Aurora Bellini

Aurora POV

I wake up to the smell of vanilla, which, objectively, should be a good thing.

It isn’t.

It’s my own damn candle on my nightstand — the one I apparently lit in my sleep because I have what Sophia calls “nocturnal cozy-gremlin tendencies” — and the fact that it surprises me every single morning says something unflattering about the current state of my cognitive function. I shove my glasses up my nose and squint at my phone. The screen is too bright. My brain is too slow. The number looking back at me is too early.

6:12 a.m.

I groan into my pillow. A real, full-body groan, the kind that belongs to a woman who has been working three jobs, studying contract law, and existing on vanilla creamer and borrowed optimism for the better part of three years.

“Why,” I ask the ceiling, “do mornings exist? Who signed off on this? I want names.”

The universe doesn’t answer. It never does. But Sophia does — through the wall, loud as a car alarm.

“Aurora! Two minutes or I’m ripping your blankets off like a Band-Aid!”

I sit up immediately.

Here’s what you need to understand about Sophia Martínez: she is brilliant, she is warm, she is my best friend in the universe and the only reason I have not completely unraveled — but she does not make empty threats. She once removed my heated blanket in the middle of February and called it “an act of survival.” She cited case law. I’m not joking. She had an argument prepared.

I don’t test her.

Our apartment is what the real estate listing called “cozy” and what Sophia calls “the shoebox” and what I call home, which I think says something about me as a person. Two small bedrooms, a kitchen that fits exactly two people if neither of them breathes too deeply, and a living area where the couch and the coffee table maintain a careful détente. The radiator rattles. The window in the hallway sticks. The super has been promising to fix the fourth stair for eight months.

It’s perfect. It’s ours.

I pull on my usual armor: cream sweater, black skirt, tights that will almost certainly be destroyed by noon, and the scarf I’ve worn so many times it’s soft as a secret. It smells like the vanilla perfume I can’t stop buying, the one that isn’t practical and isn’t cheap and is the one small thing I refuse to give up because some luxuries are load-bearing.

When I shuffle out to the kitchen, Sophia is already there — dark curls in a bun that somehow looks intentional, navy scrubs printed with tiny cartoon hearts, because she is the kind of person who makes even hospital clothing adorable. She takes one look at me and does the thing she always does, the sweep, top to bottom, cataloguing me the way she’ll one day catalogue patients.

“You look adorable,” she announces.

“I look like I slept three hours.”

“Same thing on you.” She hands me my coffee without being asked. Extra vanilla creamer, extra sugar, enough caffeine to restart a stalled heart — which, if her MCAT scores are any indication, she will one day be qualified to do literally. “You have the café shift, then tutoring, then the study hall shift, then your Contracts reading.”

I pause mid-sip. “Are you reciting my schedule to me?”

“Yes, because someone has to bear witness to your martyrdom.”

“I’m not being a martyr. I’m being resourceful.”

“You are working three jobs and calling it a personality.”

“I’m building character.”

“You’re building a stress fracture.”

I laugh — the specific laugh I’ve developed for conversations like this one, half real and half armor — and take a longer sip of coffee. It’s scalding. I don’t care. “Don’t med students have like a hundred thousand in debt? Maybe more?”

“Yes,” she says evenly. “But we’re discussing you and your tendency to treat ‘functioning’ as a synonym for ‘thriving.’”

She says it lightly, the way she says most hard things — slipped in between ordinary sentences so it lands before you can brace for it. That’s Sophia’s particular genius. She’s been doing it since we were five years old, since she slid her crayons across the kindergarten table and I told her she was pronouncing magenta wrong and she punched me in the arm and then gave me half her Lunchable, and I decided right then that this was my person and I was keeping her.

More than twenty years later, she hands me toast I didn’t ask for and I take it without comment because we don’t need to narrate everything.

Queens greets me the way it always does: loudly, and without apology.

