We Regret to Inform You
Page 28
She snorted. “My parents and I are getting lunch, if you want to come.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m actually meeting the Millers later. Congratulations, though.”
Flatly she said, “Whee. I have a diploma from a school whose name is synonymous with scandal and corruption.”
“Hey, at least you have a good story for when people at MIT ask where you went to high school.”
“Actually,” she said, “I was planning to lie.”
“That works, too.”
A limo pulled up in front of the building, and the Dorsays—Meredith, her parents, her brothers, and Cousin Margot—climbed in. “Oh,” Emily said, “the places she’ll go.”
The limo drove away. The parking lot was pretty full of people heading out to parties and restaurants. I balled up my program and shoved it in my purse. “Someone told me something once,” I said, “about how people can’t own up to their mistakes because of a fragile self-narrative. Like, they have to think they’re the hero or they fall apart.”
She laughed dryly. “You think Meredith has a fragile self-narrative?”
I thought about that for a minute. I wondered about the mental contortions it would take for Meredith Dorsay to believe she was the hero of literally anything.
Finally I said, “I think she’s a schmuck.”
Nate’s car was packed to the brim, mostly with his stuff. He was in the driver’s seat, his car idling in my driveway; my mother was just inside the front door, and I was just outside it.
“I know you think this is a bad idea,” I said.
She said, “Just promise me you’ll still go, at the end of the year. You have a lot of good choices now.”
“I promise,” I said. “Come next August, I’ll be on a campus buying overpriced textbooks and hating my roommate.”
“Do you have enough money?” she asked.
“Is there any such thing?” I asked. “No, I’m fine. We’ll be fine.”
She leaned against the door frame. “We,” she said. “You and Nate, you mean.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we’re also fine.” I pointed from me to her and back again.
“Are we?”
“Nothing that happened was your fault.”
“Except for the credit card debt.”
“Well, that part was your fault.” It wasn’t like I was mad about that, though. To be honest, I wasn’t really mad about any of it. We’d wanted the same things. I still wanted to go to a good college. I wanted to have a good job. I’d just been so caught up in the idea that that was the goal, it hadn’t occurred to me that those things were the beginning of a very long, nonlinear path. I would take classes and do badly. I would get a job and get fired. I would get another job and hate it and realize I needed to start over. And between now and then, I still needed to decide what I wanted that job, that life, to look like. I was passably good at a hundred different things. It was time to decide what I loved.
“Mom,” I asked. “Did you ever think about what would make you happy?”
“Please don’t start.”
“I’m serious,” I said.
“What makes you think I’m not?”
“Well, are you?”
She leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. “I love you, Mischa,” she said, which was, I guess, as good an answer as any.
“I love you, too. I have to go.”
I hugged her one last time, and then I went.
I climbed into the car next to Nate and sat my butt down on Maury, who he’d stuck in my seat while I’d been saying goodbye.
“Oof,” I said, because having a plastic skull under one’s nether regions was not especially pleasant. I pulled him out from underneath me and saw that he was, for the first time, without accessories.
“He’s naked,” I said.
“We’re taking him out for a new wardrobe,” Nate said. “I’m thinking a top hat and a cravat.”
“He doesn’t have a neck,” I pointed out.
“Details, details.”
I tossed Maury unceremoniously into the backseat, where he landed on top of the list we’d made of all the things we wanted to do that summer, before we ran out of time or money or both.
“Rude,” Nate said. “Are you ready?”
“No,” I answered. “Let’s go.”
Very great thanks are due to Hannah Bowman, who is both my agent and the author of the terrifying college admissions formula that appears at the beginning of this book. Nobody ever told me I would need an agent with a math degree; I’m so very lucky I found one anyway.
Katherine Harrison, thank you for being my editor, for shining a light on things that needed fixing, and helping me to solve problems I couldn’t work through on my own. Thanks also to the rest of the good people of Knopf BFYR for all the millions of tasks that are involved in editing, designing, proofing, printing, promoting, and selling books.
Thanks to Christopher Budd, who so graciously lent me his expertise not only in computer security and realistic hacking that does not involve people typing really fast for no reason, but also in skydiving. Thanks also to the staff at Caxton College in Valencia, Spain, for helping me with Mischa’s French, and to my husband for double-checking Bebe’s Spanish, and to Kate Hattemer for translating Paul Revere’s motto into grammatically correct Latin. Any mistakes in the book are my own.
Thanks to my mother, who read early drafts of this book and did not hate them, and to my father, who is likely responsible for my cynical outlook. And to Paul, who snuck me into his high school job on Sunday mornings so I could use the typewriters to fill out my college applications. I’m so glad we never have to go through that again.
And finally, for my kids. Listen. Come closer. Closer. I love you, no matter what.
Ariel Kaplan survived the university admissions process twice in order to receive her BA from the College of William and Mary and her MLS from Florida State University. Despite this, she continues to have nightmares in which she is forced to repeat the third grade as an adult.
Her first book, Grendel’s Guide to Love and War, received three starred reviews and was an ABA Indies Introduce Selection, among other honors. We Regret to Inform You is her second novel, and she is hard at work on a third, entitled We Are the Perfect Girl.
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