I Was Told It Would Get Easier

by Abbi Waxman

  This time the kid showing us around was nicer, and for a moment I tried to imagine myself playing Frisbee under the cherry blossoms. It didn’t work, and suddenly Alice appeared, like a lion creeping up on a limping antelope or whatever.

  “This is boring,” she said. “Are you even interested in GWU?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if college is what I want to do.”

  Alice was surprised. “Why not? It’s four years where your parents pay for you to sleep in and party. Who wouldn’t want to do that?”

  I looked at her and raised my eyebrows. “Well, I think the schools actually want you to work as well, Alice.”

  Her expression changed. “Oh . . . don’t you have good grades? I hear community college is a good alternative.” She tried on a tone of supportive enthusiasm, which suited her about as well as a party hat suits a rhinoceros.

  Nice try, but I shook my head. “My grades are fine. I don’t like school.”

  “No one likes school, Emily.” Alice checked her phone absently. It was almost like blinking. “Besides, my mom says college is way more fun.”

  “I thought she didn’t go to college.”

  “She didn’t, but I’ve never dated a movie star and I still know it would be fun.”

  I decided not to waste any more mental energy on Alice’s Guide to College. She’s an idiot.

  Alice asked, “Where did your mom sneak off to earlier? Secret boyfriend?”

  I gazed at her. “Yeah, she got a match on Tinder.”

  Alice giggled. “Can you imagine?”

  I shook my head. “No. She had a work call.”

  “Oh,” said Alice, losing interest.

  The guy leading the tour had stopped to point out the engineering building, and we all concertina’d together again. Engineering buildings all look the same, what’s up with that?

  Alice yawned hugely and stared around. She lowered her voice. “Did you hear about Becca and Lucy and that other girl? They got suspended.”

  “No,” I lie, “what for?”

  Alice shrugged. “Who cares? Bad grades, probably, they’re all dumb as bricks.” She looks over the group of kids. “I think I’m going to try and hook up with the blue-collar guy.”

  I frowned. “Will? How do you know he’s blue collar?”

  “You knew who I meant, didn’t you? He needs to work through college, doesn’t he? His parents may not have even graduated high school for all we know. I’ve never slept with someone in a different social class, it might be fun.” She fake shivered. “A little rough around the edges, if you know what I mean.”

  I shook my head. “You’re an asshole, Alice.”

  Alice grinned and nodded. “I know, I’m a terrible person.” Will happened to turn around at that moment and caught us both looking at him. He raised his eyebrows at us and then, when Alice smiled flirtatiously, smiled back. Then Alice did that stupid thing where she looks at the ground and bites her lip, which I guess she thinks is totally hot, so she missed the moment when Will looked at me and briefly rolled his eyes. I laughed but managed to turn it into a cough.

  Alice said, “Do you want to bet I can bag him before the end of the week?”

  I said, “How on earth, your mom is here, his dad is here, it’s not like we’re going to get a lot of free time.”

  Alice snorted. “Are you joking? Did you actually read the itinerary?”

  “Uh, no. I leave all that stuff to my mom.” This was a fairly embarrassing admission, and Alice pounced on it.

  “How grown up of you,” she said sarcastically. “There are several periods where we can all hang out, only the kids. Side trips, visits to the mall, whatever. It’s totally doable.”

  “Well, I’m not betting on it. I don’t care what you do.”

  Alice said, “Really? I saw you looking at him, too. Maybe we should both try and see who wins.”

  I felt myself blushing but said no pretty firmly. “He’s a person, Alice, not a prize. Did you miss all those lectures about consent?”

  Alice snorted. “Oh please. You’re saying guys hate being offered sex with no strings attached?”

  “You’d sleep with him to win a bet?”

  “No, I’d sleep with him because this trip is a total bore and I need something to occupy my time. I don’t even know why I’m here. I’m going to USC. My dad went there, he’s on the board, and the admissions director has been to our house and has a boner for my mother. I’m so good.”

