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 visited 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.