Margot is having a hard time finding her seat. She wanders aimlessly down the aisle, hopelessly searching for seat 47B. She doesn’t take the train much. She usually flies, but every airline was booked through the next few days. So she’s taking the train home: from Montreal to New York City. It’ll take eleven hours, but she’s just got to get home.

She drags her feet over the fraying gray carpet on the aisle, as she walks between rows and rows of small chairs bound in sticky, maroon leather.

She forgot to put her contacts in this morning as she rushed to get out the door by seven in the morning. Now her glasses are in a pocket of her backpack that she can’t reach, so she has to squint and lean towards the numbers to see them.

She finds what she thinks is the row she’s looking for and slips her backpack off.

“Is B the aisle seat?” she asks. She’s not sure if A is the aisle or the window seat. She may be in the wrong place entirely.

The boy in the seat by the window, Carter, is staring at his phone, where he’s been wrapped up in some stupid drama with his soccer team. Something about their first-string striker skipping practice to see his girlfriend. Carter doesn’t really care.

“Yeah, I think...” his voice drops off when he looks up and sees who's standing in the aisle looking down at him.

“Oh shit,” Margot says, forgetting to be subtle.

Carter stares at her for a moment, immediately noticing she’s gotten a haircut since the last time he saw her. The black curls at the edge of her part are falling into her face because they don’t reach into her claw clip.

“Hi, Margot,” he says.

She exhales, blowing the air slowly out. She recognizes him even through the slight blur.

“Hey, Carter.”

Both of them freeze and fall into silence. Asking themselves over and over again, what are the fucking odds?

“Um...” Margot is the first to speak. “I can see if anyone wants to change seats with me if you think that might...”

She looks around, realizing everyone in her vicinity has earbuds in and looks like they might bite her if she bothers them.

Carter wants to let her ask someone to switch. He wants to let her sit somewhere else because it’ll just make things so much easier for him. It’s an eleven-hour train ride, and he’s not sure he can bear to sit in awkwardness with Margot the whole time. He wants to be a dick for his own sake.

“No,” he says. “It’s fine. Sit.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He pats the seat awkwardly, and Margot stifles a laugh at how ridiculous he is. She’s noticed that he’s wearing the same crewneck he was wearing during the single night they spent together, a soft green with small embroidered sailboats, and the name of some obscure town in Maine.

***

“Is that where you're from?”

“No,” Carter chuckled. “Just something I stole from the lost and found in the science wing.”

“Oh, so you’re a klepto?”

***

She sits, and pulls a book, her laptop, and her glasses out of her backpack before putting it under the seat. She puts her stack of necessities on the tray table. She asks herself again, what are the odds?

Carter thinks the same thing.

If it was break and everyone was leaving town, that’d be one thing. It’s not absolutely crazy to run into another McGill student when everyone is leaving for Christmas or summer, but this is a completely arbitrary Friday in October. Carter wonders why Margot is leaving town, but then decides not to ask. He doesn’t think he’s really in the position to be asking something like that to someone like Margot. No— he’s definitely not.

As Margot is getting settled into her seat, her phone rings. Carter watches her pick it up, and in between Margot’s slender fingers and poorly painted nails, a picture of a girl with the contact name “Sis <3” appears on the screen. The girl looks strikingly similar to Margot, with the same dark curls and light brown skin.

He watches Margot take a deep breath and declines the call.

“Where are you headed?” Carter asks. Instead of asking why she’s avoiding her sister or why exactly she’s leaving McGill at such a peculiar time.

“Back home, Brooklyn.”

“Oh shit,” Carter says. “I didn’t know you were from New York.”

“I— are you from the city?”

“Yeah,” he nods, brown curls falling into his eye line. “Manhattan.”

It is so incredibly strange that Margot and Carter don’t know this about each other. Not that they ever could have known each other in New York because there are far too many people for them to have ever run into each other. They went to different high schools. Margot attended Adelphi Academy, and Carter went to Tottenville High. Margot spent her afternoons interning at the Veterinary Hospital a few blocks up from her house and her weekends practicing the drums. Anytime Carter wasn’t at school he was at soccer practice, and if he wasn’t at soccer practice he was sleeping or watching movies. They’d probably never come close to crossing paths. Still, the number of city kids who choose to attend college in Montreal can’t be more than a handful.

***

“What made you choose McGill?” Carter asked. He threw a lazy arm over Margot's shoulder as he guided her down the street toward his apartment. He hoped she didn't realize just quite how tiny it was. Carter didn’t have time to work during the soccer season, so he was near dirt broke as a result. He found the cheapest, smallest apartment he could. He crossed his fingers and prayed Margot wouldn’t care or notice.

