame?” she asked.
“Sunday.”
Noel was wearing wine-colored pants (softer than jeans, rougher than velvet), a blue-on-blue striped T-shirt, and a gray jacket with the collar turned up.
He was as pale as ever.
His eyes were as wide and as blue.
But his hair was cut short: buzzed over his ears and up the back, with long brown curls spilling out over his forehead. Mags brought her hand up to the back of his head. It felt like something was missing.
“You should have come with me, Margaret,” he said. “The young woman who attacked me couldn’t stop herself.”
“No,” she said, rubbing Noel’s scalp. “It looks good. It suits you.”
*
Everything was the same, and everything was different.
Same people. Same music. Same couches.
But they’d all grown apart for four months, and in wildly different directions.
Frankie brought beer and hid it under the couch, and Natalie was drunk when she got there. Connor brought his new college boyfriend, and everyone hated him—and Alicia kept trying to pull Connor aside to tell him so. The basement seemed more crowded than usual, and there wasn’t as much dancing.…
There was about as much dancing as there would be at a normal party—at somebody else’s party. Their parties used to be different. They used to be twenty-five people in a basement who knew each other so well, they never had to hold back.
Noel didn’t dance tonight. He stuck with Pony and Simini and Frankie. He stuck by Mags’s side, like he was glued there.
She was so glad that she and Noel hadn’t stopped texting—that she still knew what he woke up worried about. Everybody else’s inside jokes were seven months old, but Noel and Mags hadn’t missed a beat.
Noel took a beer when Frankie offered him one. But when Mags rolled her eyes, he handed it to Pony.
“Is it weird being in Omaha?” Simini asked her. “Now that everybody’s left?”
“It’s like walking through the mall after it closes,” Mags said. “I miss you guys so much.”
Noel startled. “Hey,” he said to Mags, pulling on her sleeve.
“What?”
“Come here, come here—come with me.”
He was pulling her away from their friends, out of the basement, up the stairs. When they got to the first floor, he said, “Too far, can’t hear the music.”
“What?”
They went down the stairs again and stopped midway, and Noel switched places with her, so she was standing on the higher step. “Dance with me, Mags, they’re playing our song.”
Mags tipped her head. “‘A Thousand Years’?”
“It’s our actual song,” he said. “Dance with me.”
“How is this our song?” she asked.
“It was playing when we met,” Noel said.
“When?”
“When we met,” he said, rolling his hand, like he was hurrying her along.
“When we met here?”