She looked surprised, as if I had unearthed a secret. “Yeah,” she admitted. “Which is actually the favor I wanted to ask you. I’d love to interview your grandmother. Do you think she’d be up for it?”

“To archive her story?”

“I guess so.” She smiled sheepishly. “Well, I don’t really know what I’m doing yet. Let me figure that out first, and then can I reach out to you again?”

“Of course.”

I scraped the bottom of my frozen yogurt cup. I regretted not getting more. Not because there was anything special about Cherry Hill frozen yogurt. I just didn’t want to leave yet. I wanted to ask her if maybe we could keep in touch even if she didn’t figure out her major. Or maybe I could help her figure it out? Even if she didn’t want to interview grandmother, she could still come up to Boston before the school year started and meet her and grandfather. In short, I wanted to ask her to be friends, except the lines of our lives were already curving away from each other.

I thanked her again for the yogurt and for the pencil.

“Stop thanking me,” she laughed. “It was nothing.”

We left the shop, loitering for a bit in the parking lot. I asked if she wanted a ride. She said she’d walk and pointed to the neighborhood across the street, huge houses with two-car garages. All I could do was thank her again for the yogurt.

She laughed again. And when she did, her hand reached out, brushing the inside of my left wrist.

“You’ll never forgive me for that, will you?”

My wrist has been tingling ever since.

Back on campus, I’ve been examining the pencil, hoping it might show me some sort of hidden message. It really is just a pencil, though, from any way I look at it. A nice one, to be sure. But looking at it makes me tired, as if this whole last year of searching is finally catching up to me. Maybe it wasn’t worth it.

Grandfather would say to look at the bright side, to think of the journey not the destination, etc. So I guess without the search I never would have gotten the chance to work with Prof. Logan or EMBRS and certainly never would have learned so much about how to build resilient data pipelines. And I met someone new, someone nice, someone I hope I’ll see again. And most importantly, in a few days, I’ll be going home to see grandmother and grandfather, and to celebrate another year of her life.