Layoverland

by Gabby Noone

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “And?” he asks.

  “And what?”

  “Well, aren’t you going to apologize for being rude to me?”

  “No. I’m not,” I say, stepping out of the cart. “The only reason I was rude to you was because you were pressing me about my own life. That’s not the point of these sessions.”

  “Fair enough. But you were being judgmental before that. About Harvard and the whole SAT answers thing. I know that was messed up, but I thought the point of these sessions was for me to be honest. And how am I supposed to be honest when I have to worry about what your reaction will be?”

  He’s right. I’ve let my guard down too far.

  “I know I looked like a spoiled brat yesterday,” Caleb says as we walk inside the hangar. “And maybe I was. But I didn’t tell you exactly why I was so obsessed with getting into Harvard because . . . well . . . it’s kind of a sore subject for me.”

  “All right,” I say, settling into my seat. “Then show me.”

  Caleb takes a deep breath then flips down his helmet. I turn on the Memstractor and we’re transported to a staircase lined with framed family photos.

  “Those are my parents,” he says, pointing to a photo on the wall of a couple laughing with each other on a picnic blanket, their textbooks spread out before them. It’s the same woman from Caleb’s earlier memory of his birthday party. His mom. She’s sitting next to some football-player type with blond hair. His dad.

  “They met at Harvard law school.”

  He stares at the photo for a few seconds, then looks at another one. Suddenly we’re transported to a college campus with redbrick buildings and a sprawling green lawn full of people sitting at round tables. Underneath a maroon-and-white balloon arch, toddler Caleb is getting his picture taken with his parents. They look perfect, like the photo could be used in a brochure promoting next year’s reunion.

  “You know, if I’m being honest,” I say, looking around, “this place looked a whole lot nicer in Legally Blonde.”

  “That movie wasn’t even filmed in Cambridge, Bea. It was filmed in Los Angeles.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Anyway,” he says, drawing out the word and turning away from me. “My parents were super into alumni culture. They took me to their five-year reunion. They bought me little Harvard sweatshirts for Christmas. . . .”

  Now we’re inside his childhood living room. It’s more modest than I was expecting, with a tabletop-size Christmas tree and only a handful of presents underneath. Past Caleb tears open a box, pulls the sweatshirt out, and holds it up to his chest. Caleb’s dad puts his arm around his mom’s shoulders and gives her a squeeze as they look on adoringly.

  “I don’t know,” Present Caleb says. “It was just a given that I would go there and follow in their footsteps.”

  “So that’s it?” I ask, unimpressed. “Your parents went to Harvard and had their happily ever after, so you had to go there too?”

  Caleb scrunches up his face.

  “That’s the thing: they didn’t have a happily ever after. My mom was a first-generation Mexican American who was going to school to become an immigration lawyer. My dad’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower and my grandparents considered George and Barbara Bush to be, in their words, ‘close personal friends.’ Do I need to spell it out for you? They were doomed from the start. But I guess they were happy for a time. My dad had this progressive phase in college where he swore off his family, which was totally bogus because they were still paying his tuition. Then he met my mom and fell in love. She got pregnant with me the year after they graduated and they decided to keep me and get married.”

  “So then what?” I press. “His conservative supervillain genes were just too powerful and overtook his brain and he had to return to his old life?”

  “Ehhh.” He shrugs. “Kind of. His family cut him off and he freaked out about us having no money and became a corporate lawyer. That’s when things fell apart and my mom realized she couldn’t love him anymore. Now he’s one of those people who identifies as ‘socially liberal and fiscally conservative.’ Whatever that means.”

  “Oh, so he thinks the problems that plague society are bad but their causes are fine?” I say sarcastically. “Because he can make a profit from them?”

  Caleb looks at me slack-jawed.

  “That’s exactly how my mom would describe it to me,” he says, blinking.

  “I don’t mean to totally trash my dad. All things considered, he was a good dad. He helped me with my homework. He’d buy me really, really nice Christmas and birthday presents. He went to all my soccer games.”

  His memories transport us through a montage of time spent with his dad. They look like the stock footage that would appear if you searched “father and son bonding.”

  “You did a great job out there, buddy!” his dad calls, standing on the edge of a field, wearing a business suit.

  “I lived with him in the summer and stayed with him on weekends, but . . .” He trails off.

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know if you would get this, but, like . . . you know how companies will hire one person of color and then pat themselves on the back for being soooo diverse?”

  “I’ve heard about it.”

  “Sometimes I felt like I was the diversity hire for my dad’s . . . whole life. Or like I was just the holdover from some phase he had.”

  Now we’re transported to a beach that’s nearly empty except for a family clumped together near the water. It’s Caleb’s dad, a younger blond woman, a pair of blond toddlers, and Caleb awkwardly hunched next to them.

  They’re all wearing white button-downs and khaki pants. A photographer is taking their picture. It looks nearly identical in composition to the portrait that sat on my school principal’s desk.

  Who decided that wearing khakis on the beach was the ultimate way for the nuclear family to be immortalized?

