I am obviously in a weakened condition: That doesn’t sound ludicrous. It doesn’t even sound impossible. Rosa and Oscar go into full texting and calling mode: I think they contact everyone from both AP calc classes. Some kids, like Stuart, have marching band or sports or some other commitment. But when we arrive at Graeter’s in Oscar’s beat-up Toyota, ten kids are already there waiting for us.
“Let’s call Jala, too,” I say impulsively. “She doesn’t have class on Wednesday afternoon—let’s see if she’s available.”
That’s how I end up at a table with Oscar and Rosa and Jala and a jumbo cup of mint chocolate chip ice cream. After a burst of other kids coming over to tell me, “Good for you, for standing up to Mr. Hattimer!” somehow we stop talking about school. We don’t talk about the homework we’re ignoring, either, or about our college applications or hopes or fears. I certainly don’t say anything about Daddy or the Court scholarship. Instead, Oscar tells how hard it was growing up as the only Chinese-American kid anyone has ever heard of who hates rice. Rosa amuses us with imitations of the best and worst telenovelas from Mexico. Jala and I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Eventually we’re the last ones left at Graeter’s except for the workers.
“Why didn’t we ever do this kind of thing while I was still in high school?” Jala asks.
Rosa makes a show of pulling out her empty pockets and repeating a line from one of the telenovelas: “No dinero, no tiempo.”
No money, no time.
“But we can do it a lot more this year,” Jala says. “Just—maybe not four-dollar ice cream cones. Maybe . . . maybe we could just eat jelly beans at the park or something?”
“Jelly beans?” Oscar asks incredulously. “Jelly beans?”
“What? It’s not rice.” Jala defends herself, which makes the rest of us laugh.
By the time I get home, Mom has already left for work. Somehow going out for ice cream has made it so that I’m able to try calling Tiffany and Rachel Congreves again. My luck has changed: Both of them answer their cell phones. And both of them say, yes, they have time and are willing to talk to me about Whitney the babysitter; Whitney the patient neighbor and pseudo big sister; Whitney, their idealized view of what it was like to be a teenager. They talk about how they watched her from afar during her high school years, and how she made them believe that they would be the star of everything when they got to Deskins High School too.
Both of them get strange tones in their voices when we inch toward any mention of Whitney’s life after high school, but now I know what that’s about. I let them steer the conversation back into safe territory. I am anything but a persistent interviewer. Everything was safe and charming and perfect for Whitney in high school, and if Tiffany and Rachel want to pretend that that’s how things stayed in Whitney’s life, who am I to object?
After I’m done talking to them, I manage to bang out a decent rough draft of my scholarship application essay. It’s about how much Tiffany and Rachel adored Whitney and how sad it was for them when she grew up and left them behind: two peasants in the Land of the Two Seas, longing for their queen to return.
I know I’m not really writing about Tiffany and Rachel and how disillusioned they were by Whitney.
I’m really writing about me and Daddy.
Now—
a few weeks later
It’s two days before the Whitney Court Scholarship application is due, and I’ve decided I’ll turn it in tonight. Over the last few weeks I’ve tweaked my essay so it positively overflows with nostalgia for long-ago happiness; I’ve edited out any hint of blaming anyone for the way things changed.
I am a model of efficiency putting together the cover letter I’m going to send by e-mail, along with the basic grid of information—name, address, phone number, etc.—that’s required. But when I open the essay to read it one last time before sending it off, I can’t quite let go.
Maybe I should put it aside for an hour or two, then proofread it one last time with fresh eyes, I tell myself.
I minimize everything and open another application form instead: the Common App. I know I am way behind Stuart and Rosa and even Oscar, who’s usually the worst procrastinator in our group. Stuart loved getting to explain to me, “No, Becca, you don’t have to fill out a different application for every school you apply to. Just about every college takes the Common App—you just fill it in online and then it’s done.” Stuart finished the Common App back in August and is now working his way through the supplemental forms so many colleges require.