  I stared at her, wondering how we’d ever been friends.

  Then Alice said, “I bet you think me and my whole family are hideous, horrible people, but the thing is, Emily, everyone would do whatever they could to get ahead. I’m just being honest about it.” She shrugged. “If you don’t think your mom would blow the dean of Harvard to get you in, you’re an idiot.”

  I wondered if Alice was right. Was everyone else playing the system every way they could? They seemed so nice. Will and another kid were standing nearby, laughing at something on their phones—were they hacking into the school’s mainframe to boost their chances? Were they blackmailing the admissions person? They suddenly both laughed and it seemed unlikely. I’m not naive: The process is a crapshoot; I know that. Colleges get millions of applications from kids with 4.0 GPAs and up every year, and I’ve watched enough college acceptance videos online to know that getting in is as much luck as anything else. We all put a lot of faith in the shibboleths of academic success (not sleeping through Comparative Religion, either; check that vocabulary); we’re like compulsive gamblers who wear their lucky shirt or who only place bets on even days, or brides who wear something blue. We get this grade. Take that AP class. All so our raised hand stands out and we’ll be the one pulled from the ocean. Suddenly I’m completely exhausted and turn up my palms at Alice.

  “I don’t think your whole family is hideous, your little sister is really quite sweet.”

  Alice laughed. She never takes offense; it’s another aspect of her character I envy. Maybe she’s a sociopath who has no human feelings whatsoever, or maybe she’s so incredibly self-confident that other people’s opinions simply roll off her beautiful plumage.

  “Do you know why you and I never became real friends, Emily?” she asked, leaning close enough for me to see the sheen of highlighter on her cheekbones, the dab of lighter shadow at the inner corner of her eye.

  I shrugged. The group had moved off again, and in a moment I was going to walk ahead and lose Alice. “I don’t vape? I don’t know the lyrics to rap songs? I get blackheads and dandruff like every other normal teenager?”

  “Well, yes, all of those, but the biggest problem is you have no sense of humor. You take yourself so seriously.” Alice giggled. “Who the hell cares about penmanship anymore?”

  I was annoyed. “I have a sense of humor, I can be fun.”

  “Oh yeah? Prove it.”

  Just then the tour finished, and I saw the parents group standing across the street. My mother smiled at me, as she always does when she first sees me. There she is, my heart sang, there’s my mother. Don’t tell her but seeing her makes me feel safe.

  I turned to Alice. “You know why you and I never became real friends, Alice?”

  Alice shrugged. “I’m too pretty?”

  “No, it’s because I do take myself seriously. You think you’re here to party, and I know I’m here for something more interesting. If you want to call that having no sense of humor, then fair enough, I’m cool with it.” I pivoted to walk away. “Good luck with your project, Alice. Have fun.”

  I nearly banged into Will, who, it turned out, had left the other kid behind and was apparently about to speak to me. He had his phone in his hand—either the cat video was so good he had to share, or he was offering to let me in on the hacking.

  I muttered an apology, praying he hadn’t heard A
lice talking about him, and pushed by to make my escape. Always so smooth, Emily.

  JESSICA

  So, while Emily was pretending all is normal, clearly something had happened across the street. I could tell from the way she paused to let a driver by, waving her hand impatiently, that she was upset.

  “How was the tour?” I said, wanting to hear her speak a bit before deciding if I needed to dig deeper.

  “It was good,” said Emily. “I liked it better than Georgetown. The lecture halls were very pretty. The dorms were nice. I like the school colors.”

  Huh, that was a lot of detail. I examined her covertly. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” replied Emily. “I’m tired.”

  “Alright,” I said, knowing that wasn’t true. Or maybe it was true, because teenagers are permanently exhausted, but it wasn’t the whole story. I looked across the street and saw the rest of the kids approaching, so I turned and nudged her.

