Chapter 43: Surprise Party
New Jersey
"See you around."
"Yeah. See you."
Adam watched Leonard in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of the school parking lot — standing on the sidewalk with the specific look of someone who had gotten something they hadn't expected and wasn't sure yet what to do with it.
He drove for about ten minutes, then turned around.
He found Jimmy Beckman at football practice, pulled him aside, and had a short, direct conversation about the nature of friendship and the specific kind of trouble that came with messing with someone who had people in his corner. Jimmy listened with the sullen attention of someone who had lost a fight recently and was still processing it.
Adam drove away feeling better about New Jersey than he had on the way in.
Galveston, TexasThe Duncan House
Adam pushed open the front door and was immediately hit with a wall of noise.
"SURPRISE!"
A full crowd — family, neighbors, people he recognized from the last four years of his life — erupted from behind furniture and around corners, holding a banner that read: Welcome Home Columbia University Student Adam Duncan!
"Wow!" Adam said, with appropriate enthusiasm.
He'd seen it coming from about half a block away when he noticed the cars. But the performance was part of the occasion, and the Duncan family had clearly put real effort into this, so he met it with equal energy.
Columbia's acceptance letter had reached home while he was still driving back. Three days had been more than enough time to organize a proper celebration. In this family, in this neighborhood, any sufficiently good news was grounds for a gathering.
"Let me hug you!"
His mom Amy got to him first, squeezing him hard and immediately starting to cry and talk at the same time, which was a skill she'd developed to an impressive level over the years. In the flood of words, she called him PJ twice — his old name, the one they'd used for the first decade of his life in this body — which she caught and corrected both times without fully stopping.
Bob stood nearby looking proud in the specific way fathers looked when something they'd worried about turned out fine. He clapped Adam on the shoulder and said simply, "I'm proud of you."
"Thanks, Dad."
Teddy punched him lightly on the arm, which was her version of a hug. She'd always been the academic standout of the family — sharp, driven, the one everyone expected big things from — and Adam could see both genuine pride and a complicated mix of other feelings in her expression. He understood. It was the right reaction.
"Is New York actually fun?" Gabe appeared at his elbow. Four years had turned him from an annoying ten-year-old into an annoying fourteen-year-old, which was progress of a kind.
"It's incredible," Adam said. "One of the great cities in the world. Keep your grades up and you'll see it yourself someday."
Gabe stroked his chin with the expression of someone doing calculations.
"It's also extremely expensive," Adam added quickly. "The gap between doing well there and not doing well there is enormous. Enormous."
"Your brother's right," Bob said, appearing at Adam's other elbow with the radar of a parent who had caught the direction of a younger child's thoughts. "Keep working."
"Adam! Adam!"
Something small and solid hit his leg. He looked down.
Charlie. Four years old now, round-cheeked and completely delighted with herself, looking up at him with both arms raised.
He picked her up immediately and she dissolved into giggles, which was the best sound in the house.
Emmett found him later, when the party had settled into its comfortable middle stage.
They bumped fists. Emmett's expression had several things in it that he wasn't saying.
Adam knew what they were. Graduation was weeks away. Emmett didn't have a college plan, which wasn't entirely about grades — it was about money, about loan structures that made the math not work, about a future that was currently a question mark in a way that Adam's wasn't anymore.
In a different version of this life, PJ and Emmett would have stayed close — food truck business, the long friendship of two people who never went far. Adam's path ran somewhere else entirely, and paths that diverged at eighteen had a way of not reconnecting.
He didn't have a solution for that. He wished he did.
"Congratulations," Emmett said, and meant it.
"Thanks," Adam said, and meant that too.
Juno came over when things had quieted down a little, Lauren a step behind her.
"Congratulations," Juno said.
"You too," Adam said. "Harvard."
She smiled. "I'll come visit. New York's only a few hours from Boston."
"Anytime," Adam said, and he actually meant it.
Four years had clarified something he hadn't fully understood at the beginning. Juno was complicated and occasionally alarming and had a relationship with certain categories of knowledge that he tried not to think about too carefully. She was also, genuinely, his friend. The kind that didn't require maintenance or performance. The kind that showed up.
In four years, he was going to apply to Harvard Medical School. The overlap would continue regardless.
Better to go into it with a clear picture of who she was than to let the relationship drift into comfortable fiction.
He looked at Lauren briefly, thought about the hillside and the red hoodie and the knife that had dropped into the grass, and looked away.
"New York," Juno said. "Don't let it change you."
"Too late," Adam said. "I'm already smarter."
Juno laughed.
End of Chapter 43
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