The cold hits first — that specific January cold that feels less like a season and more like a personal affront. The snow from last night has frozen into something crunchy and deceptive underfoot, and the wind off the street carries the smell of someone’s bodega coffee and someone else’s cigarette and the particular exhaust-note of a city that never idles. A kid tears past me toward the school on the corner. Two old men argue in front of the laundromat with the intensity of people debating something that genuinely matters, though I catch the word “Mets” and revise my assessment slightly.

I wrap my scarf tighter and walk faster.

I know every crack in these sidewalks. I know which traffic lights take forever and which ones you can catch if you time your stride right. I know the smell of this neighborhood in every season — car exhaust and corner-store coffee in summer, wood smoke and wet leaves in fall, this particular cold-and-salt smell in January that I have never been able to name but would recognize anywhere in the world.

I was born here. Raised here. Lost someone here.

My chest does the thing it does.

Dad.

I push it down. Not because I don’t want to feel it — I’ve made that mistake, the not-feeling-it mistake, and I know how it compounds — but because I am three blocks from my shift and I cannot cry into people’s espresso orders. That’s bad for tips and worse for professionalism. My grief has learned, over six years, to be patient. It knows when it’s welcome.

Right now is not when it’s welcome.

The café smells like cinnamon and steamed milk and the specific kind of exhaustion that comes with being perpetually underpaid in a city that runs on coffee. My manager Dan is already behind the counter, and he looks at me with the eyes of a man who has watched me drag myself through the door for two semesters now.

“Morning, Aurora.”

“Morning.”

“You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

“You’re what, twenty-two? You’re supposed to bounce back.”

I tie my apron and reach for the marker. “I lost my bounce at sixteen.”

He doesn’t have an answer for that. Nobody ever does.

The shift moves in the rhythm I know by heart now: the grumpy regulars who soften after the first cup, the students who type furiously and order one thing for three hours, the woman who always asks me if I’m a student and beams at me when I say yes, like she’s proud of something she had no part in. I name the cups when I’m bored — Sophia started me on this, a dare that stuck — and take private satisfaction in watching a finance bro respond to “Voldemort” with zero irony. I explain the difference between an Americano and a drip coffee for the eleventh time this week. I pour, I steam, I wipe down the counter, I memorize the Palsgraf case in my head between orders because my brain doesn’t know how to be idle and I stopped fighting it.

Four hours. My feet hurt. I swap aprons and walk.

Tutoring is the job I like best, which is its own kind of irony because it pays the least. The kids are in a program for middle schoolers who are behind in reading and math, and they like me because I explain things in movie references and because I draw small, precise hearts on their worksheets when they do well. Not gold stars. Hearts. It started as a joke and became a system.

“You’re the best tutor,” a kid named Marcus tells me today, kicking his feet under his chair.

“I’m the most affordable,” I tell him.

He squints. “Is that the same thing?”

“Ask me again in ten years.”

He scrunches up his face the way kids do when they decide an adult is being weird on purpose, which is fair, and goes back to his worksheet. I watch him work and think about how this — explaining things, breaking things down until they’re clear, finding the right angle — is the closest I can come to the thing I actually want. Me, walking into a courtroom and the room reorganizing itself around me. The precision. The ability to look at a problem and see every edge of it.

My photographic memory helps. It’s not magic — it doesn’t make me smarter, exactly, it just means information tends to stick. I can pull up a page I read six months ago like a file. My professors think I’m a genius. I’m not. I just remember things other people are allowed to forget, which sounds like a gift and sometimes is and sometimes at two in the morning absolutely is not.

The study hall shift is three hours of watching the clock and getting through as much coursework as I can in the gaps between students who need help finding things. I work through Contracts first — I’ve started drawing tiny hearts next to cases I actually like, which I am aware is a deeply unhinged system and also find I cannot stop doing — then move to Torts, then give up on Torts and read six pages of the romance novel I have hidden inside my Constitutional Law textbook, which is not something I will be putting on my resume.

