“Um, isn’t your mom inside?”
He laughs. “She went to the grocery store for more eggs. And my stepdad’s in his office. In the windowless attic.”
“And your neighbors?” I say, looking around the cul-de-sac.
“Don’t know ’em,” he replies, and pulls me into another kiss, silencing my protest.
A few seconds into it, I hear a car pull into the driveway behind me. I jerk my head back from the kiss. Not the way I wanted to meet his mom. “Don’t worry,” Michael says, looking past me. “It’s just my brother.” The car door slams, and there are footsteps on the driveway.
“You have a brother?”
Michael nods casually. “We’re not exactly close.”
I smooth my hair and turn around.
My stomach drops.
“Glad you could make it,” Michael calls from behind me, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
Holy shit. Holy. Shit.
Josh is standing in the driveway, holding a suitcase. Tyler is behind the wheel of his mom’s burgundy minivan. Suddenly, I understand why Tyler has been acting weird. It was about Josh.
“You’re Michael’s brother,” I say, stunned. Josh is Michael’s brother.
Josh just stares at me.
“You know my brother?” Michael asks.
I nod feebly. “We went to high school together,” I manage.
Josh’s face twists in anger. “That’s right!” he says, his voice laden with sarcasm and fury. “We did go to high school together! Then you went to Yale and morphed into a heartless bitch. Here’s the part I’m not sure about: At what point did you start screwing my brother? Was it before or after you decided to blow me off?” For a second I think he might spit at me, but he just gets back into the van. Tyler is already halfway down the driveway when Josh slams the door.
“Whoa. What was that about?” Michael looks stunned.
“We used to date,” I say weakly, knowing he’ll need more detail than that and wondering how I can possibly give it to him.
“You dated my brother? Recently?”
“No! We broke up in September. Why didn’t you tell me you had a brother?”
“It didn’t seem important. Wait, this September?”
“It didn’t seem important???” I stare at him in disbelief. “He’s your brother.”
“I told you we’re not close,” Michael says evenly. “You had a boyfriend when we met?”
Crap.
For a second, I consider telling him the truth. The collision, the entanglement, all of it. The words start to form in my mouth. “It’s the craziest thing,” I start to say. But Michael cuts me off.
“Look, I don’t want my brother to come between us,” he says. “He’s not worth it.” Michael steps down off the porch so we’re eye level. “Whatever happened between you guys is over, right? One hundred percent?”
“One hundred percent,” I say firmly.
“Good,” he says, and touches my cheek. “Now let’s eat.”
The meal goes surprisingly well considering the massive elephant in the dining room. Two seconds after we sat down, Michael launched into the Josh story, sparing no detail (not even the front porch kiss). My parents smiled politely, but I could tell they were horrified by the notion that their daughter might have broken up with her boyfriend for his older, cuter (and thus, in their mind, less trustworthy) brother.
“I didn’t know they were brothers,” I offer by way of explanation.
“How is that possible?” my mom asks. “Didn’t you know Josh had a brother named Michael at Yale?” The problem, of course, is that I don’t know if I knew that. Fortunately, no one else at this table does, either.
“There are a lot of Michaels at Yale,” I reply defensively. “And Michael didn’t tell me he had a brother, so I didn’t make the connection,” I add, glaring at Michael. He brought this up. He can deal with it.
“Josh and I don’t exactly get along,” Michael tells her calmly, spooning sweet potato soufflé onto his plate. “Before this morning, we hadn’t spoken since last Thanksgiving. Wow, these yams look amazing, Mrs. Barnes.”
“Thank you,” she says, then turns back to me. “The name Michael Wagner didn’t ring a bell?” she says pointedly.
“His last name isn’t Wagner,” I snap. “It’s Carpenter.”
“Oh, so you’re stepbrothers,” Mom says, as though this makes everything better.