I just haven’t been in the right mood to attack any college application.
But tonight, with my Court scholarship essay done except for a final read-through, I can dare to believe everything will turn out okay: I will get to go to college. Regardless of Daddy. Regardless of all the psychological booby traps he left in my mind. Regardless of money.
I download the Common App and begin filling in my legal name, my preferred name, my social security number . . . I’m amused that they ask for an “IM address” as well as e-mail. I don’t get to “family information” until page 2. But even this doesn’t faze me.
It will work out. It will work out. . . .
I leave everything connected to “Parent 2” blank. Maybe I will end up checking the “Unknown” box. It wouldn’t be a lie, exactly. Sure, I lived with Daddy until I was in eighth grade; I talked to him every single day of the first fourteen years of my life. I spent hours and hours and hours with him. But evidently I never knew him at all.
I still don’t understand anything about him.
I start getting bogged down in questions I’m going to have to ask Mom about—will I be able to apply for financial aid or not? Before it can depress me, I minimize the Common App as well, lining it up at the bottom of my screen with all the Whitney Court Scholarship documents. I start looking at college websites instead: Vanderbilt and Duke and Georgetown, along with some lesser-known schools like Oberlin, DePauw, Denison . . . Everything I’m looking up is private, and therefore very, very expensive. I decide to keep an open mind and look at public schools, too. I start with the two Ms. Stela mentioned as giving a lot of merit aid, Toledo and Kentucky.
I’ve just opened the Kentucky site when the handle of the front door rattles. Mom’s been at work for the past three hours and nobody else should be trying to get into our apartment. I’m trying to decide between diving behind the couch to hide or looking for a weapon to fend off an attacker, when the door swings all the way open:
It’s just Mom.
“You scared me to death!” I say. I actually put my hand to my chest, as if that can slow down my pounding heart.
“I had a headache and things were really slow, so they sent me home,” she says, dropping her purse onto the couch. Her eyes are bloodshot and her hair’s a mess—she really does look awful.
“You mean, you’re finally taking a sick day? Your very first one?” I marvel. This has been a point of pride for her, that she never takes time off. My private theory is that both of us were so miserable that first year here that she could have been very, very ill and not even noticed, because it was no different from how lousy she usually felt.
“No, it’s not an official sick day—they just didn’t need me tonight,” Mom says.
So, you won’t get paid? And now we’ll have even less money? I think, but don’t say.
Mom walks behind me on her way to hang up her coat. She stops abruptly.
“University of Kentucky? Why are you looking up UK?” she asks, staring down at my computer screen. Something in her tone has shifted—it’s almost like she’s mad.
Or even more scared than usual.
“Ms. Stela said they give big scholarships,” I say. “I thought I’d look, anyway.”
“But—you can’t go to UK!” Mom protests. “We have relatives there, or used to—my cousin’s kids . . . what if somebody recognized you?”
Even before Daddy was arrested, it’d been a long time since we’d visit
ed any of Mom’s relatives. I don’t think I’d be able to tell Mom’s cousin’s kids apart from any other UK students.
But I guess they might remember me.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, closing the UK website. “I was just looking. I don’t really want to go there, anyhow.”
The Common App form I’d been filling out pops up to replace the UK site.
Mom leans closer and squints at the screen.
“What’s that?” she asks, and there’s panic in her voice now.
“The Common App—you know, how I’m applying for college?” I say. “I fill it in online and then—”
“Online?” Mom interrupts. She makes the word sound like “poison” or “genocide” or “murder”—something with a grim, potentially fatal meaning. “Oh, you mean, you just got the form online, and then you’ll print it out and send it in, right?”
“Well, I can do it that way,” I say. I click back to the information page. “But look—they strongly recommend people do the whole process online. And I was thinking . . .”