  “Let’s go get coffee or something. We don’t have to stay with the group all the time.”

  One of the selling points of E3 is that they take care of everything on the tour; you just have to pay a ridiculous sum of money. They offer dozens of different tours, some regional like ours, some hopscotching the country to cover a particular major (best colleges for engineering, etc.). Once you’ve picked a tour and handed over your credit card, they do the rest, booking all the tickets, arranging and paying for meals (except where noted and excluded—always read the small print), hotels, transportation, and such. For those of us with no time to ponder the variables, it seemed like a worthwhile exchange. All we had to do was show up and check “college tour” off our list. But it wasn’t like touring North Korea; you could always leave the group, as long as you made it back in time for the bus.

  I walked alongside my daughter, noting the pace of her steps, the set of her shoulders. As a little girl Emily had been shy and reserved, a little bit clingy and interested in staying close. She was the kid sitting on the side twenty minutes after everyone else was in the pool. When I’d expressed concern to her preschool teacher, the teacher laughed and told me to be glad she wasn’t first in the water.

  “She’s not scared, she’s watching. She’s evaluating. When all her friends are doing drugs, she’ll be the one who calls the ambulance, don’t worry.” As Emily wasn’t quite four at the time, the thought of her actually being able to use a phone was as surprising a concept as her doing drugs, but I’d clung to this advice tightly, especially during middle school.

  I missed her being little. Little-kid problems are so much more easily solved than teenage problems. I’m fully aware I’m not the first parent to notice this. I was working full-time, but in the evenings and weekends I had string cheese and cookies, cartoons and hugs, kisses and stuffed toys. I took Emily to baby gym and then toddler gym and then kinder gym on Saturday mornings; later I drove her to dance lessons and piano lessons. I felt competent and quietly proud that I managed to stay patient most of the time.

  I’ll be honest, though, there were days in the office, or in the courtroom, where I forgot I even had a child. Not all day, just periodically. I loved my work. I loved solving problems that were complicated and thorny, that no one else had yet solved. And working hard also meant I was building a wall of protection for us, Emily and me, and if it meant I had less time for Emily, then it was the small price we had to pay until the wall was high enough. Once she was in school and we had Anna, I could convince myself she was fine. But bit by tiny bit the wall I was building ended up between us.

  In the last several years any feeling of competence I ever had has completely eroded. I wake up most days unsure of myself, stressed about work and anxious about Emily. She needs help more than ever before but refuses it with every ounce of the self-assurance I’d foolishly encouraged her to develop. I spent over a decade acquiring advanced Emily-decoding skills, like one of those profilers they bring in on TV cop shows, able to look at a crime scene and tell you where the criminal grew up and whether or not he wears hats. But one day, somewhere around Emily’s thirteenth birthday, I’d woken up in enemy territory, having apparently parachuted in overnight, and none of those skills were any use at all.

  “Did Alice say something to you?” I asked carefully. Not looking at her, like approaching a skittish horse.

  “No,” said Emily. “You know, we barely know each other anymore.”

  “You used to be friends.”

  Emily shrugged. “Back in ninth grade, for about ten minutes. I don’t think you remember how time behaves in high school, Mom. Something can happen one week and be totally forgotten by the following one. Every six-hour school day has about fourteen hours in it.” She was still looking ahead, walking quickly to put distance between herself and Alice. “It’s a miracle of physics.”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I completely knew what she meant. My own life seems to be getting faster every week. However, I do remember my mother grounding me at fourteen, for something predictable like throwing an illicit party, and how the sentence of a month seemed impossibly long. I remember thinking no one at school would recognize me when I got out; they’d stand in the hallways and mutter to each other, Who’s the girl with the unbrushed hair and overgrown fingernails? She looks a little bit like Jessica . . . but didn’t Jessica move away or something? My mother had relented after two weeks, doubtless worn down by the endless whining and stomping about. As every parent of a teenager knows, grounding is a double-edged sword.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked Emily.