(The romance novel is research. I am also writing one — dark fantasy, published on Inkitt, under a pen name that is not Aurora Bellini. My readers do not know I look like a kindergarten teacher. This is intentional. It’s good. I think it’s good. Sophia thinks it’s good and she is constitutionally incapable of lying to protect my feelings, which is why she’s the only person I’ve told.)

By nine o’clock, the snow has started again. I pack my bag, shrug into my coat, and walk out into the cold that has settled deeper now, the kind of cold that presses through layers and reminds you it’s serious.

My breath fogs.

My boots find the ice anyway.

God, I’m tired.

Sophia is face-down on the couch when I get home. She lifts one hand in greeting without lifting her face.

“Did you survive?”

“I died twice. The second one took.”

“Same.” She rolls over to make room. “Scoot.”

I drop my bag and collapse next to her and we stay like that for a moment — the particular silence of two people who are too tired to perform anything for each other, which is its own kind of luxury. The radiator ticks. Somewhere above us, a neighbor is watching television. The snow hits the window soft as breath.

“I checked the bank account,” I say, eventually.

“I know. I saw it on your face the second you walked in.”

“I’m going to be broke forever.”

“You’re not going to be broke forever.” She says it without inflation, without the specific bright energy people use when they want to convince you of something they’re not sure of themselves. Sophia doesn’t do that. When she says something, she means it, and she means it the way she means everything — carefully, and with her whole chest. “You’re going to be the best attorney in New York. You’re going to walk into rooms and win arguments before you open your mouth. You’re going to look back at this apartment and this year and this number in your bank account and you’re going to remember exactly what it cost you and use it.”

I stare at the water stain on the ceiling. “I can’t afford mozzarella sticks right now.”

“I know.”

“That’s the standard I’m operating at. Below mozzarella sticks.”

She snorts. Then we’re both laughing, the tired kind that goes on a second too long, and then it fades back to quiet and the quiet is okay.

“I miss Dad,” I say.

I don’t plan to say it. I never plan to say it. But the hour is late and my guard is down and grief, I’ve learned, has impeccable timing in the worst possible sense — it waits until you’re not braced for it and then it says, simply: here. I’m still here.

Sophia doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t do the thing people do where they immediately try to fill the space. She just says, “I know,” and it sounds like: I’m not going anywhere.

“I thought it would get easier by now.”

“It will. Just not tonight.”

My eyes sting. I press them closed. He would have been proud of this — even of the three jobs and the -$4.92 and the mozzarella sticks I can’t afford — because he understood, better than anyone, that the trying is the thing. You don’t get credit for the arrival. You get credit for the walk.

I pull out my phone. The photo is in a folder I’ve never named, which I think is because naming it would make it too real: me and my dad at the pier, both of us holding ice cream cones that have already started to melt, both of us laughing at something that’s been lost to time. He’s squinting against the sun. I’m wearing a hat he always made fun of. We look happy in the specific way that people look happy when they don’t yet know what’s coming.

“I’ll make you proud,” I whisper. “I’m working on it.”

Sophia squeezes my hand once, and then she gets up and heats the leftover pasta and puts on something stupid on television, because that’s the other thing she understands: that grief needs company but it doesn’t always need words, and sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is put food in front of them and let them watch someone else’s problems for a while.

We eat pasta and watch reality TV and she falls asleep before the credits.

By 12:30, I’m in bed with the ceiling and my thoughts and the particular restlessness that comes from being too tired to sleep.

My phone buzzes.

Bank account: -$4.92.

I stare at it for a long moment.

“Universe,” I say out loud, to no one, to the snow falling soft and steady outside my window, to the candle I apparently lit again without noticing, “if you have any miracles lying around — literally any — now would be a genuinely great time.”

The vanilla flickers.

The snow falls.

I fall asleep still waiting.