It strikes me that this is a huge step for me. I sat down and started filling out the Common App and didn’t think, Oh, no, where will this information be stored if I hit save? Who has access to it? What if this site gets hacked? And I really did have it in my mind that I would fill out the information and send it in online, just like Stuart and Rosa and Oscar and Clarice and Lakshmi and every other college-bound kid I know.
I was going to act normal for once, without even thinking I was acting normal.
I point to the “https” at the top of the screen.
“Look, it’s safe,” I tell Mom. “They ask for social security numbers and everything. “They’ve got to keep this site secure.”
Mom makes a skeptical sound. Or maybe it’s gagging.
“Your father hacked sites like that,” she says.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “I’ll mail it! But this is going to cost a fortune in postage, and—”
“How many schools were you planning to apply to?” she asks. She pulls up a chair beside me. She’s hovering way too close.
I do my best not to sound annoyed.
“Well, I don’t really know what I want to major in, so I want a school with a wide range of good programs,” I say. I could be quoting from one of the websites I just looked at. “For my reach schools, I was thinking Georgetown, maybe Duke, maybe . . .”
I am not going to say “Vanderbilt.” Not when Mom already has an expression of horror spreading across her face.
“But, Becca, those are schools people watch,” she says. “Places the national news media go when they do reports, ‘What are college students thinking about now?’ Georgetown—Georgetown’s in Washington, D.C.! Do you know how many reporters there are swarming all over Washington, D.C.?”
She makes them sound like a plague of locusts. And she makes it sound like those reporters would be as interested in swarming all over Daddy’s story and us as they were three years ago.
No, actually she sounds even more terrified of that possibility than she was three years ago.
Why? What’s wrong with her? Has she totally lost her mind?
I can’t face those questions head-on. It’s like I can only handle having one defective parent at a time.
“Well, Duke’s just in North Carolina,” I say defensively.
“Right, and haven’t you thought about how many Belpre High kids try to go there?” she asks. She rubs her temples. “What if you ran into someone you knew from Georgia on campus? Don’t you think they’d put it on Facebook? ‘Guess who I just saw . . .’ And then the word would spread, and the next thing you know, there’d be TV reporters following you around, sticking microphones in your face . . .”
Vanderbilt is also a place a lot of Georgia kids would want to go, I think.
And then I am too mad to think clearly.
“Why would reporters care anymore about me? Or you? Or Daddy?” I ask Mom. “And even if they did, what if I just said, ‘Leave me alone! I don’t want to talk?’ Did you ever think of that? If you’d just done that three years ago, we wouldn’t have had to move, wouldn’t have had to start over . . .”
I am completely rewriting the past—I wanted to move just as much as she did. But there are rebellious thoughts tumbling in my mind: What if we’d stayed? Mom was supposed to be the grown-up. What if she’d just said, “Becca, we’ve got to tough this out. I know it’s hard, but we’ll survive.” Would we maybe have been better off? Would we both be fine now—not always so terrified of our own shadows? What’s there to be afraid of if the whole world already knows your secrets?
“Reporters don’t take no for an answer,” Mom mutters.
“Well, who cares?” I explode. “It’s not like they’re going to tie us down and torture us until we talk!”
Mom puts her hand down on a pencil I left lying on the table. She starts rolling it back and forth, back and forth, a nervous tic.
“Becca,” she says slowly. “I didn’t want to tell you this at the time, but . . . there were death threats. People wanted to kill us. Not just Daddy. Us. To get back at him.”
I know this is supposed to horrify me. I know I am supposed to cower beside Mom, to start sobbing, “Oh, thank you, Mommy! Thank you for saving my life!” Maybe I’m even supposed to thank her for acting so insanely fearful on my behalf for the past three years.
But I’m not feeling any of it. There’s no room in me for anything but anger right now.
“So what?” I say. “Isn’t it kind of like we buried ourselves alive so they didn’t have to?”
“Becca . . . ,” Mom says.
