by Meg Wolitzer
Back at the Kadetsky house, they found Greer’s parents staring at the computer. “Shit,” her father said as they approached. “This is not going to work.”
“What are you talking about?” Greer said.
“The aid package.” He sighed heavily and shook his head.
Suddenly Cory understood the whole thing; it revealed itself before him, sickeningly.
“What?” Greer said, still not getting it.
“We can’t swing it,” said Rob. “They were extremely stingy with us, Greer.”
“But how can that be?” she asked. She and Cory examined the paragraph about the “amount of award.” The next paragraph said something like, “Given that you did not choose to provide the appropriate information and documentation . . . ,” and then went on to apologetically say that Yale could only offer so much and no more. The amount it had offered was a token. Apparently Rob, who had volunteered to handle the financial aid forms, hadn’t actually completed them. He had left out parts that had seemed too complicated, or else too intrusive. Rob explained this calmly but haltingly now.
“I’m so sorry, Greer,” he said. “I didn’t know it would have this effect.”
“You didn’t know?”
“I thought they would come back to us—the financial aid people—and say they needed more information. I filled out what I could, and then it got to be too much, and I got pissed off at how much they wanted from me, answers I didn’t know, and would have to go digging around for, and I guess I did a half-assed job.” He paused, shaking his head. “That’s what I do,” he said. “That’s what I always do.”
Laurel picked up a letter that was lying on the table. “There’s one more thing, though. One more place. I just went and got the mail. Ryland,” she said.
“What?”
“You got in! They offered you a really extraordinary package. Room, board, even spending money. I was worried you’d be upset about Yale, so I opened it. This solves the problem.”
“Right, Ryland,” Greer said with sarcasm. “My safety school. Where my guidance counselor made me apply. A school for dummies.”
“That’s not true. And don’t you want to see the letter? You won something called the Ryland Scholarship for Academic Excellence. It has nothing to do with finances, it’s only based on merit.”
“I don’t actually care.”
“I know you’re upset,” Laurel said. “Dad fucked up,” she added, giving Rob a sharp, furious look, and then her face grew pinched and she began to cry.
“Laurel, I thought they would come back and ask for the information again later,” Rob repeated, and he came and stood beside his wife, starting to cry too. Both of Greer’s parents, these hapless, slightly unruly-looking people, were crying together and hugging each other, while Greer sat with Cory at the table with her hands in fists. Cory thought about how your parents brought you into the world, and you were supposed to stay close to them, or at least near them, until the moment when you had to swerve away. This, now, was Greer’s swerve. He was witnessing it in action. He reached across and grabbed her hands and opened them. She relented, let his fingers wind together with hers. His own parents had filled out the financial aid forms perfectly, intimidated, while Cory guided them. He had bossed his parents around, telling them what to fill in on every single line. His parents were innocents, but they had done the right thing, while Greer’s parents, who should have known better, hadn’t.
“But look,” Laurel went on. “We have to move forward now. And this Ryland scholarship is pretty amazing. You’ll do fine. You and Cory both will. You’re both so smart. You know how I think of you two? How I picture you? Like twin rocket ships.”
Greer didn’t even respond. She looked at Cory and said, “Maybe I can call Yale.” So he and Greer went upstairs to her room to make the call. First Greer was put on hold, and finally a harried woman answered. All in a rush Greer started to tell her tale of anguish while Cory sat on the bed beside her. Greer’s voice was soft and unclear, even in this moment of urgency. He’d never understood this about her. He himself was certainly imperfect—defensive, sometimes condescending—but at least he could speak up without anxiety, and his voice came out easily. “I . . . the forms weren’t really . . . and my dad said . . . ,” he heard Greer say. He wanted to tell her, Say what you mean! Speak up, girl!
“I’m sorry,” the woman finally interrupted. “The financial aid decisions have already been made.”
“Okay, I understand,” Greer said quickly, and then she hung up. “Maybe my parents could call,” she said to Cory.
