by Sarah Dessen
That day, when I pulled up to Sand Dollars, Theo came out and got in the car, then leaned over to kiss me. When we finally broke apart, he eyed the Doodles in my lap. “Is that your dinner?”
“Nope. Just a snack,” I said, popping one into my mouth. “You want one?”
“Okay.”
I held out the bag, then watched as he carefully extracted one. After examining as if it was an artifact from another civilization, he finally popped it into his mouth. Then he chewed, a pensive look on his face, before swallowing and saying, “Huh. Interesting.”
“What is?” I asked, putting the car in reverse.
“That … whatever it is,” he said, gesturing to the bag. “Cheese Bomb?”
“Cheez Doodle.” I glanced over at him. “What, does it taste weird or something?”
“I don’t know. It’s the first one I’ve ever eaten.”
This statement warranted a full stop of the car. I turned to face him. “You’ve never had a Cheez Doodle before?”
“Well, I have now,” he said.
“You’re twenty-one years old,” I said slowly. “And that was your first?”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “What? Is that weird?”
Yes, I thought. Out loud I said, “Not weird. Just uncommon. These things were, like, part of our regular diet in our house when we were kids.”
“Really.” He glanced at the bag again. “Wow. They’re, um, awfully orange.”
I looked at the bag. “That’s the cheese.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
We backed down the rest of the driveway, and I ate another Doodle, surprised at how self-conscious I suddenly felt. Now, though, with this mention of the herring dip and olives, it made more sense. His life was a long way from mine. But we were getting closer. One piece of junk food and glass of wine at a time.
“Okay,” he said now, with the voice I’d come to recognize as his ceremonious one. “Snacks and apps. These are all from the Reef Room. We have their homemade wasabi peas and peanuts mix, shrimp puffs, and, your favorite, the chicken satay.”
“Wow,” I said, looking across the spread. Actually, I was more a shrimp burger girl and hated horseradish in any form. Still, as he fixed a little plate for me on the top of one of the containers, I didn’t say any of this. “This looks great.”
“Is that your phone?”
“What?”
He nodded at my pocket, adding another shrimp puff. “Your phone. I think it’s ringing.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I slid it out and glanced at the screen, then hit the mute button. “It’s just my father. He’ll leave a message.”
“You don’t want talk to him?”
I tried a wasabi pea. Ugh. I took a sip of wine, which didn’t help matters. “I rarely do, actually.”
“I’m surprised,” he observed, now making his own plate. “You seemed pretty close the other night at the Laundromat, when he came to help Clyde with that hole in the ceiling.”
I picked up a piece of chicken. “That was my dad.”
“Your …?” He looked confused. Then, “Oh, right. I keep forgetting you have two.”
“Only one dad. And one father.”
“Similar words,” he pointed out.
“But not similar things. At least not in my life.” I was feeling myself getting less and less hungry by the second, discussing this. “It’s a long story.”
“We’ve got time.” He took a sip of his wine, savoring it. “I mean, if you feel like talking about it.”
I didn’t, actually. But since I was also now keenly aware of a woman in a Finz shirt power walking down the beach past our little date, eyeing us disapprovingly, I needed a distraction. “My father got my mom pregnant the summer before her senior year of high school. He disappeared from our lives pretty soon after. She married my dad when I was three. My father and I haven’t ever been close, really. The only stuff we’ve ever had in common has been school related.”
“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 terns 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.
“If that’s what he was feeling, he should have said as much,” I managed finally. “He’s a grown-up. He can use his words.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “Again: not handled well. But he’s here now, right? Maybe he wants to make amends somehow.”
“Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.”
He ate a shrimp puff. “Sorry. My optimism can be very annoying.”
Hearing this, I again had a flash of Benji, telling me he was hard to entertain. Now that I thought about it, they were pretty similar, at least by the numbers: parent professions, where they were raised. There was probably something meaningful to them both converging on me simultaneously. Not that I was in the mood, right then, to figure out what it was.
“It’s not annoying,” I told him. “Just different. Like the Cheez Doodle thing.”
He smiled at me, then got up, coming over to where I was sitting, his glass in hand. He held it out, and I did the same. “To optimism. And junk food.”
We clinked glasses and drank. Then he leaned down, cupping my chin in his hand, and kissed me. I closed my eyes, letting myself forget where I was and what I was doing, temporarily, to just sink into it. It was almost easy to do, except for the fine grains of sand I felt blow up and over us every now and again. Light and drifting, tiny granules you couldn’t even see. But as always, they were there.
* * *
The next morning, when I woke up, someone was moving the furniture.
I could hear it immediately, the sound of large objects being pushed and pulled. I pressed my pillow over my ears, trying to dip back into dreaming, but no luck. Saturday morning, seven thirty. I was up.
More scraping, more dragging, followed by a large thud as something hit the floor. I threw off the covers, got out of bed, and went to investigate. When I pushed open my door, however, it moved only about an inch before meeting something solid and refusing to go farther.
I tried again. No luck. Finally, by using my entire body weight, I managed to get it open enough to see out, only to find myself facing the glass doors of the breakfront from our dining room.
