The last week of March was when most people found out what colleges they’d been accepted to. Wednesday was the big day for most people. Many of them got the news on their phones. You’d hear random screams or outbursts from other classrooms. And then people in the hall would be laughing and super happy and threatening to not bother going back to their afternoon classes.
After last period, people who hadn’t heard were frantically checking their phones. You’d see someone beaming with joy at one locker and then, a few lockers down, someone else in tears. In the midst of the excitement, an e-mail from Cal Arts silently materialized on my phone. Staring down at it while I stood at my locker, I felt like my life was about to take its first major turn. I slipped my phone into my pocket. I couldn’t look at it yet.
I drove the RAV4 home. My mother wasn’t home. It was just me in the big house. I did my usual routine, opening the refrigerator and getting out the milk. I took a bowl out of the dishwasher and a box of Cheerios from the cabinet. I filled the bowl and poured in the milk.
I took out my phone and set it on the table beside me. I looked into my bowl and began to eat. I kept my head down. Antoinette had once said if I’d been born in a different century I’d be a monk. I felt like that now. Spooning the Cheerios into my mouth, my head down, my mind empty, my eyes focused on the light brown circles floating in the white milk as I scooped up every last Cheerio.
When I was done I put the bowl in the sink and sat down at the table again. I picked up my phone. I opened the e-mail, which sent me to a link. I opened the link and found a message. I pressed on it:
We are pleased to inform you . . .
I’d been accepted. I let out a long breath. I sat back and closed my eyes for a few seconds. I waited for a feeling of great happiness to come over me. And it did. A little bit. But what I mostly felt was a growing sense of now I’ll have to go. It had been such a pleasant daydream: art school, being an artist, me and my camera. But what was the reality going to be? And I had no backup plan. I’d basically thrown myself off a cliff. This was the direction I was going, whether I wanted to or not.
• • •
Kai didn’t get into Oberlin, her first-choice college. She didn’t get into her second or third choices either. She did get into New York University, though. She called me from in front of the supermarket where she was with her mother. I could hear the shopping carts banging together. She read me the acceptance notice. She was of course relieved that she got in somewhere. But NYU? From everything she’d read, it was huge and impersonal and there was no real campus. You were dumped in the middle of New York City, basically. She wasn’t sure she wanted that. She didn’t know if she could handle the stress.
“But you want to be a writer,” I reminded her. “New York is great for that.” She had told me this a couple months before.
“Yeah, but I’ll be all alone. And the dorms are tiny. And there’s no grass.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” I said.
There was a pause. I heard a sniffle on her end. “I wanted to go to a real college,” she said, her voice filling with emotion. “With courtyards and Frisbees and all that.”
“Frisbees?” I said. “You’ve never thrown a Frisbee in your life.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Maybe they’ll have other things. That are good in other ways.”
“I don’t want to go to New York,” she said. “It’s too much. It’s too scary.”
“But how do you know until you get there?”
• • •
Antoinette got accepted to a college called St. John’s. It was a small school in New Mexico where you only read the classic books. That was the entire curriculum. You started with Plato as a freshman and then went right through the rest of civilization. It was for weirdos and geniuses, it sounded like. I imagined skinny dudes with wire-rim glasses, wearing tank tops and sandals to class.
Antoinette didn’t say much about it. And then she made fun of Kai for being afraid of New York. “You’re going to love it,” she said one night as we drove to Burrito Express in Kai’s Subaru. “Are you kidding? You’re going to be so glad you’re not surrounded by frat boys and football games. NYU will be perfect for you.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Kai.
“Oh my God,” said Antoinette. “I am so right.”
• • •
By mid-April, it was mostly settled where people were going to college. Grace Anderson would not be going to Puget Sound with Austin, but instead was going to University of Oregon. So were Petra Jones and Logan Hewitt. Logan Hewitt would be living in the Hewitt-Lonsdale dormitory, which his father had donated the money for, since he’d gone to Oregon too. Claude was going to Santa Clara College near San Francisco. I didn’t know anything about it but someone said everyone was preppy and good-looking, which sounded about right. Emma Van Buskirk was going to Yale. Olivia Goldstein was going to Smith College back East, which Kai wanted to go to, but didn’t get in. Bennett, I found out, was going to University of Portland to study electrical engineering. Which people joked about. “If you want to have your brain rewired, who better than Bennett!”
And last but not least, I was going to Cal Arts. Which, I found, confused people. Or at least nobody really said anything about it. I was tall and blond and good at tennis. That’s how most people thought of me. But nobody really cared that much. High school was almost over. We were already starting to drift away in our own directions.