“Go ask them,” he said. “Tell them it’s important to you. Say it in a serious voice, like you mean business.”
So they went back downstairs, and she approached her parents and said, “Would either of you call the office at Yale for me?”
Her mother just looked at her anxiously. “This is your father’s department,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“Didn’t you just call over there? What did they say to you?” Rob asked.
“They said the decisions were already made. But you could try,” Greer said. “You’re a parent. Maybe it would be different.”
“I can’t,” he said. “The bureaucracy of it all; it’s not for me.” He looked helplessly at Greer. “It’s just nothing I could do comfortably,” he added. Then, for emphasis, he said again, “I can’t.”
They actually weren’t going to try to help her, Cory saw with astonishment. He was witnessing a tableau of Greer’s entire childhood being enacted before him, and it created in him an intense fury, as well as a desire to protect Greer and love her harder.
Greer accepted the full ride at Ryland, and Cory chose Princeton; if he’d gone to Yale it would’ve been a constant, sharp reminder to Greer. Their paths were now diverging precipitously—the swerve affected not just her and her parents but also him—so they would have to work to keep themselves as close as possible.
On their last night together at the end of the summer, up in her bedroom with a strong rain battering the windows, Greer lay in Cory’s arms and cried. She hadn’t cried about college before now, because her parents had cried that day in the kitchen and she had wanted to distinguish her own response from theirs; also, she had wanted to be better than they were, stronger. But she cried there in bed with Cory.
“I don’t want to be this damaged person,” Greer said, her voice choked, her face turned sharply away from him.
“You aren’t. You’re totally fine.”
“You think so? I’m so quiet! I’m always the quiet one.”
“I fell in love with your quiet,” he said into the little blue section of her hair. “But that’s not all you are.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Of course I am. And other people will start to see it too; they really will.”
The rain came down and they barely moved, and then finally when it got late they rose with little groans and separated so they could finish packing up their childhood rooms, going through the task of selecting what they still cared about—what made the cut because it was still a part of them—and what was necessary to leave behind for good. Greer scooped up her collection of snow globes and her Jane Austen novels, even Mansfield Park, which she had never particularly liked. It was as if the books were a lineup of stuffed animals that had graced her room all these years; that was how much they comforted her. Cory, who would be leaving for Princeton in the morning, left behind his row of NBA bobblehead figurines on a shelf so Alby could have them. But after hesitating he took the boxed set of The Lord of the Rings. He wasn’t particularly literary, but he loved those books and would never stop loving them. Pretty soon Alby would want to read them too, he knew, and when that happened he would lend them to him.
The next day, after goodbyes so ardent and extensive that they had a World War II quality to them, Cory went off in his
packed family car for the trip down to New Jersey; Greer would go to Ryland two days later. At Princeton Cory was given a job in the Firestone Library, checking out books in an enormous, grand room; he ate his meals in another enormous, grand room.
He and Greer Skyped at night and made the effort to travel frequently to see each other. He spoke to her about being intimidated by Princeton but loving it there too, and about playing Ultimate Frisbee on the greenest fields on earth. He didn’t tell her that he worried about staying faithful to her, and worried more broadly that what they had agreed to was going to be difficult to sustain. Girls at Princeton flirted with him all the time—WASPy blond girls who had grown up in houses with names, and a cool black flute player from LA, and a boho genius who lived in the Netherlands though she was American, and was named Chia.
Then one day in the dining hall, he heard one girl say to another, “Here’s something about me that you didn’t know. I made it into The Guinness Book of World Records.”
And the other girl said, “Really? What for?”
“Oh, I collected more bottles for recycling than any other kid ever had. It was my thing. I was famous in Toledo. I was such a little dweeb.”
Cory whipped around, practically spitting cobbler. “You’re Taryn the Recycling Girl?” he asked, shocked. “I read about you in my fourth-grade reader!”
