Paige and Emily did not see each other again before Paige left to go back to Stanford on Monday afternoon. Emily finally heard back about her loan that Monday, as well, and was able to breathe a little easier. Her friends had teased her about how smitten she had seemed with Paige on Friday, but it didn't last long after she told them that Paige had only been visiting and Emily didn't even know where she lived.

Indeed, in the 6 months that passed before Paige and Emily saw each other again, Paige rarely thought of Emily, at least at first. Paige had found the whole encounter rather unnerving and pushed it to the back of her mind. She threw herself into swimming even more than usual because she found that unless she went to sleep completely exhausted, she dreamed about her body being pressed up against Emily the way she had been those moments during intermission in the bathroom. Whatever her body was trying to tell her, Paige wasn't ready to hear it, so she swam it into submission and found that it often drug her mind down into silence with it.

In November, Emily went back to Rosewood and spent Thanksgiving with Hanna, Spencer and Aria since her mother had gone to Texas to be with her father at the army base he was stationed at. She joined her parents in Texas for a week during Christmas and spent the rest of her break in Solomon rereading her worn copies of Harry Potter for the hundredth time and stock piling her energy for the coming term. She thought about Paige more often than she liked to admit.

Paige returned to Philadelphia for the holidays. She and Tuck visited their Grandma Hazel almost every day. They put Christmas lights on the tree house and had a Full House marathon by accident. And there were always the many church services she and Tuck were expected to attend around the holidays as the pastor's children. Although Paige was still figuring out what it was that she believed and how that differed from her parents' views, she found comfort in the familiarity of the tradition. The candlelight Christmas Eve service her father did had always taken her breath away with its beauty and she knew it wouldn't feel like Christmas without it.

Emily spent most of January eating clementines and writing poems about amputees. She was taking her first poetry workshop and the winter seemed different because of it, somehow deeper. The colder it got, the further Emily burrowed into the words that lay thick on her mind. She and the girls would walk to class in pairs with their arms linked as a way of steadying themselves on the ice that had coated the campus, shuffling along with their heads bowed low against the biting wind. They all developed a liking for brandy in the evenings; they would sit under electric blankets on the sectional at night, sipping the warming liquid and doing their homework, wishing the house was either better insulated or that they had endless amounts of money for the heating bill.

Then in February the sky had broken open and the whole town was covered in two feet of snow. Something about the blanket like snow had made the cold seem more bearable and Emily and the girls, on their way home from the scene shop one night, had stopped to have an impromptu snowball fight. Tuck had been wandering around campus that night, too, taking pictures of the new snow to send to Paige in sunny California. He knew that, despite her whining during the fall, she was missing the changing seasons while at Stanford. He spotted Emily and her friends running around under one of the lampposts by the student union and snapped a couple pictures of them mid-snowball fight. He sent the best one he had captured (Emily was dodging a snowball, her eyes squeezed shut with laughter) along with about a dozen others he had taken of the snow-covered campus to Paige in an email. Paige was surprised when she opened the picture and saw Emily's face, but brushed it off as a coincidence. But she printed the picture of Emily and her friends out and taped it on the wall next to her bed. She told herself she did it because she missed the snow.

In March, Tuck was cast in his first acting role at Vallance and he called Paige to tell her the news.

"Hey, T, what's up?" Paige had to call him back because she'd been in practice when he called originally.

"Paigey, I got cast!" he'd already told her he was planning to audition.

"Congratulations! I knew you'd get in."

"You did not," Tuck told her. "I've never really acted before outside of class," he said, referring to the Beginning Acting class he'd been in the previous fall.

"I did know, actually," Paige corrected him, "because I would never in a million years be cast in a play, which means that you got the acting genes."

"Can't argue with science, I guess," Tuck conceded. Paige could hear him laughing on the other end of the phone. "We're opening on the last weekend in April. Can you come? You have to come, Paige. I'm going to see if Mom and Dad will come, too."

Truthfully, the prospect of their parents being at Vallance while she was there didn't appeal to her much. Paige loved her parents and she would be happy to see them, but she knew if they were there she'd be stuck doing family things all weekend long and she wouldn't have a chance to, well…

"Of course I'll be there," Paige responded before she let her thoughts get carried away.

"You're the best, P. I gotta go, though. I've got a hot date tonight I've got to get ready for!" Tuck couldn't help telling her this news as well.

"Oh really? Well, don't do anything I wouldn't do," Paige told her brother.