“My parents went here,” Margot replied. “This is where they met, and I’ve been gifted a McGill hockey jersey every other birthday of my life so I needed to come here so they could get some use.”

Carter winced at the mention of hockey. He turned the two of them to the left, onto the street his apartment was on.

“Right,” Margot said. “You’re on the soccer team.”

“Yeah.”

“And how's being a hockey hater in Canada going for you?”

“Not super well, but no one has crucified me yet,” he said. “You’re a big hockey fan then?”

She shrugs, “I watch with my family, but it's not like my greatest passion, y’know?”

He laughed lightly, and Margot noticed just how contagious his smile was and the way his eyes shone through tiny creases as his cheeks pushed upwards. She told herself not to notice things like that because that will be what sticks in her head for so long after things don’t go the way she wants.

***

Carter shifts in his seat, turning towards Magot. He’s baffled. Home is–well it used to be–so very special to him, and he doesn’t understand how Margot and he had missed that entirely.

Margot is also a bit surprised, but she supposes it makes sense. She and Carter hadn’t crossed paths for an incredibly long time. And they had spent most of their eight-ish hours together in Carter's bedroom, sleeping and doing other things that don’t involve talking.

“So weird that we never... talked about that,” Margot says, while she reconsiders if she wants to ask someone to change seats with her. Talking to Carter feels like walking through molasses, and she’s not sure she can deal with awkward small talk for a whopping eleven hours.

Carter recalls all the bad things he’s done lately and wonders if any of it was awful enough to earn him a situation that is this uncomfortable.

The car door slides shut, and the train sputters to life. Slowly, they move away from the station and towards the Adirondacks. Carter and Margot have found themselves on one of the most scenic Amtrak routes in the country. There are a number of people just on the train for the view, but not them. They’re needed at home.

Carter slides a book out from the seat pocket in front of him.

“I’m gonna read now,” Carter says, feeling, for some reason, like he needs to explain his actions to Margot.

Margot looks at him skeptically but nods.

As Margot puts a pair of earbuds in, and as she’s choosing a song, she looks over to Carter, who’s already enthralled in a book titled The Psychopath Test.

***

“You’re friends with Carrie?” Carter motioned to the group of Margot’s friends, huddled at the other end of the bar. It was packed, as bars near colleges always were at this time on Friday nights. The bodies of other students bumped against Margot and Carter, as they stood, facing each other, with their sides pressed into the bar.

“Yeah, you know her?”

He nodded, and leaned close to Margot both because he’s shamelessly attempting to flirt, and because the music is so loud he can hardly hear her.

“We had a psych class together last semester.”

“Oh,” Margot said. “Is that what you’re studying?”

“It’s my minor,” he explained. “I’m majoring in kinesiology.”

Margot bit her tongue, keeping herself from making a snarky comment about how it feels like every McGill athlete she knows is a kinesiology major. She knew that cute boys don’t always respond incredibly well to harsh humor, particularly when it comes to their beloved athletics. Carter was not the first McGill athlete to approach Margot at a bar. After a few trial and error runs, she learned it’s best not to make fun of sports to these boys, even if she thought they were mostly stupid.

“What about you?”

Margot took a sip of her poorly made martini, “I just switched to Biology.”

***

Margot pulls out her own book, feeling a pang of heartache as she realizes that maybe she and Carter won’t exchange another word for the rest of the train ride. She pushes the emotion down. She shouldn’t care; up until ten minutes ago, Carter was just one boy from one night and nothing more. He’d made that plenty clear by avoiding her gaze at all costs in any place: the dining hall, the campus bar, the library, the elevator. She’d spent the past five months convincing herself whatever spark she’d felt that night was just temporary.

Carter reads six and a half chapters before his eyes start getting heavy, so he closes the book and leans his head against the window. They’re deep in the mountains now, and the train arches around a peak. Lake George is covered in white caps. Across the lake, leaves of all shades blur together in autumn-hued streaks as the train speeds through the Adirondacks.

He lets his eyes fall shut, but can’t even fall into the first phase of sleep before his mom calls. He opens his eyes, takes a moment to adjust to the brightness, and picks up his phone. He stares at the screen, debating letting it ring a few more times and go to voicemail. He’s already spoken to her once this morning and he’s already nervous he won’t be able to stand her, or his dad, for a whole weekend.

“Hi, Mom.” He caves and picks up.

Margot can’t help but glance over, hearing how strained his greeting is. She watches him take a few, obviously, purposeful deep breaths as he listens to his mother on the other end.

