Chapter 19: December
1178 Words
December arrived the way Boston Decembers do — without negotiation.
One morning the cold was the ordinary November kind and the next it had a different quality entirely, sharper and more committed, the kind that meant it had settled in for months and knew it. The trees on the quad had given up their last leaves. The sky had gone the flat grey of a city preparing for winter.
I liked it.
There was something honest about Boston in December. It did not pretend.
---
Prisca came back from Portland with something slightly different about her.
Not dramatic — she was still herself, still precise and direct and unhurried. But there was a looseness that had not been there before, something that Portland had returned to her. Home had done something to the careful composure, softened it at the edges in a way that felt like addition rather than subtraction.
She arrived Monday evening.
I opened the door and she came in and hugged me before taking off her coat — properly, both arms, the kind that lasted a moment.
"Hi," she said into my shoulder.
"Hi," I said.
---
She brought things from Portland.
A jar of a specific jam her mother made — fig and cardamom, she said her mother made twelve jars every fall and sent them to people she loved. She had brought one for me.
I looked at the jar for a moment.
"Your mother sent this for me," I said. "She doesn't know me."
"She knows you eat mostly," Prisca said. "And she knows what matters to me." She set her bag down. "That's enough for my mother."
---
December brought the end of semester pressure with it.
Finals in three weeks. Papers due. Presentations to finish. The campus that had been quiet over Thanksgiving filled back up with the specific energy of students remembering simultaneously that the semester was nearly over.
Ellis announced the final assessment — a full research proposal, fifteen to twenty pages, due the last day of class.
The room received this with the silence of people doing mental mathematics.
"I'm pairing you," Ellis said, scanning the room. "Two per proposal. I'll post the pairs Thursday."
I looked at Prisca.
She was already looking at me.
---
The pairs went up Thursday morning on the course portal.
Daniel Reeves and Prisca Hayden.
I stared at the screen for a moment.
I texted her immediately.
*Ellis.*
Her reply came in under thirty seconds.
*I saw.*
*Thoughts?*
*I think Ellis is perceptive,* she wrote. *And possibly not above using a research methodology course to make a point.*
*What point?*
*That good collaboration requires genuine understanding of your partner's thinking.* A pause. *Or she randomized the list and we happened to land together.*
*Which do you think?*
A longer pause.
*The first one,* she said. *Ellis doesn't randomize anything.*
---
We started working on it Saturday morning at her apartment.
Her space was different from mine — warmer somehow, more accumulated. Books everywhere but organized differently, by instinct rather than system. A cork board above her desk pinned with index cards, images, printed articles with colored tabs. The visual thinking of someone who needed to see the connections physically.
I stood in front of it for a long moment.
"Your entire brain is on this board," I said.
"Working brain," she corrected. "The rest is internal."
"What's the proposal?"
She handed me a printed page. She had already drafted a framework — a research proposal examining media representation of first-generation college students, combining qualitative interviews with content analysis of existing coverage.
I read it carefully.
"This is your documentary project," I said.
"Adjacent to it. The academic version." She sat at her desk. "I thought if I was going to spend three weeks on a research proposal it should serve something real."
"Ellis will appreciate the genuine investment."
"I'm not doing it for Ellis," she said simply. "I'm doing it because it matters."
---
We worked for four hours.
The collaboration had a natural quality — she thought in frames and narratives, I thought in structure and argument, and the two approaches fit together without friction. When she went wide I went specific. When I went too rigid she pushed the frame outward.
At some point she was at the board and I was at her desk and the proposal had become something neither of us would have written alone.
"Stop," she said at one point, turning from the board.
"What?"
"Read back the methodology section."
I read it back.
She listened with her eyes closed — the focused listening she brought to things she was genuinely assessing.
"The third paragraph," she said. "You stopped early."
I looked at the page. She was right. I had pulled back before the fullest version of the argument.
"Ellis's note," I said.
"Cross the edge," she said. "What's the actual claim?"
I thought about it. Rewrote it out loud, pushing further.
She opened her eyes. "That," she said. "Write that."
---
By afternoon the draft had a shape worth working with.
We made coffee — her apartment had better coffee than mine, a fact I had accepted without resentment — and sat on the floor with the draft between us.
"This is good," she said.
"It's a first draft."
"A good first draft is rarer than a good final draft," she said. "The first draft requires honesty. The final draft just requires editing."
I looked at her. "Where did that come from?"
"Mr. Callum," she said. "Eighth grade." A small smile. "He had a lot of those."
"He sounds like he was a good teacher."
"He was the right teacher at the right time." She looked at the draft. "I've had a few of those."
A comfortable pause settled.
"Ellis," I said.
"Ellis," she agreed.
---
Peter texted mid-afternoon.
*Sophie and I are official. Thought you should know.*
I showed Prisca.
She read it and looked up. "Sophie Chen?"
"You know her?"
"She's in my media production class. Front row, always prepared, asks the questions everyone else is thinking but won't say." She handed my phone back. "She's good. Peter is lucky."
"I'll tell him you said so."
"Tell him she is also not above arguing with things she disagrees with," Prisca said. "So he should mean what he says."
I smiled. "He knows. That's why he likes her."
---
She walked me out at six.
On the doorstep the December cold hit properly — the committed kind, no negotiation.
She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed against it.
"Same time next Saturday?" she said.
"Earlier if you want. We have three weeks."
She nodded. "Saturday morning. Bring the better coffee."
"Yours is better than mine."
"I know," she said. "Bring yours anyway."
I laughed.
She smiled — the full one.
"Goodnight Daniel."
"Goodnight Prisca."
I walked down her street in the cold December evening and thought about fig and cardamom jam from a mother who sent things to people her daughter loved.
Twenty marks on a map.
And December just beginning.
- Writer