“No, we have the same parents,” Michael tells her. “My stepfather adopted Josh when he married my mom two years ago. I respectfully declined the offer.” Somehow I doubt there was anything respectful about it. Michael can’t even say the word “stepfather” without contempt. How can two guys have such different opinions of the same man? Even from my limited memories, I know that Josh adores Martin. Michael, for some undisclosed reason, hates him.
“How’d your mom and Martin meet?” I ask in an effort to both change the subject and gather some clues about the source of Michael’s ill will toward the man his mother married.
“He and my dad were best friends,” Michael replies.
“Yikes,” my dad says under his breath. I shoot him a look.
Mom holds up the platter in her hand and smiles. “Balsamic-glazed parsnips, anyone?”
11
THERE
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
(the day before Thanksgiving)
You have already told us about yourself in the Common Application, the Short Answer, and the Personal Essay. Please tell us something about yourself that you believe we cannot learn elsewhere in your application.
I stare at my blinking cursor. I should be thrilled that the prompt is so vague. But what if everything about you is already covered “elsewhere in your application”? What if there’s nothing left to say?
“See, this is why I’m not Yale material,” I mutter. Why am I even doing this? Why am I filling out the application if I’m not going to apply?
I start typing. The Lure of the Ivy, by Abigail Barnes.
“There are those who have never wanted to go anywhere else,” I type, reading my words aloud as I go. “The moment they learned what college was, they set their sights on the Ivy League. Awed by its exclusivity, inspired by its excellence, enticed by its promise of a bigger and brighter future. I have never been one of those people. That is, until the Yale application packet arrived in my mailbox. It was that moment that I felt it: the Lure of the Ivy.”
I charge through another four hundred words, then reread what I’ve written. Definitely not what the Yale admissions committee is looking for, but that’s fine, since I’m not actually applying. If I wasn’t certain before, I am now. My own words convinced me. I’ll admit, when I saw that my SAT score was within the median, there was a moment—a millisecond—when I considered it. It’s hard not to be enticed by all that history and prestige. But that’s not a reason to apply.
And fear isn’t a reason not to.
I push this thought from my mind. Yes, the fact that the odds are stacked against me has intensified my conviction. Why shouldn’t it? Strong sense of self. That’s my thing. I know what I’m good at, and I stick to those things. What’s wrong with having a realistic grasp of my potential? It’s not like I’m resigned to mediocrity. I just know my limits.
Your limits or the edge of your comfort zone?
“Enough,” I mutter. I’m ready to stop thinking about this. I promised my mom that I wouldn’t make a hasty decision, and I haven’t. I’ve thought it through and come to a reasonable and rational conclusion. Yale is not for me. As if to make the point, I drag the “Yale Application” folder from my desktop to the trash where it belongs.
I don’t even know why I bothered filling it out. There’s a good chance I’ll hear from Northwestern today, and if I do, that will be that. Early Action decision letters were sent on November 20, and a bunch of people on the NU admissions blog have already gotten their acceptance email. Mine could arrive any minute. Just thinking about it makes me sh
aky. For the sixtieth time today, I click on my mailbox icon.
No new messages.
I wonder if Caitlin’s heard from Yale yet. Even though we haven’t spoken since our fight, I’m praying she gets in early. Thanks to Grandpa Oscar, it’s the only place she’s ever wanted to go. Unceremoniously, I pick up the phone and dial her number. Her voicemail picks up immediately.
“Hi, this is Caitlin. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.” Beep.
I quickly hang up.
In twenty-eight days, I’ve called her twenty-eight times. Sometimes it rings a couple of times first. One time the line just went dead. Most of the time it goes straight to voicemail. I’m terrified of an in-person confrontation—I avoid her at school and stopped going to the frozen yogurt place we both love—but I’ve called her every single day since our fight. I’m not sure what I’d say to her if she ever picked up, but I keep calling anyway. Afraid of what it’ll mean if I stop. In my head, I know there’s a good chance our friendship is already beyond repair, but in my gut, I still believe there’s a scenario in which we move past this and go back to being Caitlin and Abby. The hardest part is knowing what to do in the meantime.
