The Moon and More(58)
Author: Sarah Dessen

“School,” he repeated, pouring some more wine.

I nodded. “First just what I was learning, reading, that kind of thing. But when I was sixteen and started looking into colleges, he was suddenly very invested. Said he would handle tuition, bought me books, coached me about applications and essays. He really wanted me to go to an Ivy, or someplace of equal stature.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

I glanced up at him. He was listening while swishing around the wine in his glass, something I’d noticed was a habit of his. It was like it tasted better if he kept it moving, or something. “No. But then, when I did get into Columbia, he told me he actually couldn’t pay after all. And then instead of explaining why, or really saying anything, he just disappeared. Again.”

Now, he looked up at me. “You got into Columbia?”

I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered or insulted by how surprised he sounded. “Yeah.”

“Wow. You weren’t kidding about the SAT thing,” he said. “You must have seriously aced that verbal.”

I had. Not that I needed to tell him that, so instead, I shrugged. “I did okay.”

“Why aren’t you going there?”

“I couldn’t afford it.”

“That’s what student loans are for, though,” he said. “Debt is part of education.”

“Well,” I said. “Not in my family, I guess.”

“Your parents didn’t want you to go to Columbia?” he asked. “That’s crazy. Do they even know how hard it is to get into?”

“My dad’s a contractor,” I pointed out. “And East U gave me a full scholarship. It made no sense to go into some huge debt.”

“Yes, but they’re not the same caliber of school. I mean, no offense, but really . . .” He shook his head. “Not even close.”

“Yeah.” I bit my lip. “I guess not.”

He looked at me, but I just turned my head to the ocean, forcing myself to take a deep breath. Here I was, sitting on the remains of someone’s house, drinking wine I didn’t like, with food I could barely tolerate, while rehashing the worst part of the past year. There are just moments when you look up from any one place and realize, suddenly, you have no idea how you got there.

“Wow,” Theo said after a moment. I was still studying the waves, crashing in front of us. A few tern circling overhead, taking occasional dives. “Our First Fight. And it only took ten days.”

Even after such a short time, I could say that this sentence was pretty much Theo encapsulated. Not only did he know the exact duration of Our Time Together, but our first fractious moment already had a moniker. “Are we fighting?”

“I offended you.” It was a statement, not a question. I turned to look at him. “I’m sorry, Emaline. I just . . . education is a big deal in my family. It arouses passions.”

I nodded. “We feel that way about college football.”

I was kidding, although I realized, a beat later, he might not have realized it. We sat there another moment in silence while I tried another wasabi peanut. Still kind of gross. But the wine, surprisingly, was kind of growing on me.

“And,” he added, “I didn’t get into Columbia.”

I raised my eyebrows. “No?”

“My verbal was nothing to sneeze at, either.” He sighed. “It was my first choice.”

“No way.”

“Yep.” Another wrist flick, sending the wine swishing. “Don’t get me wrong, I love NYU. But it still nags at me sometimes.”

I didn’t say anything. Instead I just looked down at the table and the faint layer of sand covering it. I drew a circle in it with my finger, slowly. “I know a lot of people would have found a way to make Columbia work. But it just wasn’t going to happen for me. But the fact that he never explained what happened and disappeared . . . it just made it worse.”

“It’s a big promise to break,” Theo agreed.

“He blew off my graduation, too. Never responded to the invite. I didn’t hear from him until that day you saw us at the Reef Room.”

“What, a couple of weeks ago?” I nodded. “Ouch.”

“I know.”

He was quiet for a minute. “Did he ever tell you what happened? Like, why he suddenly couldn’t pay?”

I shook my head. “Now I know his marriage was falling apart. But he never gave that as a reason. He can’t even talk about it, period. The couple of times the subject of college has come up, even fleetingly, he looks like he might implode or something.”

A pause. Then he said, “Man. He’s probably embarrassed.”

I raised my eyebrows. “How do you figure?”

“It makes sense,” he said. “This is a guy who had never lived up to his obligation as a parent, right? Finally here’s his chance. He’s going to help you get into college and pay for it. Does it make up for everything? No. But it is Columbia. A dream come true, right?”

It wasn’t my dream, though, I thought. But I didn’t say this.

“But then,” he continued, “he screws that up, too. Talk about humiliating. Man.”

It was taking me a minute to catch up with this reasoning; there was a delay, like on live broadcasts. Finally I said, “But I was fine with going to East U, even after all we’d done. I didn’t care about Columbia. I would have told him that, if he’d just stuck around and been honest with me.”

“Maybe. But I bet for him, it wasn’t just about getting you into any old school,” Theo told me. “This was a chance he could give you that no one else in your life could. Something that could change everything. He was so close to redeeming himself. Which made it even worse when he didn’t.”

“It wasn’t about him, though.”

“True. But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.” He leaned forward a bit, looking more closely at me. “Look, I’m not saying he handled the whole thing well. I’m just saying . . . maybe there was more to it than you think.”

By this point, I felt unsettled, like my view of something I’d taken as fact was suddenly being shifted, and in doing so was skewing everything else I believed as well. Beneath all that, barely but still there, something else. This tiny feeling that maybe, just maybe, he might be right.