FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter One: The Wrong Roommate
The boy standing in her kitchen was eating cereal out of the mixing bowl, and he was, without question, the wrong person.
Wren Kessler stood in the doorway of apartment 4B with a duffel bag on her shoulder and a color-coded folder in her hand, the one labeled ROOMMATE AGREEMENT in her best block letters, and watched a total stranger pour milk over what looked like her entire box of cereal.
"You're not Jordan," she said.
The boy looked up. He had the kind of face that made you forget your own sentence halfway through, dark hair pushed back like he'd run his hand through it and given up on the rest, a gray hoodie with a delivery company's logo half peeled off the chest. He considered her for a second, spoon still in his mouth, then pulled it out with a small pop.
"No," he agreed. "I'm not Jordan."
"You're supposed to be Jordan Calloway. Pre-med. Very quiet, according to his intake form. Likes to be in bed by ten thirty."
"That does sound like a great guy," the boy said. "I'm JJ Calloway. No relation, as far as I know, though we should probably ask our moms, because that would be a wild coincidence to find out about after I've already eaten your cereal."
Wren set her duffel bag down very slowly, the way you set down something breakable when you are trying not to throw it. This was the part where, in the five year plan currently living in a binder on her desk at her parents' house, everything was supposed to be simple. Sign a lease with a verified, background checked, quiet, pre-med roommate. Keep her scholarship apartment stipend intact. Do not, under any circumstances, end up living with a stranger who ate cereal like it owed him money.
"There's been a mistake," she said.
"Working theory, yeah."
"I filled out four pages of forms for a compatible roommate. I have a system."
"I believe you," JJ said, and he did not sound like he was mocking her, exactly, which somehow made it worse. "I filled out zero pages of forms, because the leasing office called me on a Tuesday and said a spot opened up in a two bedroom near campus for the price of my current one bedroom shoebox, and I said sold before they finished the sentence. I did not know there would be a folder involved."
"There's always a folder."
"Noted for the future."
That was the moment Wren should have walked straight back down to the leasing office, folder in hand, and demanded they fix this before she unpacked a single box. She knew that. She could practically see the version of herself who would have done it, calm and organized, problem solved by dinner.
Instead she stood there a beat too long, and the boy who was very much not Jordan Calloway smiled at her like he already knew he'd won something, and something small and unhelpful in her chest went, oh no.
She blamed the smile for the next twenty minutes, during which she did not go to the leasing office. She went to the leasing office the next morning instead, at nine sharp, with the folder, a printed copy of her original application, and a very reasonable request to have the error corrected before the semester officially started.
The woman behind the desk, whose nameplate said DEB and whose expression said she had already had this exact conversation four times that week, pulled up the file with the patience of someone drowning slowly and pleasantly.
"So here's the thing," Deb said. "There were two J. Calloways on our incoming list this cycle. One dash Jordan, one dash Jamie James. Somebody merged the files. It happens maybe twice a year."
"Okay," Wren said, because this was fixable, this was a normal problem with a normal solution. "So we swap him out for the actual Jordan."
"Jordan withdrew from the university in July. Financial reasons, I think. There's no one to swap him back in for."
"There has to be another two bedroom."
"There is not," Deb said, not unkindly. "Not at your rate, not with three weeks before move in, not unless you want to break your lease and eat the fee, which, based on the number on your account here, I do not think you want to do."
Wren did not want to do that. Wren's stipend from the university covered exactly the apartment she already had, at exactly the rate she'd already signed for, and her parents had made it extremely clear over the summer that the apartment, like the scholarship, like the five year plan, was a privilege that came with the word if attached to it. If you keep your grades up. If you stay focused. If you don't do anything foolish with the money we're not spending on a dorm.
Nothing in that agreement covered accidentally living with a stranger. But nothing in it covered fixing that, either, not without money she did not have and a fight with the leasing office that Deb had already, gently, told her she would lose.
"So I'm stuck," Wren said.
"You're stuck with a very charming twenty year old who tips his delivery customers in terrible jokes, according to my cousin who works at the coffee place on Fifth," Deb said. "Could be worse. I've seen worse."