And the girl, who happened to be gorgeous, with wavy dark hair and dark eyes, nodded and laughed. That night on Skype, Cory made Greer guess who he had met that day. “Just guess,” he said, but she was unable to guess, and so he told her. He left out the detail that Taryn the Recycling Girl from Toledo was really hot now, and that she had asked him if he wanted to meet for a drink sometime. “Glass, not plastic,” Taryn had said, giving the words a suggestive, James Bond quality.
And then there was Cory’s Secret Santa, Clove Wilberson, who had grown up in Tuxedo Park, New York, in a house called Marbridge. “Dang, Cory Pinto, you are the cutest and the wootest,” Clove said to him one day, in response to nothing.
“Both?” he said mildly.
He also didn’t tell Greer that one night Clove Wilberson came up to him after a party and said, “Cory Pinto, you are miles taller than I am, so I can barely do what I want to do.”
“Which is what?”
She’d pulled his face down toward hers and kissed him. Their mouths touched in a meeting of soft surfaces. “So did you like that, Cory Pinto?” she asked when they pulled away; for some reason it amused her to always call him by his full name. Then she quickly said, “Don’t answer that. I know you have a girlfriend. I’ve seen you with her. But it’s okay; you don’t have to look so scared.”
“I’m not scared,” he said, but almost immediately he felt compelled to run his hand across his mouth.
Sometimes he would see Clove’s room from below, and when the light was on he would imagine going up there and not saying anything, but just pulling her onto her bed the same way he pulled Greer onto the bed when she came to Princeton or he drove up to Ryland. Everything Clove Wilberson said to him was through a scrim of teasing.
And whenever he saw Taryn the Recycling Girl, she would say, “So when are we drinking out of glass, not plastic, together?”
How would he get through four years of college not having sex with anyone but Greer? He was excited by different girls all the time, now that he wasn’t with Greer every day. He wished he could say to her, Let’s have one day a week when we get to hook up with someone on our own campus. Someone who means nothing to us, but who fulfills a shallow hormonal need. You can hook up with that drummer friend of yours; he is totally into you, I can tell. But Greer would’ve been shocked, and he couldn’t hurt her.
Back home in Macopee over spring break freshman year, when they were sitting together at Pie Land studying, Greer had reached across the table and absently touched Cory’s face. Her hand stroked his cheek, for a moment staying on the small, pale scar there, which was now over a year old. He had imagined that when they were older and in the next phase of their lives, living in their apartment together in Greenpoint or Red Hook—or was it Redpoint and Green Hook?—that would be the right time to confess to her his modest but valiant tale of having once saved her from the indignity of having a group of high school boys declare her a 6, and then taking an injury to the face for it.
“I always knew you were really a nine,” he’d been planning to say. But he was slightly older now, and changing; and lately Greer had begun to speak to him with a certain halting eloquence about the way women were treated in the world. He finally understood how arrogant his confession would have been. His little scar, which had grown thin and white and nearly invisible, had been a badge of honor connected to a story he’d looked forward to telling her. Now he knew he never would.
* * *
• • •
Near the end of college, Cory thought there ought to be a book called The Alcohol Speaking, in which people wrote about all the things they had done while drunk. The problem was that they might not remember them when it came time to write them down. Princeton was full of decisions made while drunk. Cory had hooked up with Clove Wilberson twice sophomore year and then again once junior year. It had been the alcohol speaking, he knew, and he had been full of regret and remorse each time it happened. He couldn’t really blame it on Clove, but there she was one night, practically doing a lap dance for him. Cory had such long legs that they often just fell open when he sat in chairs. Years later on the subway in New York, women would look annoyed with him and he didn’t understand why, until once during rush hour a woman stared him down and said, “Enough with the man-spreading.” He was mortified, and clapped his legs back together like a machine part.