Time to get moving. The crew team’s first-ever pep rally picnic starts at noon, and I’m still all sweaty and windblown from practice this morning. Ever since my foot healed, Coach Schwartz has had me jogging with the team before practice and doing push-ups and crunches with them after, so I end up just as nasty as everyone else. Since I’m pretty close to pre-injury form, I thought about asking Coach P to let me run in the state cross-country meet this weekend, but decided that I couldn’t abandon my teammates for the Head of the Hooch. It’s the biggest regatta of the fall season. Coach wants us at the boathouse ten minutes before the picnic starts to hand out our boat assignments. Close to a dozen college recruiters will be there, so everyone is on edge—Josh in particular. This is the first (and only) time this season that scouts from the West Coast will see him row, so if he wants a crew scholarship to a PAC-10 school, Saturday is his make-or-break moment. Not that he has anything to worry about. Our star stroke hasn’t had an off day all season.
And, since we started dating, neither have I. The past twenty-six days have been like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Feast and famine. Fire and ice. My days break down into two categories: moments with Josh and moments without him. When I’m with him, my mind turns off. I don’t think. I don’t plan. I don’t worry. There’s no room for thoughts or plans or worries. Every space and crevice is stuffed with happiness, so full it feels like my soul might burst at the seams. Minutes speed by, rushing us to the next and then the next, until our time is up.
That’s when I’m with him. When I’m not, time slows down. Seconds crawl by. I watch the clock, counting the hours until I see him again, as I think and plan and worry. About him, about us, about the future. I replay our last kiss and try to plan for the next one. I wonder if he’s feeling what I do, simultaneously convinced that he can’t and he must. I worry about what it’ll be like to leave him, even though graduation is still six months away.
“You’re in love,” Mom said when I came home last Saturday night, clutching a giant blue teddy bear. Josh had taken me to the fair, where we’d shared cotton candy and ridden the rickety roller coaster, and he’d won me the biggest stuffed animal on the wall. Afterward, we went to our swing in Josh’s neighborhood, neither of us caring that the moon was too bright to see any stars. I could still taste his gum on my lips. Big Red. The kind he always chews.
“What?” I said, even though I’d heard her fine.
“You’re in love,” she repeated, her smile knowing and kind. “I’m glad.”
I blushed and looked away, not ready to acknowledge it, but not arguing with her either.
I’m in love.
“Abby!” I hear Mom call from downstairs, startling me back to the present. “Isn’t the picnic at noon?”
The party is about to begin when I arrive at the boathouse at quarter till. In the time since practice ended, the Brookside booster club has turned the boathouse grounds into a wonderland of blue and orange streamers and balloons. The Peppery Pig has set up shop under a huge tent in the shape of a Spartan’s helmet, giving the crisp autumn air that great charcoal-and-roasted-meat scent. I inhale deeply, relishing it.
My teammates are gathered around the picnic table closest to the river, munching on chips and dip while Coach hovers nearby, holding his ubiquitous clipboard. Josh, as usual, is the last to arrive. He’s never actually late, he just doesn’t show up until the precise time we’re supposed to meet. Class, practice, our dates. Always right on time.
At 11:49, his Jeep pulls into the parking lot. I smile as he comes down the hill. Untucked polo shirt, Converses replaced by canvas loafers. Hanging out with Tyler is clearly rubbing off on him. He’s also stopped parting his hair, and right now it’s damp and messy, like he got out of the shower and shook it.
As he gets closer, my mind quiets and everything gets brighter. The blue of the sky, the green of the pine needles, the yellow paint on the boathouse door. My teammates are talking, laughing, buzzing with adrenaline and caffeine, but they’ve become background noise. The Josh Effect.