Wren did not find this comforting. She walked back to apartment 4B turning over exactly four possible plans, none of which were realistic, and found JJ Calloway sitting cross legged on the floor of the empty second bedroom, surrounded by boxes, eating something out of a paper bag that smelled, infuriatingly, incredible.
"Verdict?" he asked.
"We're stuck with each other."
"Devastating news," he said, not sounding devastated. "Egg roll?"
"I have rules," Wren said, ignoring the egg roll, because if she looked at it too long she was going to want it, and she did not have room in her budget this week for wanting things. "If we're doing this, we're doing it with rules. Chore chart. Quiet hours. A shared calendar so we're not both trying to shower before an eight a.m. class."
"A shared calendar," JJ repeated, delighted, like she'd said something charming instead of something reasonable. "Sure. Put me on the calendar. I am extremely available, I have three jobs and negative time, but sure."
"Three jobs?"
"Delivery, coffee shop, and I do weekend catering when a guy I know needs an extra set of hands. It's a whole ecosystem. Very sustainable. Ask me again in a year when I've collapsed."
He said it lightly, like a joke he'd told a hundred times to keep anyone from asking the real question underneath it, and Wren, who had spent her whole life being asked the real question underneath things by relatives who loved her a little too loudly, recognized the move immediately. She filed it away. She was not going to think about what was underneath JJ Calloway's jokes. She had a system. The system did not include him.
"Fine," she said. "Rules. Calendar. And you owe me a new box of cereal."
"Absolutely," he said, and held up the paper bag. "Egg roll's still on the table, by the way."
"I also want it noted, for the record, that I had an entire system. A questionnaire. A rubric, JJ. I scored potential roommates on compatibility."
"Out of how many points?"
"A hundred."
"What would I have scored?"
"Before or after the cereal incident?"
"Let's say before. Hypothetically. Charitably."
Wren considered this with more seriousness than the question probably deserved, mostly because it kept her from thinking about the number on her bank app, or the words if you stay focused, or the fact that she had three weeks to build an entire semester's worth of stability around a person she had known for less than a day. "Forty," she said. "Forty two, if you'd filled out the forms."
"Forty two," JJ repeated, pressing a hand to his chest like she'd wounded him. "That's almost half. I'll take it. Give me a semester, I'll get you up to sixty."
"You'd have to actually do the chore chart."
"I will exceed every expectation on that chore chart. I will alphabetize the chore chart."
"That's not what the chore chart is for."
"You don't know that. Maybe it's exactly what it's for."
He said it with the same easy grin he'd had over the cereal bowl, and Wren found herself, against every instinct her color coded life ran on, almost smiling back, before she caught herself and turned it into checking her phone instead. This was fine. This was a logistics problem, a lease she couldn't break, a roommate she hadn't chosen. It did not need to be more complicated than a shared calendar and a chore chart, and she intended to keep it exactly that simple.
She took the egg roll. It was, she would later insist to anyone who asked, purely a financial decision, because she was a broke college sophomore and free food was free food, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the way JJ Calloway grinned like he'd just won an argument she hadn't known they were having.
The mail came the next afternoon, while JJ was at his coffee shop shift and Wren was alone in the apartment trying to get the shared calendar app to sync. Buried under two pizza flyers and a card from her grandmother was a thick cream colored envelope with her aunt's unmistakable, aggressively cursive handwriting on the front, addressed to Miss Wren Kessler, and Wren's stomach dropped before she even opened it, because her aunt only used the cream envelopes for two things: Christmas cards, and announcements that came with strings attached.
It was September.
She opened it anyway, and read the first line twice before it landed. Marisol and Grant are thrilled to invite you to celebrate their wedding, it said, in her cousin's careful calligraphy, and underneath that, in a different hand entirely, in her Aunt Carol's blue ballpoint pen, someone had scrawled a single line that turned Wren's whole afternoon, and possibly her whole semester, sideways.
We expect you to bring someone this time, it said. Someone serious. You know what your father and I discussed about the tuition.
Wren read it a third time, just to be sure, and then heard the front door open, and JJ's voice call out, cheerfully, asking if there was any of that cereal left.