But in a butterfly sling chair in an overdecorated suite at Princeton sophomore year, after a vodka tasting given by a senior named Valentin Semenov, the son of a genuine oligarch, Cory leaned back and let Clove pour herself over him like syrup. “Oh my God,” he said when the lights went low and she opened his fly. A zipper being opened was like a little shock, especially when the hand holding the zipper pull was not Greer’s. Greer, whose absence was now as strong as a presence, and the worth of whose love was unquantifiable, making Cory perhaps richer than the richest oligarch.
I’m sorry, he thought, I really am, but as he was thinking this, the alcohol wasn’t just thinking but was in fact speaking; and beloved, invaluable Greer, with her blue streak and her sexy little body and her growing desire to be more outgoing and do something of meaning in the world, fell straight down through a trapdoor, away from him, away. Meanwhile, Clove Wilberson cleverly sidestepped that trapdoor, straddling Cory on the butterfly chair and then eventually in her bed. Finally he saw her dorm room not from below but from within. Loads of ribbons and trophies for field hockey. Loads of doodads that belonged to a rich girl. While they were in her bed, her parents called twice, and both times she took the call. She told him she had a horse named Boyfriend Material, who would be running in Saratoga that summer. “Bet on him; I’m confident he’s going to win,” she said sweetly into Cory’s ear.
The next day he said, “Clove, listen. I can’t do this again.”
“I know you can’t.” She didn’t seem upset, and he thought: Was I no good? But he knew he was good. He was unruined, and strong and energetic. Because of Greer, mostly, he knew what he was doing sexually. Clove smiled at him and said, “Don’t worry, Cory Pinto.”
So he didn’t worry, but two more times over the course of college he returned to her, starting up the pattern of shame and absolution and cycling unhappily through it. But it was the alcohol speaking every time. Being apart from Greer allowed these changes to happen. There were other changes, too. During the fall of the presidential campaign, he and Greer skipped weekends that they were meant to see each other, and instead went separately campaigning. Greer went to Pennsylvania on a Ryland bus; Cory went to Michigan on a Princeton bus. Clove was somewhe
re on that same bus, but he sat up front with Lionel, and across the aisle from Will, his two future microfinance startup partners. They were all overexcited by the campaign, and could stay up all day and night in the way you could only do without penalty when you were that age.
For weeks after the election Cory was so elated; elated and relieved and unworried about the future.
“Hey, Cory, Will and I wanted to talk to you,” said Lionel one evening as the three of them walked across campus. “Looking ahead here, we can’t get going on the startup right out of school. We’ll need a year or two. By then we’ll have more capital.”
“The thing is,” said Will, “because of the economy our dads are feeling less generous.”
“So we should all make a pact to go out there after we graduate and earn a shitload of money ourselves first, and use it later,” said Lionel. “Like saving up acorns for winter. Will and I are both going to try to get jobs in finance or consulting. You should do that too.”
At first this news depressed Cory, and he refused to consider their suggestion. But much later, as graduation drew closer, he became more comfortable with the idea of consulting for a year or two, though it wasn’t at all what he had planned. So many people around him were becoming consultants. Along with banking and business school it was one of the paths of least resistance. The top firms swarmed the top campuses, and many of the students went willingly.
Over a designated period during Cory’s senior year, recruiters from consultancies and VC firms and banks descended upon Princeton in their good tailored suits. They distinguished themselves from the students, who carried backpacks and were dressed in rumplewear; and from the male faculty in their oatmeal tweed and low-slung corduroys that revealed their deflated, tenured asses; and from the female faculty in shaggy, earthy, academic, latter-day Stevie Nicks dress, ambling into the long, less frequently tenured (as Greer had pointed out) homestretch of the rest of their lives.
After the initial interview, a man and a woman from Armitage & Rist took Cory out to dinner in downtown Princeton, at one of those Ye Olde restaurants where parents took their sons or daughters when visiting from far-off hometowns. The consultants urged him to get an appetizer first; did they think he was hungry? he wondered. Were they thinking of him as Vaguely Ethnic Scholarship Male, Exhibit A?