“Yes, I’m on the train. It’s on time...”

“Yes, I know you need me to come straight home...”

He rolls his eyes, twice.

“No, I’m not going to see Jake until we get everything packed up...”

“Okay. Yeah, I love you too. . . Bye.”

Carter hangs up, and accompanies it with a sigh of relief. He notices Margot peering at him, and, of course, as soon as they make eye contact, she looks down and pulls the ends of her brown, thin sleeves over her fingers anxiously.

“My mom is...” Carter speaks, and pulls Margot's gaze back up to him. “She’s something else.”

“I get it,” she smiles softly. “Are you going home to see her?”

Carter thinks for a second, wondering if he should just lay it all out for her right now. He hesitates, remembering the morning after he met Margot and how he woke up to an empty bed, a missing shirt, and an unlocked front door. It made him figure it was just another one-night, college hook-up to her. She probably really doesn’t care about all his parental drama anyway. But she’s going to be next to him for the next several hours, and sitting in a tension-filled silence seems much worse than having a conversation.

“Kinda?” he says. “My parents are moving out of our apartment. So I’ve got to go pack up all the shit I have left there and decide which of it should go with my dad to Buffalo, and which of it my mom will take.”

“Oh, are they–”

“Getting divorced? Yeah. Which they sprung on me right at finals last semester.”

Margot purses her lips, “So right around the time we...”

“Yeah,” Carter realizes. “That next morning, actually, I think.”

“I–” Margot sputters, and pushes her glasses up her nose. “I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

Carter smiles, and tugs on the neck of his sweater. Lately, talking about his parents makes it hard for him to breathe. His parents were miserable, and he’s glad they’re moving on. But his dad’s moving to Buffalo to start a new branch of his business, and his mom is going back to Pittsburgh to help his aunt with her new baby. Their Manhattan apartment has already been sold. That’s the part he’s upset about.

He’s lived in New York all his life. He’s lived in that apartment all his life, and now it’s going to belong to someone else. He’s going to spend his holidays and summers in Buffalo or Pittsburgh from now on. He’s heard both of those cities suck, and that’s all he knows about them. Now, when someone asks him where home is, he has no idea what to say.

“It’s fine,” Carter assures. “You didn’t know, and it's not like we were focused on having incredibly deep conversations anyway.”

***

“Okay, but like– hypothetically,” Margot giggled. She was propped up on her elbows in Carter’s bed, wearing his t-shirt. A plate of pizza bagels sat between them, directly on the mattress.

“Hypothetically, someone gives you a check for a billion dollars and tells you that you have to leave McGill immediately. Where are you going?”

Carter bit his bottom lip, and gazed upwards, thinking.

“First, I’d go to Italy. See all the places my parents went on their honeymoon, and flip off every stupid statue of roman lovers I saw.”

“Wait wh–”

“And then, I’d buy a sailboat. Something nice, but not stupid and showy. I’d stock the kitchen with Panera Mac and Cheese and Reese’s Puffs. I’d take off and spend a year at sea.”

“Alone?”

“Probably,” he said with confidence, but then he caught her eye. He saw her with her disheveled hair and smeared eye makeup, resting her cheek on her palm, and he wavered. “Unless I found somebody I could stand to be in close quarters with for an extended period of time.”

Margot blushed and silently thanked her complexion for making it a little less noticeable.

“What about you?” Carter asked, picking up a bagel. “Where would you go with a billion dollars?”

“Okay,” Margot said. “Realistically? I’d probably just transfer to another college and use the money to pay for vet school and rent and everything boring in life. But, if I wanna be fun, I think I’d go to Antarctica.”

“Antarctica?”

“Yeah, and then you can sail there and we can meet up to look at penguins.”

“I don’t think you can sail to Antarctica.”

“Well, I don’t think anyone’s going to give us a billion dollars for no reason.”

***

“What about you?” Carter asks. “What’s dragging you home in the middle of midterms?”

“Um,” Margot wonders for just a moment if she is brave enough to get into this with Carter, who is still a stranger by any normal definition. “I have to go home because my parents and I need to convince my sister to go to rehab.”

“Oh my God,” Carter says, without thinking.

“Right?” Margot says.

“Do you want to talk about that?” Carter offers, not knowing what else to say.

“I’d rather not.”

Margot will be talking about her sister, her addiction, and the way she went behind Hannah’s back and told her parents how often she was using plenty once she gets to Brooklyn. She’d really like to take this train ride to try and not think about it.

