I smile. “Hi, Miles.”

“Hey, Rem,” her boyfriend says.

The two of them have been inseparable all week while he’s been back. She even had him use his Mr. Teller impression to call her out of school.

They’ve been dating since last summer when he was home on break from CalTech. He’d skipped a year, so he graduated this spring but spent most of summer on the West Coast at a new internship. Or, as Sage refers to it, his new ho market.

“Did you get the app to work?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I sit up, hearing the garage door open. “It’s working fine.”

“Let me know if the video cuts out. I’ve dealt with a few reports of it today.”

Sage sighs into the mic. “You two need a room or what?”

I roll my eyes, and Miles starts sweet-talking the drama queen on the other end.

“You love the nerd talk.” Something rustles, his voice suddenly much closer and lower. “You want to hear me talk about backend servers and bug reports.”

“No!” she giggles out.

“Admit it—you’re so turned on right now.”

They fall into their own little world like they usually do, and once a breathy sigh comes through, I don’t even bother with a goodbye.

It’s nothing new for us. In fact, Sage and I haven’t said goodbye once since we met in the second grade. Not when she left for eight weeks of summer camp, not when my mom and I moved to the town over a few years ago.

A door slams downstairs, and I glance at my closed one. I grab the extra pillows from the top of the bed and go over to shove them against the crack at the bottom, silencing all other sounds from the rest of the house.

As I crash back onto my bed, I grab my phone and open the app Miles installed over the weekend.

The startup he’s interning at is developing an app for virtual tourism. Eventually a person will be able to log in, and someone in another part of the world will walk them through a museum or an art exhibit. They could experience Carnival in Brazil while working a late nursing shift in Maine or see the Vatican in the middle of a snowstorm in the Midwest.

It’s in the beta-testing stage, only available to a few dozen people right now. I’m one of them because my best friend has no boundaries and volunteered me without my knowledge. She claimed it would be good for me to have more randomness in my life. Really, she thought Miles said virtual dating, only realizing her mistake when he was explaining to me how it works.

The purple W flashes, and the dots appear at the bottom as the app loads. Then the dashboard appears, welcoming SaintR to Wanderer.