  “No,” my daughter replied firmly. I wasn’t fooled for a second. Emily is never hungry . . . until her blood sugar suddenly drops through the floor and she turns into a total monster.

  “Well, I am,” I lied. “Let’s stop here.” We’d reached a reasonable-looking café, and I turned in without waiting for an answer.

  The waitress turned out to be the pink-haired girl who’d shown the kids around Georgetown that morning, but she didn’t recognize Emily. She’d probably already had a busy day, what with showing a bunch of idiots around school and then rushing here for her afternoon shift. I’d waited tables in school; it was actually far more instructive for becoming an adult than anything I’d studied at Columbia.

  “What can I get you ladies? Start with a drink?” The waitress was shooting for perky but falling slightly short. I felt sorry for her.

  “I’ll have coffee and a pastry,” I said. “What do you recommend?”

  The waitress looked at me and probably wanted to suggest cutting back on the baked goods, but instead said, “People love the donuts. They’re baked.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take one of those.”

  “Me, too,” said Emily.

  “I thought you said you weren’t hungry?” I asked innocently. Why do I do that? Why must I always comment? I knew she was hungry, I’d maneuvered her into eating, why couldn’t I leave it at that? No, I have to make a point.

  “I changed my mind.” Emily smiled up at the waitress. “I’ll have an iced coffee, too, please.” She didn’t seem annoyed by my comment, but she dropped her smile once the waitress glanced away. Honestly, I feel like a spy in my own life sometimes, trying to figure out what’s going on using tiny clues, body language, menu choices.

  The waitress nodded, looking towards the door as the rest of the tour group came in. Damn, now Emily wasn’t going to tell me anything. Well, at least I got her to eat something. Despite my close call with ruining the moment, I took a second to fist-bump myself for my masterful ninja parenting. In some ways Emily reminds me of bosses I’d had when I was younger, the kind of out-of-date leaders who needed to think an idea was theirs before they could accept it. I’d quickly learned to propose something after lunch when they were at their most genial, to act mildly confused when I made a mistake and hope their avuncular bullshit sexism would kick in. Emily is like that; her interest in som
ething wanes in exact proportion to the interest I express in it. It’s probably a law of nature. Someone should fund a study.

  “Do you mind if we join you?”

  We looked up to see Will, the boy from the tour, with his father. He was the one who’d spoken.

  “Not at all,” I said, doing that thing where you shift your chair a little bit, indicating your willingness to make room.

  Will smiled at Emily and she smiled back, and I could see she thought he was cute. It was the same smile as the one she wears when she shows me an outfit she already knows looks awesome. I love that smile. That smile gives me hope she knows how wonderful she is, rather than doubting herself. But it comes and goes.

  The boy sat next to her, and I realized he was a full head and shoulders taller than she was. I wondered anew at the enormousness of teenage boys. They go home the summer after sixth or seventh grade and come back in the fall seventeen feet taller. Having never had a son, I usually imagined that the kid’s poor mom comes in one morning, drops her tray (she’s carrying one in this imaginary scene; go with it, okay?), and screams to discover her son is barely fitting in his bed. She flies to get a crowbar to help him get up, then rushes to Target to buy everything three sizes bigger. It’s probably not that sudden, but it seems that way to me.

  The boy’s father smiled at Emily. “So, you’re Emily, right?”

  “That’s right,” Emily said.

  “And you’re Jessica,” the man said to me, proving that he may not have gone to college but he certainly outstripped me in the name-recall contest. “I’m Chris, and this is Will.”

  I smiled at him and said, “I remember from this morning.”

  There could have been an awkward silence at this point, but as both Chris and I could see the kids liked each other, we bounced the conversation along like a doubles beach volleyball team headed for the regionals.

  “What are you thinking of studying at school, Emily?” Chris asked, his clear green eyes regarding my daughter steadily.