A LITTLE, Nina’s mom signed back. COLLEGE CLASS.

I was a little overly excited when I signed, COOL!

MY NAME J-A-C-K-I-E, Nina’s mom signed, introducing herself. “And that’s . . . finished,” she said with a laugh.

I busied myself with pulling out my school things while Nina conversed with her mom. She joined me at the bar after Jackie left the kitchen.

“Ready?” Nina asked me, reaching for a highlighter. “Mom went for . . . jog, and my dad’s . . . work.”

“It’s just us?” I guessed as I sat on the barstool beside her.

Nina nodded. “Thankfully,” she said. “My brother’s away . . . Stonybrook . . . in New York.”

COOL, I signed, flipping open my textbook.

“. . . brother . . . kind . . . genius,” Nina said, pulling her own textbook toward her. “Less pressure . . . me.”

“Do you want to go to New York too?” I said, interested to learn a little more about Nina.

She gave this dramatic shudder and shook her head. “No . . . prefer Colorado. Close . . . home.”

I couldn’t say I preferred Colorado when I’d been here less than two months, but I could relate to wanting to stick close to home. Mom and Connor—they were my home.

SAME, I signed with a tiny smile. “So where do you want to go to college?” I asked aloud next.

Nina held up one finger, signaling me to wait, and then very carefully began to finger spell, C-U B-O-U-L-D-E-R.

The effort she put into finger spelling made my smile widen, so I signed, FOR? back at her.

“History,” she said aloud. “. . . want . . . work . . . museums.”

She ended her sentence with a word I couldn’t quite make out, so I imagined she’d said something about wanting to be a curator or director or something.

WONDERFUL, I signed to her.

“Well, let’s get . . . work,” Nina said with a happy smile, tapping a finger on the textbook. “Promise . . . have snacks . . .”

The next hour or so passed quickly, but we made little progress. Nina and I were wearing identical frowns as we poured over our books. We’d narrowed down the list and had talked about how we would do a presentation, but we weren’t any closer to picking a final topic.

“What . . . we . . . do? The . . . century . . . huge,” Nina said while she scribbled out half a page of notes about famous events scattered throughout the twentieth century.

Nina grabbed the piece of scratch paper we’d been using to jot notes to each other when speaking or signing wasn’t cutting it and wrote: How did presentations at your old school go?

I shrugged, unsure of how to answer. “Normal, I guess?”

Apart from being done in sign language.

Nina made a sour face and shoved her textbook away, hopping down from her stool. FOOD, she signed, heading over to the refrigerator.

I checked the time on my phone and noted it was nearly noon. Hard to believe we hadn’t picked a topic for our presentation after two hours.