Carter and Margot fall into a brief awkward silence, both getting momentarily distracted by the heart-stopping views to their left, as they continue to arc along the edges of Lake George. Carter looks at the Lake for a moment, but then he turns back to look at Margot. His head is tipped to the right so she can see out of the window, and her curls are falling over her shoulder.

Carter thinks back to the night in the bar for just a moment and remembers how he first saw Margot from behind. Her hair was the first thing he noticed. It was longer then, reaching to the small of her back. Now, it’s just below her shoulders.

Margot notices him staring. It’s impossible not to. When he’s focusing on something his eyebrows push inward, and his already big eyes seem to grow even more. He looked at her the same way in the bar for at least fifteen minutes before he plucked up the courage to buy her a drink.

Fuck it, Carter says to himself.

“Do you want to watch a movie?”

“What?”

“I have some movies downloaded. Do you want to watch one?”

Carter is already rifling through his backpack, pulling out his laptop, two pairs of earbuds, and an earbud splitter. He is prone to losing any pair of wireless earbuds he has, so he’s tied to the wires.

He blinks at Margot with a tangle of wires in his hands and waits for her to respond.

She thinks about how she’s going to tell her sister about this once she’s home. This crazy story, and the baffling audacity of a boy, who slept with her and then ignored her for months, to ask if she wants to watch a movie. Margot will be home in nine and a half hours. She’ll see Hannah in nine hours and forty-five minutes, and thinking about that makes her stomach lurch.

Margot is going home to help her parents convince her big sister that she needs to go to rehab.

Realistically, Hannah is going to be too mad at Margot to spend any time talking to her about a silly little hookup from months ago.

“Margot? Do you want to watch a movie?”

Carter's voice pulls Margot out of her thoughts about Hannah.

She looks over at Carter who’s still staring at her with those stupid, big, brown eyes and she thinks about how awful he’s made her feel for the past few months. She thinks about the pit in her stomach that forms every time she catches Carter’s eye in the hallway and he immediately looks down, or how the air is sucked right out of her whenever he walks into the dining hall and turns right around when he notices she’s in there. She thinks about how her heart rate increases every time her phone rings because she thinks, maybe, possibly, it’s him finally calling her back all these weeks later. All of a sudden, she has anger pushing at her fingertips and the sour taste of confusion on her tongue.

“What are you doing, Carter?”

Her question is lined with hostility.

“What? I–” he stumbles over his words. “I’m watching a movie and I just thought–”

“I called you last semester,” Margot says. “I–I did the ‘play it cool, wait 48 hours thing’ that you're like supposed to do, but then I did call, and you just– you never replied. You never texted. God forbid you hold eye contact with me for more than a second, or be in the same room as me.”

Carter tries desperately to pivot his brain from deciding between “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Stand by Me” to taking in what Margot’s saying.

“You do it too,” he says, simply. “I saw you the week after in the library, and I tried to wave, but you pretended you hadn’t seen me. And– and, Margot, last Thursday I saw you in that sandwich place on the corner of Bringham, and you got up and walked out. You left a ceasar wrap with one bite out of it on the table.”

Margot says nothing.

Maybe she’s also guilty, in some part. Maybe she started pretending that night hadn’t meant as much as it did all on her own, without Carter doing so first.

“And besides, you left before I got up in the morning. Which I figured basically meant you never wanted to talk to me again.”

She bites her lip. Carter is right. She did leave, early in the morning and quietly so he wouldn’t hear her. She wanted to sleep in and get hungover breakfast at the diner down the street. She’d gotten caught up in the circumstances, thinking about how Carter and her met late at night in a bar, how they’d had sex before even knowing each other for twenty-four hours. Before long she’d convinced herself that Carter probably saw her as just a hookup, and she was better off forcing herself to take the same mindset.

“I thought–,” Margot offers. “I thought you probably didn’t care, that maybe it was just about the sex for you–”

“Can I see your tickets?”

Carter and Margot turn their heads to their left, where they see a young girl smacking gum and holding a ticket scanner. She’s wearing a gray, collared shirt with the Amtrak logo embroidered on her chest, and she’s got ridiculously long, red nails. Carter wonders how on earth she operates the scanner with nails like that.

“Ummmm, tickets?”

She continues to smack her gum.

“Right,” Margot says, reacting first. She pulls her phone out from under her thigh, where she wedged it after Hannah called. Carter watches her as she fumbles through putting her password in and scrolling through her email. Her cheeks go red, as the girl with the scanner smacks her gum louder and louder in annoyance.

He’s really not totally sure why he never called Margot back. Maybe it was because he was distracted with his parents' bullshit, maybe he’d already let go of the idea of their one night being anything more, maybe he just kept putting it off because he was nervous.

