I feel my lungs compress inside my chest like two vacuum bags getting the air sucked out of them. “Relax,” she chirps. “College is just a racket for corporate brain-munchers anyway. Life is the only real school there is.”

My emotions threaten to disgorge like a hundred-armed octopus all over Eric and Damien’s lawn. I had a plan. We had a plan—Moony and I. High school, then university, then an internship somewhere with real offices and natural light. A steady job with payroll and benefits. Hard work molded into marketable skills traded for a reasonable life.

How can there be no money?

I see the tiny private New Hampshire campus I’ve been dreaming about for the past three years drift into a fog of doubt. The cable-knit sweaters, vegan lattes, and vintage messenger bags of my future disappear like steam through an open window.

Carefully, I tuck the tentacles of my panic back down, one by one. I can’t afford to unwind, to let my guts spill out like a shaken soda can, or—like my mother—I may never recollect them all.

She has to be lying.

“I’m not going,” I tell her.

Her eyebrows arch in a comical way as she rubs at her forehead and drops her purse on the lawn. “Catia.”

“I’m not going with you. I don’t want to live with you. I want to stay here.”

“You can’t stay here,” she snaps. “I just told you we’re selling the house.”

“Then I’ll live somewhere else.” I cross my arms.

“Oh yeah? Where is that?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere.” I jut out my chin stubbornly.

She laughs and shakes her head. “You’re still a minor, Catia. Have you thought about that?”

“So?”

“So they won’t allow you legally to live on your own. Not yet.”

“Are you threatening me?”

She raises both her hands in the air, palms out, in surrender. “I was your age once,” she says after a moment. “I won’t force you. But I’m asking you, Catia, to come with me. And I’m reminding you that you have nowhere else to go. I’ve been out there with nowhere and no one, and I’m telling you it’s not where you want to be.”

She digs a cigarette out of her front pocket—her jeans are so tight it’s a wonder she got them in there in the first place—and lights it up.

I have a choice to make, but it doesn’t feel like much of one. And I know I’ve made it already, made it the second I decided to dial her number. “I thought you quit,” I tell her.