Not long before Peter died—halfway through Alexa’s junior year—she told him she might want to take a gap year. She thought she might want to live in California for a while. Her class was suffering from collective stress and anxiety; people were having contests about how little sleep they could get by on; it was a particularly long, gray New England winter, where time and time again they opened the door for Bernice to go outside and do her business and they all swore she shook her head and backed away.

Peter didn’t say, You can’t do that. He didn’t say, That’s not in the plan. He said, “Let’s do this. Let’s do your college visits, and you take your standardized tests, and you do your applications. Just to cover your bases. And when the time comes to decide, we’ll have a conversation about it with your mom.”

Alexa didn’t understand how Peter could be so reasonable and so patient all the time. She had only seen him get truly angry twice, once when somebody keyed his car in the North End in Boston while they were all having dinner at Carmelina’s, and in 2018 when the Patriots lost to the Eagles in the Super Bowl.

Then Peter was gone. Poof. She thought that if Peter were here he’d be proud of what she’d built, and somehow his imaginary approval got intertwined with her efforts too. Later, after her fight with Caitlin and Destiny, after months and months of feeling removed from her mother’s and Morgan’s grief, her desire for a new life, a faraway life, got braided in as well. And now here she was, sixteen thousand subscribers strong.

Neither she nor her mother brought up the college visits: nobody had the time or the energy to make them happen. She visited and applied only to Colby, her mother’s alma mater, and to UMass, and got into both. As Silk Stockings gained steam, her interest in college narrowed and narrowed until it was the size of a pinhole. In May she had taken a deep breath, called Colby, and given up her spot. Come September, she would head to Los Angeles, where Silk Stockings would be but the first step in making Alexa Thornhill a brand.

She had a few things to sort out, such as, where would she live in L.A.? How much money did she actually need to get started? When would she tell her mother that she wasn’t going to Colby? She’d confided rather ill-advisedly in Tyler, but she’d sworn him to secrecy. And she’d begun to mention her plans to move to L.A. casually in the occasional video (the one about understanding current market conditions, for example), aware, as any rising YouTuber was, of the possibility of the eyeballs of a talent scout coming to rest on her channel.