I laughed out an incredulous breath. “Well, we can lay out the landscape so far. I mean, doesn’t my opinion factor in at all?”

“Of course, but we don’t even have offers from every school.”

“Hanna, we can assume everywhere you’ve been is an option!”

It sucked having this conversation over the phone, but I was too wound up to wait. After reading my friends’ reactions today, I knew it was absurd that we didn’t even have an inkling of where we were going yet. I didn’t want to put it off anymore.

I heard her take a calming breath before she said, “I feel like planning right now would be putting the cart bef—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I cut in. “You are the fucking cart! You are the fucking horse! You’re leading this. Every school wants you!”

“Will.”

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. She sounded so vulnerable, but her placating tone chipped away at my already frayed patience. “What?”

“Don’t yell at me. I don’t want to fight.”

I felt too upset to diffuse this immediately. “At this point, getting off the phone with me or putting this aside doesn’t mean we aren’t fighting. The fact that you’re eight interviews in and I have no idea where you’re leaning is already a problem. I want to have it out.”

Hanna went quiet on the other end of the line, finally uttering a small “Okay.”

Trying to calm down, I said, “Babe, there’s nothing wrong with fighting. Sometimes we won’t agree. Sometimes we will actively disagree about how to handle something. It has to be okay for us to have a fight.”

“Well, we just argued this weekend, too. And this one feels big,” she said.

“Because it is,” I answered with an incredulous laugh. “I mean, hey, it’s only our future.”

She didn’t respond. All I could hear was a quiet tapping on the other end: her nervous habit of flicking a pen against her leg.

Leaning against the wall, I said, “Hanna. I need you to say something.”

“I’m not sure what to say because I don’t feel like I can make a decision yet. I haven’t been to Caltech. I haven’t heard back from Harvard, Berkeley, or Rice yet, either.”

“And that’s fine,” I told her. “All I’m asking is that we talk about it, because you do have offers from five schools, but you won’t even lay out some hypotheticals with me. You loved Harvard. You loved Princeton, but were iffy on a faculty spot at Hopkins and MIT. Right?”

“Right.”

And then she said nothing more.

“You only have one more interview,” I reminded her evenly. “You’ve heard back from all but three places. So what are your top three?”