“It turns out the girl who broke your heart last Christmas is his fucking sister.” Meredith pounds one fist into her closed palm. “What are the odds? I mean, I don’t know, Ellie…. it kind of feels like fate.”

“You don’t believe in fate.”

“I don’t believe that we should surrender our agency because we think things are meant to be,” she clarifies. “But I do believe some people belong in our lives. Do you remember how we met?”

“Duh. Thwarting girl-on-girl crime.” Meredith and I were neighbors in the dorms our freshman year. We both had roommates named Ashley who thought they were too cool for us, but we didn’t hang out those first few months. We were both too busy studying and working thirty hours a week to bother making friends. Meredith had been dating this absolute tool of a mechanical engineering major named Spencer Yang from high school, and right before winter break, she’d come back to her dorm after a Business Law Society meeting to find her boyfriend and her Ashley in a rather shocking sexual position by our eighteen-year-old standards.

I caught her in the bathroom in the midst of an Aries chaos rage, about to inflict some misguided girl-on-girl crime by pouring bleach into Ashley’s shampoo bottle.

Instead, inspired by Gilmore Girls, we decided to deviled-egg Spencer’s beloved Miata, but we never actually made it past our dorm kitchen. We spent hours drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonades and laughing wildly as we attempted—and failed miserably—to make deviled eggs, and Meredith forgot her anger somewhere around the fourteenth consecutive listen to “I Knew You Were Trouble.” And that was it.

I saw her at her absolute lowest, her absolute messiest, and somehow, she became the one person I could show my messy self to in return.

“You’re my platonic soul mate,” Meredith says. I stare at my best friend on the phone screen. Awake at five her time to talk me through an anxiety spiral, her wild red hair held in place by a single pencil. She’s the bold oil paint to my watercolor timidity, the fire to my water, the Aries to my Pisces. “You’re my platonic soul mate, too,” I say.

“Maybe Jack is your romantic soul mate….”

I scoff, but I’m thinking about the Jack-size cookie-cutter inside of me. About the people who’ve seen my messiest self and loved me anyway.

“The fact that this woman came back into your life after a year… I don’t know. It feels like magic to me.”

“You don’t believe in magic, Mere.”

“No.” Meredith sighs. “But you do. Or, at least, some version of you used to.”

I stare down at the panels sketched out in Clip Studio on my iPad. None of this feels like magic.

“Family Ski Trip: ten hours.”