For a minute, Carter considers that, if he had called back, he could have spent his last summer in New York with Margot. Now, it feels like he’s lost a whole different part of his hometown in one fell swoop. He squashes the fantasy of a summer with her in the city. He fucked it up with Margot, and he’s never going to spend another summer in New York. There’s no use in imagining that either of those things were different.

He watches carefully as she finally finds the email and lets the girl scan it. When she looks at Carter, he pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, and lets her scan the barcode in the top corner.

Before she moves on, the girl taps on the screen of her scanner a few times, her nails clicking along with the smacking of her gum.

“Thanks,” she says, not looking at either of them as she moves up the aisle.

Carter wants to look at Margot and laugh about their peculiar train conductor, but then he remembers the conversation she had interrupted. Tension refills the train.

“You just seemed so cool, and you’re an athlete, so I didn’t think a guy like you would be interested in more than just the sex,” Margot continues, words tumbling out of her in a way she can’t control. “That’s why I left. And I know it doesn’t make sense because then I called you anyway, but it also doesn’t make sense that you’re mad that I left because you never called back and–”

“Why would you think I didn’t care?” Carter interrupts her rambling.

“Isn’t that how it goes with boys you meet in bars after midnight?”

“Margot,” he says. “I don’t think there's, like, rules.”

Margot runs out of things to say. She shouldn’t have left without an explanation. Carter should have called her back. She shouldn’t have left the sandwich shop. He shouldn’t have turned the other way in the hall. They did a million things they shouldn’t have done, and ignored the one thing they should have. They should have just talked.

They wade in mutual silence. Carter looks out the window because he can’t stand to look at her just yet. The night he met her she was eyes aglow and all smiles. Now, the corners of her mouth tug down.

The view really is incredible. The train is moving too fast to see the details, so the colored leaves along the tracks all blur together. But the trees on the mountains in the distance stand still. In all directions they’re surrounded by warmth: oranges, yellows, reds. Carter’s taken this train a couple of times, when he wants to spend as little time at home as possible. He’s still not over his parents separation, even five months after they first told him. He often thinks too hard about the stories he heard about his parents when they first met. How much they loved each other, how perfect it all seemed, only for it all to fall apart twenty years later. When he can’t sleep at night, he worries about how in the world he’s ever going to commit to someone without the fear of it all going up in flames.

“This is stupid,” Margot says. “We’ve both got bigger things on our plate. Let's not fight about some stupid one-night stand that happened last semester.”

“The morning you called me was the morning my parents told me they were getting divorced,” Carter finally admits. He knows Margot just asked to stop talking about it, but he can’t fight the feeling that he needs to give her an explanation. “Every time I went to call you back all I could think about was how their marriage exploded.”

“I still didn’t deserve to be hung out to dry, Carter.”

Margot is reluctant to forgive. She’s reluctant to forgive Carter for never calling. She’s reluctant to forgive Hannah for her addiction. She’s reluctant to forgive herself for telling her parents Hannah was using again.

“I know. I’m an asshole,” Carter says. Guilt fills the space behind his eyes.

“Yeah, a little bit,” she agrees, “but I might be a little bit of an asshole too”

“Do you wanna talk about your sister?”

Margot chuckles at the utter lack of chill Carter maintains, “No.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Do you wanna talk about your parents?”

“Not at all,” he smiles. This time, Margot doesn’t tell herself not to notice it.

“Okay well now that we’ve confirmed we’re both assholes, and gotten awkwardly vulnerable, I think we can watch your movie.”

“Honestly, I don’t know if I’m there yet. Movies are pretty serious.”

“Oh, shut up,” Margot reaches over and grabs one of his pairs of earbuds. She starts to detangle it, and Carter quickly becomes fascinated watching her fingers untie the ball of knots. He shakes it off, reminds himself not to be a freak, and gets to work on his own pair of headphones.

They start by watching “Stand by Me,” and when that's over they go straight into “Pirates of the Caribbean” because they’re still seven hours from the city. Halfway through the movie, Carter sees Margot’s return ticket sticking out of the book on her tray table. He can’t read the smallest font from where he is, but he can see that she’s set to come back Monday at 7 p.m., on the 158 Adirondack.

He has a class Monday morning, and he wants to be around his parents for as little as possible, so he booked a ticket home Sunday evening.

He pulls his phone from his back pocket, and glances over at Margot to make sure she’s not watching him. She’s not. She’s fallen asleep, with her head tipped towards him, resting precariously on the headrest.

He changes his train to the 158 Adirondack leaving at 7 p.m. on Monday night.