“You don’t want to start this war with me,” she warned. I reminded her of the froyo incident and biked away before she could escalate.

She followed me through Cambridge. Luckily, it’s the time of year when the weather here is amazing—no longer humid from summer, the bitter cold still weeks away, like the city was showing off. The leaves were just beginning to turn, deep yellows and oranges against the freshly painted green of the bike lane. We even got to see some turkeys halting traffic; it was never better to be a biker.

For the first time since I came home, I could pretend my life was on track. Like I was a student back for fall break, blazing along the same well-worn path as everyone else, maybe even a better one because she was there with me. Her flannel billowed behind her, a trail of cozy colors that warmed me whenever I looked at her. She would squeal each time she saw a dog in a sweater, and her bike would teeter dangerously. I smiled down at my handlebars, just really, truly grateful.

“Where are we?” she asked skeptically when I stopped at the building where grandfather used to teach. I could understand her skepticism—the MIT buildings are not quite as New England grand as Harvard’s or (I imagine) Princeton’s. They’re quite a bit weirder-looking. Grandfather’s has a particularly lopsided structure, a near-collapsing quality to it, in an endearing way.

I locked my bike and told her we were going to class. That I was going to teach her.

“But I’m on fall break!” she complained.

“Humor me,” I said. “I haven’t been to school all semester. I miss it.”

“What a nerd,” she laughed.

“Is that a problem?”

I held the door to the building open for her. She lingered in the doorframe, glancing over her shoulder at me, her hair still windswept, a mark on her forehead where her helmet had been.

“Quite the opposite,” she said as she resumed walking, and I was relieved she could not see the stumbling puddle I had become behind her.

I managed to regain my composure in the classroom. Classrooms are good places for me. It felt so good to be back in one, to hear the projector groan alive, the mechanical lowering of the screen, to plug in my laptop and project my desktop background of my neighbor’s orange cat onto the wall.

Louise squealed when she saw the cat, which I was admittedly relieved about, for I had feared she might only be a dog person. And then she chuckled.

“What?” I asked self-consciously.

“It’s nothing.” But she was still smiling, attempting to cover it. I looked down to see if there was something on my shirt. I begged her to tell me.

“I just think it’s cute that you’re petting the cat’s head with your cursor.”