"Well, that kind of limits my options, Paige," Tuck teased and then added, "Love you, bye!" and hung up before Paige could defend herself. She huffed as she hung up the phone and glanced at the picture on her wall as she threw her bag down on her bed.

On the other side of Vallance's campus, Eden had just burst through the front door of The Log and proclaimed to whoever was in hearing distance, "Guess who just got the lead in Eurydice?"

"Hmm," Charlie and Emily were sitting on the couch together doing some homework, and Charlie was bored and in the mood to annoy Eden. "From what I saw of the auditions yesterday, I'm coming to guess…Erica Lindon? She was on point."

Emily smirked and covered her face with her book. She didn't want to be the target of Eden's wrath, or even collateral damage.

"You're a jackass, you know that Charlotte?" Eden did not take her acting career, as she called it, lightly.

"I know," Charlie smirked, "but it's the only way I can get you to call me by my full name, and its so sexy when you do that, Edie. Come to bed with me." Charlie held her hand out to Eden.

Emily couldn't help laughing at this.

"Don't encourage her, Emily," Eden said.

"I'm sorry," Emily told her, fighting back a smile. "Congratulations, Eden. Who else is going to be in it?"

Charlotte had gotten off the couch by this point and was giving Eden a bear hug that Eden was fighting to get free of and pretending not to enjoy.

"Let's see," Eden's voice came out from Charlie's shoulder region a little muffled. "Jack is playing my father. Lucy, Esther and…geez, Charlotte, let me go! Thank you. Lucy, Esther, and Chloe are the chorus," Eden stopped to think for a moment. "Oh, and that dancer, Theo McCullers, he got cast as Orpheus, actually. I can't remember the others."

THUNK.

Emily had dropped her very large and very heavy French book onto the ground.

"Shit," she said, obviously flustered, as she uncurled her legs from beneath her to get up and retrieve it. "When did he start acting?" Emily asked trying to sound casual but failing.

"Um. Now, I guess. This is his first play as far as I know," Eden was staring at Emily with a quizzical look on her face, her eyes narrowed as she took off her coat and tied her curly, black hair back in a bun. "Are you okay, Em? You look…"

"Yeah..." Emily interrupted. "I think I just…have low blood sugar." Emily finished lamely.

"Let's make dinner then!" Eden said loudly as she left the room, obliviously. Charlie stayed where she was, though, hands in her pockets and looked at Emily knowingly.

"Still got the hots for his sister, huh?" she asked Emily.

"Jesus, why do you remember everything?" Emily said hurrying past Charlie to help Eden with dinner, slightly embarrassed at her own transparency.

"It's a gift and curse," she heard Charlie say in response behind her.

Emily couldn't remember ever, in her life, a month and a half going by more slowly. Even Hanna coming to spend spring break with her and the two of them driving up to Chicago for a few days didn't make the time go faster. The possibility that she might be seeing Paige again seemed to be stretching the days to a nearly unbearable length. More than anything, it was the not knowing if Paige would come to see the play or not that was driving her crazy. She didn't even know enough about the girl, like how far she would have to travel or what her schedule might be, to make an educated guess.

The only solace came to Emily one night when she was lying in bed, reading a few pages in her Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson before she went to sleep. She was flipping through the pages, having decided to read a few at random, when the first line caught her eye,

If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the numbers by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
For fear their numbers fuse.

If only centuries delayed,
I'd count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen's land.

But now, all ignorant of length
Of time's uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.

She didn't know as she read it that first time, though it gave her such relief to see her feelings described so beautifully, that it was something she would return to many times during her friendship with Paige McCullers. But she did realize in that first reading that she wasn't alone. She and Emily Dickinson were linked through the years by more than just a shared name now. As Emily laid the book aside on her makeshift nightstand and clicked off her lamp, she sent a small thank you to the long dead poet, and fell asleep more quickly than she had in three weeks.

Paige, 2,000 miles away, was dealing with the impending meet, which she knew was coming, in the opposite fashion of Emily. She pretended it wasn't happening. She barely acknowledged her father's email with her flight confirmation. She almost hung up on her Mom when she called to tell her that she and her father were renting a car in Chicago and they would pick her up at O'Hare and drive down to Solomon the following Friday afternoon. It was stupid, Paige kept telling herself, to be nervous about seeing someone whose last name she didn't even know.

Finally, on Thursday night at 11:30 pm, she gave in to the nervous excitement she had been fighting and packed for her trip. She was about to close her suitcase when she decided to add one more item to it: the purple Vallance sweatshirt that had been so instrumental in she and Emily's first meeting.