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Dylan laughed through the tightening pain of exertion in her chest.
    “I was running! I started up again, like, a week ago, so I’m totally out of shape.”
    Kate giggled. “I know. I can see you. You should’ve heard me going up the stairs in Evans the week the elevators were broken. I sounded like a freaking donkey.”
    Dylan swiveled around and spotted her friend’s flailing hand over a bench. Golden sunlight saturated the outdoors, and many students had fled the buildings. It was a nice day out, a relatively warm fall day in San Francisco. It was still boots and jacket weather—that was the city nearly year round, it seemed—but it was comfortable.
    Dylan ended the call and strolled over to Kate, who was waiting with a steaming Grande Mocha for her. Kate had to clear the bench of a few of her books to make room for Dylan. Textbooks were always within reach of Kate due to her heavy double major course load.
    Kate freed her wild brown curls from the enormous bun she so frequently kept them in. “We should do the pub crawl this weekend,” she said as she handed the cup to Dylan.
    “We ’re not twenty-one,” Dylan said, tilting the cup to her lips.
    Kate scoffed. “When did that ever stop us? I was thinking you could wear those really cute red pumps… Remember the first time you wore them freshman year and we got lost in the city? We were freezing and our feet were hurting. You didn’t wear them again for months. That was a fun night though.” She aimed a big grin at Dylan.
    “Yeah, it was. Just not this weekend, Katie.” Dylan sometimes referred to her by the nickname she had gone by freshman year. “But you guys should totally go,” Dylan said, letting her gaze drop. “I have a lot to do. My film project partner isn’t a major , and he has a pretty heavy workload, so we’re going to try to get as much done as possible this weekend.”
    “Okay. Low won’t sell the ticket until Friday night or even Saturday.” Her smile was smaller and full of disappointment. “Just in case.” She squeezed Dylan’s arm to reiterate the point before turning back to her work, but her offer had hinted at something more, even if Kate would never say it out loud. It had been five months since Dylan’s brother, Mac, had died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and Dylan had come back to school this year as a version of herself her friends would have to adjust to.
    Going out had become something she often declined, giving the excuse of having a lot of homework or wanting to get a jumpstart on it. It wasn’t a lie, Dylan had always been a hard worker, but the sudden, ardent dedication to academia came in the aftermath of seeing her twenty-two-year-old brother in a casket, the epitome of life being too short. He was the smart and funny and focused one. It felt so unfair sometimes, given that even when he was well, he was the one who didn’t spend as much time partying or thinking about prom and homecoming or being angry because he couldn’t hang out with friends. Or all the countless things in college she had spent the last two years being so involved in. She missed doing them, but they felt so insignificant now. While he was dying, he had still been contemplating what good was left to do in the world, as if he’d had every tomorrow ahead of him to start. He didn’t; he had so few.
    Dylan was left wondering why him . Something had been peeled away from her after his death, and she knew she was re-building it with something artificial. School and filming, she loved, but in a way, they had become a barrier around her, her new way of life, sloppily stitched together for survival.
    “So,” Kate said when she looked up, “Low says she plans to axe you in your sleep. Where were you?”
    Dylan rolled her eyes and took another sip of her coffee. “She’ll axe herself when she hears what I have to say.” As Dylan relayed her earlier conversation to Kate, she watched her friend’s jaw nearly unhinge.
    Kate used her phone’s web