“What the hell?” I said, to my own face, dimly reflected back at me. It wasn’t just the china cabinet that had relocated; there was also the coffee table, the dining-room table, several chairs, and my dad’s beloved recliner—all packed into the narrow hall outside my bedroom, as if, en masse, they were making a run for it.
“Hello?” I called down the hallway towards the stairs. With all the noise, though, nobody heard me. I considered just staying put until whatever project was going on was finished, but then my tendency towards claustrophobia hit. I tried the door again. It moved another millimeter. The window it was.
There is probably something more humiliating than climbing out of your own bedroom window in full view of the neighbors early on a weekend morning. But really, I was hard-pressed to think of what it might be as I wriggled through, landed on my behind in the damp grass in my pajamas, and turned to see that Mr. Varance, the elderly widower to our right, had caught the whole show. He raised up his rose clippers in greeting; I waved back. Then I got to my feet and went around the house to the back door.
My mother was at the sink, already dressed, rinsing out a coffee cup. She didn’t see me until she was turning off the water, at which point she shrieked, jumping backwards and disappearing, momentarily, from my view. When she popped up again, she was pissed.
“What are you doing?” she huffed at me, through the glass. “You scared me to death!”
“I was barricaded in my room,” I replied. “The window was the only way out.”
In response, she turned, looking behind her at my dad, who was at that very moment carrying the couch onto the side deck. Morris, at the opposite end, was already outside. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I think he thought—”
“Can you let me in, please?” I interrupted her, aware of my damp backside and the fact that Mr. Varance could probably still see it.
She scurried over to the door and unlocked it, then held it open as I came in. “I think he thought,” she said again, “that you were already gone.”
“My car is here,” I pointed out. “And it’s not even eight on a Saturday.”
“I’m not driving this train,” she said, holding up one hand. “Take it up with him.”
When I turned to my dad to do just that, I instead found myself facing Morris, who was grinning. “Nice jammies,” he said. “You always sleep in the grass?”
I looked down. There were green clippings all across my tank top and midsection. Of course the lawn had been mowed yesterday. “What are you even doing here?” I asked him.
“Working,” he replied, as if this was something he actually did, ever.
“All right, let’s get that love seat out and that should do it,” my dad said, walking back into the room. When he saw me, he said, “Whoa. What happened to you?”
“I had to climb out the window,” I replied.
“Why’s that?” I just looked at him. “Oh, right. The hallway. Well, you knew the floors were getting started today. Can’t do them with the furniture here.”
“How was I supposed to know that, again?”
He bent over one end of the love seat, gesturing for Morris to get the other one. “About the floors?”
“Yes.”
“Because,” he said, squaring his shoulders and lifting, “we did the trim, then painted. Floors are next.”
As if I had some kind of flow chart in my mind, keeping up with every step of this never-ending remodel. “I’m not a contractor, Dad.”
“No,” he said, holding up his end of the couch, “but you are in our way. Scoot, now, we’ve got work to do.”
I moved aside as they passed by, taking the love seat out
the door I’d come in. My mom, standing across the empty room, held up two coffee mugs, a questioning look of her face. When I nodded, she gestured for me to follow her down the hall to Amber’s room.
“You’d think,” I said as we walked, “he could leave me a note or something.”
“I think the plan was to let you know when you got home last night,” she replied. “But you were … late.”
Whoops. I bit my lip, remembering how far past curfew I’d actually walked in from the First True Date the evening before. Late enough that my dad had gone to bed, something he rarely did before everyone was in and accounted for.
“I lost track of the time,” I said. “Sorry.”
She said nothing to this as she pushed the door open, revealing Amber, her now-blonde head buried under the covers. We walked over to the bed, where my mom nudged her aside, making a narrow space for us to share. She pulled up the comforter over our legs, handed me my coffee, and we settled in.
“I don’t understand,” I said, after a couple of sips, “why he can’t just let it be.”
“Who?”
“Dad. And the house. Why is this”—I swirled my hand in the general direction of the door—“always going on?”
She shrugged. “Don Quixote had windmills. The Wright brothers had the sky. Your dad has home improvement.”
“But it was fine like it was before the last project. And the one before that, actually.”
“Well, fine is a relative term. And your dad has always wanted better than that for us.” She twisted her cup in her hands. “You see a perfectly good dining room and kitchen. He sees the potential for a great one.”
“Right now I just see furniture in the hallway and us in Amber’s bed.”
“Which,” my sister’s voice came, muffled by the pillow, “I bet is looking pretty good to you right now, huh, Miss Get-Out-of-My-Room-or-Else?”
I kicked her, albeit gently, with my foot. “You owe me.”
“Says you.” She grunted, turning over. “And for the record, I was actually sleeping before you two decided to pig-pile in here. Some of us have to work today, you know.”
Amber, as part of her cosmetology school training, spent one morning a week shampooing and sweeping up hair at a local salon. From the way she talked about it, you would have thought it was the chain gang. I kicked her again. This time, she kicked me back.