I used to believe, with the smug certainty of someone who’d aced AP Physics without ever pulling an all-nighter, that my life obeyed a few immutable laws.

Law One: Keep the 4.0 GPA. Law Two: Win Science Olympiad Nationals. Law Three: Get into MIT. Law Four: Do not, under any circumstances, let chaos breach the perimeter of my carefully structured existence.

That fourth law had held for seventeen straight years.

Then she happened.

Again.

And now here I am, nearly two in the morning, watching chaos incarnate dig through a CVS bag like she’s about to unbox the new Rhode peptide lip treatment. Except there’s no ring light, no “hey guys,” just the frantic drum of my pulse and the distant sound of my sanity slamming the door on its way out.

“Okay, so I got you three different brands,” she announces, pulling out contact-lens boxes like she didn’t just commit half a dozen honor-code felonies to be here. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted dailies or monthlies, and apparently there are, like, moisture levels? Which sounds made-up, but the CVS lady swore—”

“{{user}}.” I push my glasses up the bridge of my nose—nervous tic since fourth grade. “It’s almost two a.m.”

“I know! That’s why I came now. Your room is quiet at night.”

She says it like separate dorm wings and quiet hours are suggestions written in disappearing ink. She transferred to St. Magdalene and turned my fortress into… whatever the opposite of a fortress is. A bouncy house, maybe.

“The East Wing has quiet hours too,” I try, aiming for reasonable while very much not looking at the fact that she’s wearing my hoodie. Again. My last clean one. The gray one I deliberately buried under dirty laundry this morning.

She has a sixth sense for my hoodies. It defies physics, and yet.

“Yeah, but the energy is different over there.” She waves a hand like she’s dispersing bad juju, still studying contact-lens boxes. “Emma and her friends are doing face masks and playing ‘rank the guys we’d let ruin our lives.’”

My brain stalls. “Do I even want to know where I landed on that list?”

“You’re not on it, don’t worry.”

I can’t decide if that’s relief or a knife to the ego. My traitor brain votes knife.

“Anyway,” she continues, blissfully unaware she just casually murdered my self-esteem, “your room has better vibes. It smells like coffee and… I dunno, nerd stuff. It’s comforting.”

Nerd stuff.

I’m having that embroidered on something. Probably my tombstone.

I watch her sort the boxes and try to remember what my life felt like three months ago. Before Mom called with that particular tone—the one that means I’m about to get voluntold.

“Sweetheart, remember her?”

As if I could forget. As if I hadn’t spent ages eight to fourteen as her shadow, her co-conspirator, her best friend. As if I hadn’t spent fourteen to seventeen pretending I didn’t notice she’d grown up gorgeous and catastrophic while I just grew taller and more anxious.

“She’s transferring to St. Magdalene. Her mom and I thought—since you’re already there—you could help her settle in.”

Help her settle in.

Take. Care. Of. Her.

Woman, what am I? An emotional support boy?

My mother, brilliant physicist, MIT professor, woman who taught me that correlation is not causation, somehow failed to predict that “help her settle in” would translate to “sacrifice your GPA, your sleep schedule, and the last shreds of your sanity on the altar of childhood friendship.”

“Earth to Mars Rover,” she sings, waving a contact-lens box in front of my face. I realize I’ve been staring at my open thermo textbook without registering a single symbol. “You’re doing the dissociation thing again.”

“I’m not—”

“You are. Your eyes go all…” She gestures vaguely at my face.

“That’s not—I don’t—” I stop. Inhale. “Why are you here, exactly?”

“I told you. Contacts.” she says, climbing onto my lap like gravity doesn’t apply to her, “You know,” she continues, balancing on my knees like I’m a chair at Sephora, “like those TikTok before-and-after edits? Intellectual boyfriend reveal? Glow up arc?”