SIXTY-SEVEN

I get to go home for Christmas. Thank fucking God. If you had asked me a month ago if I would ever want to go back to Iowa, I would have said, “Are you kidding? No way, no how.”

But not now.

Now I might as well be flying to the moon.

To be home. To be home with my dad and that sweet little farmhouse and a tree in the window and my dad will grill a steak and add a baked potato and a pecan pie and every other thing you could eat to make you fat.

The city is making way now, through the suburbs and out through Pennsylvania, starting to get white, blankets of white, the snow falling down, patient. It’s gonna be about a day and a half on this thing, but I don’t really mind it, rocking back and forth. There’s something gentle about it, cradling, lulling you to sleep.

I sort of just threw everything in a backpack and hustled over to the train station. I didn’t have time for much because the grades were given out this morning and we had to wait forever for our transcripts. They were supposed to be out by ten, but they were out by eleven, so everything was wackadoo.

Looks like all my studying paid off and I am not destined to be homeless. In fact, looks like I got a 4.0, if I may toot my own horn. That means my scholarship is intact.

Praise the Lord and pass the cornflakes.

And that’s not all.

Remember how I told you about how my dad kept texting and texting like a deranged stalker? Cakey-pie, CALL ME!! WHERE R U?! HELLOOOO, EARTH 2 Cakey-pie?! COME IN, Cakey-pie?!?!?! Well, somehow he just wouldn’t stop so I had to just pick up the phone and make sure he hadn’t lost his marbles for good.

So, dear friends, I call him and this is what went down, word for word:

Ring. Ring.

“Hello?”

My dad always answers the phone very cautiously. Maybe he thinks it’s a bill collector.

“Hi, Dad, it’s me.”

“Willa?”

“Um . . . do you have another daughter?”

“I had a daughter once. We used to speak every day.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

“Well, where have you been? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you . . .”

“Dad, it was an insane amount of studying, and I’m sorry, but it was a little bit crazy. So I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to call you. Until now. But I am calling you now, see. This is me. On the phone. Calling.”

“Well, I hope it wasn’t too much.”

“It’s okay, Dad. I did it. I got a 4.0.”

“Oh, Cakey-pie, that’s wonderful!”

“Thanks, Dad. Tell Mom, I guess.”

“Well, I will, honey. But that’s not why I was texting.”

“Well, why were you texting, Dad?”

“All right, well. I’ll make it quick.”

“Okay . . .”

“There’s an envelope for you here.”

“Um, okay.”

“It says it’s from University of California at Berkeley.”

“Oh. Oh . . . oh my God.”

Berkeley, honey?”

“Dad, describe the envelope.”

“Huh?”

Describe the envelope! Please.”

“Well, it’s just a regular-size envelope.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Willa Parker!”

“Sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to swear. It’s just . . .”

“Well, do you want me to open it?”

“No. Not really. It’s just gonna make me more depressed.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks anyway, Dad. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

“Okay, well, you know what? I’m just gonna open it.”

“Dad!”

Dads never do what you tell them. It’s like they were here first or something.

Now I’m just sitting here on the phone with nothing doing. God, I hate being on the phone. Why doesn’t everybody just text? Why does everybody have to talk to everybody all the time anyway?

“Willa?”

“Yes?”

“Willa?”

“Ye-es?”

“Willa.”

“Dad!”

“Okay, okay. Here’s what it says . . . ‘Dear Willa Parker, On behalf of the admissions committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to the University of California–Berkeley.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“Willa! What about your mother? What about Princeton?”

“You know what, Dad?” I pause, thinking it over. “Fuck Princeton.”

If it’s possible to hear someone smiling over the telephone, I hear that now. “You know what, sweetie? You’re right. Fuck Princeton.”

“Oh my God.”

“You’re going to Berkeley, honey! You’re gonna be a radical!”

And now, I won’t lie to you, there are tears in my eyes and I’m kind of hyperventilating, too, and everything from this year, everything bad and good, comes rushing over me and I can barely breathe.

“Willa, honey, what’s the matter? Why are you crying? Was it your safety school?”

“No!” I can barely talk, thinking how strange it all is, how unfair and strange and hurly-burly life is that this is what I get, that I get this, and Remy gets . . . what? How none of it makes sense and none of it is ever fair and don’t try to pin it down because you’ll never be able to.

“Well, I’m proud of you, Willa. I’m so proud of you.”

“Thanks, Dad. You should probably tell Mom. She doesn’t know. I didn’t tell her I was applying or anything. You know . . . ’cause either she’d forbid it or she’d try to pull strings and then I’d never really know, you know? Like if it was me who got in or the strings.”

“Oh, that is so noble. You’re like a noble little lion.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“I’m so proud of you.”

Hearing that, I could walk on the clouds.

I love my dad, and now, suddenly, back on this train, I love this whole stupid year and all the horrible things in it and I love the snow falling down around me and the train chugging over and over again on the tracks.

Right before he gets off the phone, he says, “I love you so much, little Willa.” He always says it. He’s said it a million times. Every night before bed and then some. But for some reason this time it lands exactly in the center of my soul. And I can’t wait to see him. And I can’t wait to make him proud.

And I know I will.

Now it’s getting dark on the train and the stars are all about to come on one by one. There’s a crescent moon halfway up the sky. Here I am, looking out at all that infinite space and wondering how anything gets to be anything. Sometimes it all just seems like a dream anyway. Like maybe I am dreaming this and you are dreaming your dream, too. Like it’s a fake, somehow. A paper plane.

The snow is falling down in swirls now, getting more and more impatient. Building up. Gunning.

I think about Remy and Milo, and it’s okay. They get to be who they are.

I get to let them be.

And I forgive them. I forgive them with every electron in every cell of my body. I forgive them. But you know what’s funny? I know no matter what . . . they will never forgive themselves. For anything. For everything. Anything that can be made hard . . . they do. And anything that can be made easy . . . they make hard.

It’s kind of preposterous now, looking out at the snow-swirled sky, all that swooshing past me now, back to that place, that time, those city lights.

All that time, all that feeling like I was in a Fitzgerald novel, wishing I could be like them, trying to be like them, being mad at myself for not being like them. Hoping somehow I could become them, never thinking, not once, not one time, that maybe, just maybe, I could become something better.

Maybe I could become something that wasn’t about twelve-million-dollar estates and summers in Amasandwich and people with last names like Hobbes and Peabody and Tate.

Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t so bad to be myself.

The snow is coming down in sheets now. Stirring. Nothing but the spruce and the pine and the cedars to make a say. All the way through the desolate Pennsylvania panhandle, chugga-chugga-chugga. It isn’t until the white sheet blanket coming up through Ohio that I realize I am never going back.