“Okay, people,” Coach calls over the hum of chatter. “We only have a couple minutes before the crowd shows up.” The team gets quiet. “We’re mixing things up this week,” he announces. “In the stern, anyway. Megan, I’m moving you to the men’s B.” Megan’s jaw literally drops. She’s been coxing the 8A all season, and the buzz is she has a tentative offer from the College of Charleston, contingent on her performance on Saturday. When the COC coach sees that she’s been bumped from the A boat, he’s going to assume she did something to warrant it. “This isn’t meant to be a punishment,” Coach is saying to Megan. “I still want you on the women’s A. I just want to give Abby a shot at the men.”
Did he just say Abby?
Since Josh is currently grinning at me like the Cheshire cat, I assume the answer is yes. My hand shoots up.
“You don’t have to do that,” I blurt out. “Megan deserves to be in the A boat. It should be her, not me.” I flash a smile in Megan’s direction, but she doesn’t return it. Meanwhile, Josh is staring me down.
“I don’t have to do anything,” Coach snaps. “But last time I checked, I was the coach of this team. Which means I make the boat assignments. Not you. Not Megan.” I nod glumly. “The rest of the assignments are the same as last week,” he continues.
He drones on, but I stop listening. I’m coxing the 8A? At the Head of the Hooch? There’s no way that’s a good idea. Yes, I’ve gotten better at this, but I am not A boat material. I’m not even B boat material. Every Saturday I’m amazed that my shell makes it to the finish line without crashing into the riverbank.
“I’m preparing stat sheets for each of you to give to scouts on Saturday,” Coach says in conclusion, replacing the top sheet of his clipboard with a blank piece of paper. “So write down your email address before you go. And I better not see ‘crewgirl’ or ‘mrstroke’ or any of that shit. Like I said last week, college scouts are looking for mature rowers, not punk-ass kids. Okay, you’re dismissed.”
“‘It should be her, not me’?” Josh asks. “What was that about?”
I shrug. “She’s better than I am. And this matters more to her.”
“First of all, she’s not better than you. More experienced, maybe, but you’ve got better instincts. Second, impressing recruiters on Saturday could mean a crew scholarship. Or a leg up at a great school.”
“The only ‘great school’ I’m interested in going to is Northwestern,” I remind him. “And they don’t have a varsity team.”
“I know you’ve got your eyes on Northwestern. But the Ivies are always looking for rowers. Crew could be your way in.”
“I don’t want to go to an Ivy,” I snap. “I want to go to a school with a journalism program.”
“Doesn’t Columbia have one?”
&n
bsp; “Not undergrad. Look, I get it that it’s most people’s dream to end up at Yale or Harvard or wherever. But that’s not what I want.”
Josh holds his hands up. “You won’t get any argument from me. If it’s not what you want, it’s not what you want. I thought you weren’t applying to those places because you thought you couldn’t get in, and I wanted to make sure you knew that rowing could be a way in. If that’s what you wanted,” he adds. “If it isn’t, it isn’t.”
“It isn’t,” I say firmly.
“Okay. So what about USC? A journalism program and a great rowing team.”
“Do you ever give up?” Did he just suggest I apply to USC? As amazing as things are between us, we haven’t gone down that road. There’s been no discussion of applying to the same schools, because we both know that would force one of us to forgo our top choice. I look at him, waiting for this conversation to become that conversation, but Josh just kisses me on the nose. “Hey, there’s Tyler.”
When I turn to greet him, Tyler doesn’t return my smile. He looks uncharacteristically glum.
“Is Caitlin coming?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. Caitlin hasn’t come to a single party or school-related event since our fight. She spends every evening and most weekends at the Tech astrophysics lab. At least, that’s what she’s told Ty every time he’s tried to make plans with her. He and Caitlin are still friends, but it’s different now that she knows how he feels about her. Complicated where it used to be so effortless. No wonder Caitlin’s been living at the lab, a place where order is imposed on chaos and not the other way around. It’s her escape from the havoc. A haven from Tyler’s searching eyes and my incessant calls.
“Haven’t talked to her,” he says, looking past me to Josh. “Let’s get some food while it’s hot.”
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