  “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing to the woman. “Your stepmom?”

  “Yeah. That’s Cheryl and . . . the twins.”

  She puts her arms tightly around the two of them, making Caleb stick out in the photo even more.

  “I mean, she tried her best to include me, but . . .”

  Now we’re in a big, bright kitchen with granite countertops. The kind of kitchen people on House Hunters would go wild for.

  “I made tacos, Caleb!” Cheryl says. “Your dad says they’re your favorite.”

  She plops a platter in front of him. It’s full of ground beef so gray and unseasoned that it resembles gravel. Past Caleb just makes a face at her that is half smile, half grimace.

  “I’ve never told anyone this,” Present Caleb says, looking over and gauging my face. “But I’ve always kind of felt guilty for being close with my dad.”

  “What? Why would you feel guilty for having a parent who cared about you?”

  I think of my own dad and how he only did the bare minimum of keeping Emmy and I fed and bathed after our mom was killed. We really raised each other.

  “Because my dad is everything I hate! My dad is the problem. He is a rich, entitled white guy who votes for the worst people. If he weren’t a good dad, it would’ve been so much easier to take a stand and cut him out of my life and not let him buy me a stupid Range Rover with the money he made being a lawyer who thinks corporations are people.”

  “Oh yeah, that problem we all know so well,” I say sarcastically. “The turmoil of being gifted a luxury car.”

  Okay, well, my dad did give me that used 1999 Honda Civic under Monica’s insistence.

  “Bea. I’m serious. Do you know how guilty I felt just for having a relationship with him? I thought maybe it could be productive. Like, as his main connection to the non–Fox News–watching world, it was my d
uty to change his mind, but then every time politics came up . . .”

  Now we’re back inside Caleb’s dad’s kitchen, where the family is eating dinner.

  “Did you hear the news?” Cheryl asks. “They voted to keep the Affordable Care Act today.”

  “Yeah. Ridiculous,” his dad says. “Healthcare should be a commodity, not a free-for-all.”

  Past Caleb takes a massive bite of his disgusting taco and chews aggressively for a very long moment, staring down at the table.

  “It was like my body would shut down,” Present Caleb concludes. “I knew why I didn’t agree with him, but I could never just spit it out. I was such a coward. I’ve even wondered if that’s why I ended up here. Because I had some moral obligation to change my dad’s way of thinking and I didn’t fulfill it.”

  He pauses and looks up and around.

  “If you’re hoping for the green light to start flashing right now,” I say, “I don’t think it will.”

  He waves a hand through his imaginary, pixelating hair.

  “Look, Caleb,” I continue. “I think God, or whoever or whatever is controlling all of this, is definitely petty, but that’d be straight up cruel to punish you, a child—”

  “I’m basically eighteen,” he interrupts.

  “Whatever,” I say, rolling my eyes. “It’d be petty to punish you, an almost-not-child, for your fully grown father’s flaws.”

  “Well, what if I’m here because I wasted all the privileges I did have?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, my mom grew up working her butt off so she could have a better life than her parents did. She didn’t go to a fancy high school. She didn’t have a personal tutor. She certainly didn’t have fifteen hundred dollars to spend on a fake SAT answer key . . . and she still made it to Harvard. And now she uses what she learned there for good, to help people. What did I ever do to really help anyone?”

  His memory switches again. We’re back in the same small living room from his childhood. His mom is sitting at a table on her laptop, with stacks and stacks of files around her. She looks the same, but she has a single streak of gray in her long hair and wears thick-rimmed glasses now. Caleb walks through the front door.

  “Hi, sweetie,” his mom says without looking up from her work. “How was your father’s?”

  “Fine,” Caleb says, taking off his backpack.

  “Did you eat dinner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you actually eat dinner or did you just politely eat three bites of Cheryl’s world-famous tacos again?”

  “No,” Caleb says, the corners of his mouth twitching. “I politely ate three bites of something called ‘Mexican Lasagna.’”

  His mom looks up and gasps.

  “It was like lasagna, but with jarred salsa instead of marinara sauce,” Caleb admits with a guilty smile.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me!”

  “She said she got the recipe on Pinterest. You know, I can text her and ask for the link if you’re interested in making it, Mom . . .” he says with a sly smile.

  “Oh yeah? Well, if I ever ask for one of Cheryl’s recipes, please call 9-1-1 because that could only mean I’m having a stroke.”

  They start hysterically laughing. The two of them have the same exact laugh that kind of starts with a hissing noise through their teeth, and both sigh in unison when they’re done.

  It’s a nice moment and, for some reason, maybe because I never really knew my mom and never got to make stupid jokes with her, it makes me want to cry.

  I look to Present Caleb to my right and I realize that is exactly what he’s doing.

  “Your abuela came over and made us enchiladas last night,” his mom says, turning back to her work. “There’re some in the fridge if you want to heat them up.”

  “Thank god,” Past Caleb says, heading toward the kitchen. “Is it cool if I eat in my room? I need to study.”

