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“I’m going to frame it.”

“I know.”

My room is the smallest one. I chose it on purpose freshman year because it has the good light and a window seat and enough wall for the corkboard, and I spend the next two hours making it mine again with the specific, slightly unhinged joy of a person who finds unpacking genuinely soothing.

Clothes by category, then by color. The good denim, the going-out things, the Beta Nu formal I still haven’t returned to the girl I borrowed it from. Shoes lined up like a showroom. Then the corkboard goes back up, and I pin the whole semester to it in the order it’s going to happen to me — because pinning it down is the only way I’ve ever known how to hold still.

LSAT prep, three mornings a week, the practice tests stacked on the desk like a threat I signed up for.

Cheer, five days a week, sometimes six, because NCA and NDA Collegiate Nationals are in April, and the squad does not care even a little that April is also the month I’m supposed to be quietly transforming into a person law schools fight over. And here’s the thing I don’t say out loud, because it doesn’t fit the résumé: Nationals matters to me as much as any of it. A pre-law Charleston girl headed for a life made of arguments is not supposed to also be the flyer. The one who gets thrown. The one who goes up, who spends the back half of a routine airborne, trusting four people she can’t see to put their hands exactly where she’s about to fall. But I am, and I love it more than almost anything. It’s the one place I’ve ever been that isn’t managed. You can’t manage the top of a basket toss. You can only go up and trust the catch. There’s a version of me that only exists up there, weightless, half a second at a time, and I’d set the whole color-coded fortress on fire before I’d give her up.

Then the application timeline, which technically doesn’t start until fall but which my mother started for me sometime around my birth.

I stand back and look at it. The whole spring, color-coded and pinned and under control, every hour spoken for. And I know exactly what it is, because I’ve done the work on it — the calendar isn’t about productivity. It’s about leaving no room. No dangerous unscheduled space for anything to happen in. I look at that beautiful airtight grid and I feel calm. And I know the calm is a con I’m running on myself, and I let myself have it anyway, because some cons are the only thing holding you up.

My phone lights up on the desk. Mom.

And there it is — the little internal drop, my chest going tight and cool, the shift I feel happen before I’ve even picked up. Every time. You’d think I’d have built a callus by now.

“Hi, Mama.”

“There’s my girl. Happy new semester.” Caroline Ashby’s voice comes down the line the way it always does, warm as a veranda and about that structural. “Did you get settled back into the house? I still think it’s too old for three girls. I don’t know why you won’t let your father help you find somewhere newer —”

“It’s got character. I love it.”

“Character is a word people use for old wiring, Margo.” A beat. “Speaking of, did you look at the list I sent you? For the fall applications. I had lunch with Bitsy Calhoun, and her son just started at Columbia Law, and she says the personal statement is everything now, so I want you starting yours early. Not scrambling like you scramble —”

“I don’t scramble.”

“You always say that.”

“Because I never scramble.” I’m smiling, and I can hear myself doing it — the bright, easy thing sliding into place, the daughter voice, the one that keeps a Charleston phone call pleasant no matter what’s actually being said. “I’ve got a whole timeline up on my board. Color-coded. You’d weep.”

“I would love to see it.” And she would. That’s the thing about my mother that took me years and one very patient therapist to name: the love is real. It’s just conditional on the color-coding. On the timeline being immaculate. On me being the easy one, the together one, the daughter she doesn’t have to worry about — a job I’ve held since I was old enough to understand that my sister took the other one, and there was only room for one of each. “You’re my rock, Margo. You know that. Your sister’s home this weekend, and it’s just — well. It’s nice to have one daughter who doesn’t turn everything into a production.”

And there it is. The compliment that’s a leash. The one who doesn’t make trouble. I’ve been earning that sentence my whole life, and the pathetic, tender truth is that it still lands somewhere soft every single time, and I still want the gold star for it, and I hate that I want it.

“I should go, Mama. Unpacking.”

“Of course. Send me a picture of the board. Love you, sugar.”

“Love you.”

I put the phone face-down and just sit there a second in the quiet of my own bright, soothing, color-coded room. My chest is doing the thing it always does after her — tight, a little hollow, like I passed a test I didn’t study for and still don’t feel good about it. So I straighten the stack of practice tests until the edges line up, because lining things up is the only thing that ever quiets my head. I don’t think about Maddison being home this weekend. I don’t think about the way production landed like a slap wearing lipstick. Then I fix my face and head back downstairs, because my girls deserve the version of me that can still laugh.

The girls have questions. Of course they do. We’ve been apart a month, there’s a whole party’s worth of New Year’s I haven’t accounted for, and this is a house that misses nothing.

“So,” Wren says, at the kitchen island, in the tone of a woman opening cross-examination. “Raven House. Sunday dinner tonight. You coming?”

“Can’t. LSAT thing.”

“It’s the first Sunday of the semester. You have no LSAT thing.”

“I have a forming LSAT thing. It’s in its infancy. It needs me.”

June looks up from Kevin, whom she’s repotting on a spread of newspaper like a tiny green surgery. “You skipped last Sunday too.”

“I was moving.”