Chapter 4 - The Call from Pittsburgh
The reply from the University of Pittsburgh arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, right in the middle of a torrential downpour that turned our street into a miniature river. I was folding laundry in the living room when my phone buzzed against the couch cushion. It was an email notification from the undergraduate admissions office, addressed directly to Cole and cc'd to me.
I called Cole down from his bedroom immediately. He bounded down the stairs two at a time, his hair already starting to grow back in a soft, dark fuzz that made him look like a startled hedgehog.
"Is it a rejection?" he asked, his voice tight as he stood over the coffee table where I held my phone.
"Open it and see," I said, handing the device to him.
Cole took a deep breath, his thumb tapping the screen. He read through the first paragraph silently, his eyes darting back and forth across the digital page. The lines around his mouth deepened, and for a terrifying second, I thought the answer was no—that his silence and late withdrawal had permanently burned his bridge with the school.
Then, slowly, a grin broke across his face.
"They reinstated the application," he whispered, disbelief coloring his tone. "They're letting me defer the start date to the spring term. Conditional upon maintaining my grades this semester and submitting a revised personal statement about mitigating life circumstances."
"Let me see," I snatched the phone back playfully, scanning the text myself. Sure enough, the admissions board had reviewed the medical documentation, the letter of explanation we had drafted together, and Iris’s signed statement verifying that Cole’s initial withdrawal had been an impulsive mistake born of youthful panic. They were giving him a second chance.
"Cole, this is incredible!" I exclaimed, pulling him into a quick, fierce hug that he awkwardly returned before grabbing his phone back to text Iris.
Within minutes, Iris's name flashed on the screen with a FaceTime video call. Cole swiped to answer, propping the phone up against a stack of physics textbooks on the coffee table.
Iris’s face appeared on the screen, framed by her gray beanie. She was sitting in her bedroom at home, propped up against a mountain of pillows with a textbook open in her lap. Her complexion was pale, bearing the unmistakable fatigue of her third round of chemotherapy, but her eyes were bright and wide.
"Did you get it?" she asked before Cole could even speak. "Tell me you got it!"
"Spring term," Cole said, a massive grin spreading across his face. "They gave me a deferred enrollment for the spring. I don't have to wait a whole year. I just start in January instead of August."
Iris let out a cheer that sounded a little raspy, coughing slightly before laughing through it. "I told you! I told you admissions offices aren't heartless robots. They actually read those letters."
"You basically wrote half the letter, Iris," Cole pointed out, his voice softening with immense affection. "If you hadn't forced me to come clean about the withdrawal, I would've just spent the year working at the hardware store and staring at your front door."
"And I would have hated every second of it," Iris said firmly. "Now, what's the catch? Do you have to take summer classes to make up the credits, or do you just take a lighter load this fall?"
"A lighter load this fall," Cole said, checking the requirements listed in the email. "Which means I can stay home for the heaviest part of your treatment cycle, take two prerequisite classes online through the community college, and still keep up with my swim conditioning on the weekends."
I watched them talk, marveling at how much their dynamic had shifted in just a week. They weren't hiding behind grand sacrifices anymore. They were negotiating like partners, finding compromises that honored both Cole's desire to support Iris and Iris's fierce demand for his independence.
"Well," I said, standing up and brushing imaginary lint off my jeans. "This definitely calls for something better than grocery-store cookies. Who wants pizza?"
"Only if it has extra garlic," Iris declared through the phone speaker. "And Cole is paying, since he almost ruined his entire academic career without telling me."
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"Deal," Cole laughed, grabbing his car keys from the counter.
The storm outside was beginning to clear, the heavy gray clouds parting to let slanting bars of golden afternoon sunlight wash across the wet asphalt. As Cole headed out the door to pick up the food, I felt a profound sense of relief settle into my bones. The crisis hadn't vanished—Iris still had months of treatment ahead, and Cole still had a mountain of coursework to climb—but the foundation was solid again. They were facing it together, not as a martyr and his patient, but as two seventeen-year-olds stubbornly refusing to let circumstance dictate their future.