  “You’re always studying,” his mom says. “Look what I’ve done . . . raised a huge nerd.”

  Past Caleb stops and turns.

  “Well, look at you,” he says, gesturing to all the paperwork around her. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!”

  “Have I set a bad example?” she asks with a touch of sarcasm, slumping over the table.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “No way. Good night, Mom.”

  “I didn’t even ask her about her day or the cases she was working on,” Present Caleb says next to me, tears streaming down his face. “All I could think about was me and Harvard, all the time. I thought that getting in would be this, like, big symbolic thing, and they could come together again and be proud of me.”

  “I mean . . .” I start. “Is it a bad idea to get obsessed with an elitist cultural institution that doesn’t disclose to the public how they select from applicants? Yes. But can I kind of see why you were so obsessed now? Yeah. You just wanted to make your parents proud in their own ways.”

  And you did make them proud! I want to scream. You’d have to be insane to not be proud of a son like you!

  But I can’t.

  Because I have to remember who it is I’m really talking to.

  “So did you get in?” I blurt out ungracefully, throwing salt on his wound. “You mentioned before you were applying early decision. Did you find out?”

  Caleb turns and stares at me and opens his mouth to speak, but before he can say anything, the Memstractor 3000 shuts down. There are no flashing lights, no alarms, no sounds over the PA system. We’re back inside the airplane hangar, sitting across from each other in our helmets.

  “That’s so weird,” I say. I turn and look at the machine switch.

  Resting on it is a hand with long, mauve-colored fingernails.

  Sadie.

  26

  “So what then?” I asked Emmy. “You were impregnated like the Virgin Mary?”

  She winced and rolled her eyes at me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this happened?” I continued. “I would’ve gone with you. I would’ve had your back.”

  “Because I didn’t want anyone to know, okay? I just need you to stay calm for me.”

  “I’m being totally calm,” I said in a high-pitched voice that was the opposite of calm. “Can you just tell me who did this to you?”

  “What do you mean ‘did this’ to me?”

  “What boy knocked you up and then didn’t even have the guts to go with you? So I can go beat his ass.”

  “Nobody ‘did’ this to me, okay?” she said, finally, pulling out of my arms. “See, this is why I didn’t . . . Do you remember how I got into that STEM scholarship competition at Penn State?”

  Emmy had gone to the program during fall break, which sounded more generous in name than “two days off before a weekend in October.” She’d designed a mock-up for an alarm system that saves children and pets from being left inside a too-hot car, because of course she did.

  At the end, she won a scholarship that wouldn’t pay for the entirety of college, but was significantly more than what our dad had put aside for us (i.e., exactly zero dollars and zero cents). I was so proud of her. And I was relieved she would have the few days to herself, independent from Skyler. At the time, she complained with a touch of self-consciousness that Skyler couldn’t apply to the program with her because he was too rich and too male to qualify.

  “Well, I lost my virginity to another boy in the program. I don’t know. It just happened.” She shrugged. “And then a few weeks later, I realized that I was . . . What was I supposed to do?”

  “I’m not judging you, Emmy. You know that.”

  “Aren’t you though?” she says, her voice cracking. “I didn’t tell you because I know what you’re capable of. You most definitely would’ve tracked this boy down and found some way to ruin his life.” />
  She wasn’t entirely wrong. As she was speaking the words “another boy in the program,” I was speculating if that would be enough information to figure out his address.

  “How did you even get there, Emmy? How did you even get home safely? I would’ve given you a ride!”

  I couldn’t believe this. My little sister got an abortion and she was too afraid to tell me, her best friend. I racked my brain, trying to think of any signs I’d missed of her crying out for help.

  Was I really that selfish that I hadn’t noticed her behaving differently? All those times I banged on the door to make her finish up in the bathroom, was she hunched over the toilet with morning sickness? Anxiously peeing over a drugstore pregnancy test? This was the type of thing that seemed impossible to hide from someone you not only shared a room but a bunk bed with. Emmy, who couldn’t even sneak Oreos into our room without me instantly begging her to share them.

  “I had Monica take me,” she mumbled quickly, putting her head in her hands.

  “Monica?” I yelled. “You trusted Monica over me?”

  Somehow this was the part of the whole thing that shocked me the most.

  “The thought of getting a mani-pedi with her is repulsive, let alone having her accompany you to your . . . your abortion. Ugh!”

  “Shut up, Bea!” Emmy said, looking around self-consciously. “Can you just shut up? For once.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Well, I thought I was going to be, but then I got sent this creepy picture of myself from a number I didn’t recognize. God knows who else got it! I mean, Skyler . . .”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a nervous-looking freshman emerge from her stall and smile politely toward us, avoiding eye contact.

  “No one has to know,” I said to Emmy. “As far as Skyler’s concerned, you had to go there for a cervical cancer screening. Or to get a urinary tract infection treated. Planned Parenthood offers a plethora of services.”

  By the end of my rant, I was practically yelling toward the unsuspecting girl just trying to wash her hands.

  “I can’t lie to him again, Bea,” Emmy said quietly.