I lift my chin defiantly.
“That was all three years ago,” I say. “It’s over. How much longer do we have to live like this? How much longer do we have to hide? The rest of our lives?”
I spin my laptop toward her.
“Where do you want me to go to college—some Podunk University in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to offer?” I challenge. “Or, no, wait—why bother going to college if I’m just going to have to live in a cave the rest of my life?”
Mom does not reach for the computer. She has tears in her eyes, but that doesn’t stop me.
“Deskins actually has hot and cold running water and indoor plumbing and Internet access and everything—I’m surprised you let us live here,” I say.
“Deskins has . . . very good schools,” Mom says faintly. “That’s why we moved here.”
She might as well have stabbed me in the heart with that pencil.
“Oh, right, so I can get a good education that I can’t ever use,” I shout at her.
“Once your daddy’s out of prison,” Mom begins. “Then—”
“Then I can have a real life?” I demand. Her reasoning makes no sense. Wouldn’t Daddy being around again put me more at risk? Bring back the death threats, maybe? But I’m not calm enough to pick apart the holes in her logic. I settle for screaming, “So I can’t do anything until I’m twenty-four? Seven more years?”
I jerk the computer back away from Mom’s side of the table.
“Leave me alone,” I demand. “I’ve got a scholarship application to work on. Because I don’t care what you say. I’m going to college next year!”
I pull the Court scholarship e-mail I’d written back to the center of my laptop screen. My hands shake as I attach the information sheet and my essay. One more click of the mouse—it’s sent. I guess I’m not going to give that essay one last read-through. I’m living dangerously now.
I guess I’ve been living dangerously all along.
Now
The next morning, in the near darkness before I go to school, I reread my essay. It’s fine. There’s not a single word I want to change. So it doesn’t matter that I didn’t proofread it last night.
Is it going to matter that I fought with Mom? Is it going to matter what either of us said? Is it going to matter that I don’t want to stay as terrified as she is?
&
nbsp; Except for the dim glow of the computer, I don’t turn on any lights. I sneak out and close the door as quietly as possible, so I don’t wake Mom.
For the next week or so I avoid her as much as possible. I beg Riggoli’s for extra work hours during the afternoon, while Mom’s still at home. I do my homework at the library instead of the apartment. I walk everywhere, so I don’t have to ask her for the car.
I avoid Stuart, too. I know there’s no way I can go visit Vanderbilt and Emory with him and Rosa and whoever else. But I can’t bear to say no, to completely shut that door.
I tell everyone I have to skip lunch every day to work on calc. And then, just so it’s not a lie, I really do work on calc at lunch.
I get a 98 percent on the makeup exam. But I feel no sense of triumph, no relief, no joy. No matter what Mr. Hattimer says, calc is not real life. What good is calc, anyway, when my own mother seems determined to keep me from going to college?
And then that same afternoon I swing by the apartment after school to pick up my laptop before heading to the library. Mom should still be asleep, and if I tiptoe in and tiptoe out, she’ll never know. But as I walk past the row of mailboxes at the end of the building, I see that ours is overflowing; we have so many letters, the mail carrier couldn’t even latch the door.
Maybe there’s a letter from Daddy, forwarded by the attorney, I think as I reach for the stacks of letters. Maybe he’ll tell us . . .
What? His letters never sound like him anyhow. They’re always typed and too formal and nothing like the fun-loving Daddy I remember. What do I want from him, anyway? The man is in prison. Do I really think he’s going to be able to convince Mom, “Let Becca apply to any college she wants. Let her fill out financial aid forms and college apps and anything else she wants to online! It’s safe”?
Yeah, right.
I rip one of the envelopes, trying to pull the whole stack out. No, not an envelope—it’s the back page of a thick brochure, practically a booklet.
It’s a brochure from Harvard.
Harvard? I think. Harvard wants me? Or, at least, wants me to apply?
Full Ride Page 15
