by Amanda Grace
It sounded like an accusation, like I’d interrupted something more important than the trajectory of the rest of my life.
“Sorry, should I come back?”
She shook her head, her dyed-red ringlets bouncing around her ears. “No, no, that’s fine. Let me grab your file. Go ahead and take a seat.”
I slunk in and sat down, a little too hard, on the chair across from her desk, the vinyl-covered padding hissing a bit to let out the air in between the cracks. She crossed the room and pulled open one of the black cabinets, her fingers sliding across the tabs until she found the folder holding the last few years of my life.
So much about me packed into that thin folder. So many report cards, PSAT scores, college brochures with sharpie marker circling the entrance requirements.
And yet so little of me was actually captured. The person packed into that folder was a stranger, a robot. A girl in a gilded cage who could smile on cue.
The girl that my family knew, the girl I could no longer identify with.
“Alrighty then, how did the first two weeks go? Any concerns?”
I shook my head. “No, the classes are good.”
“Not too hard? I was a little worried about packing in the general ed courses right up front. Most students do an art course, or a computer one or something the first quarter. Ease into things.” She paused, studying me over the rim of her stylish, electric-blue glasses. “You’re sixteen, after all, taking classes with adults.”
I didn’t like the way she said that, like I wasn’t an adult too. But she didn’t know me. “Yeah, it’s art I’m no good at,” I said, smiling to keep away a frown. “I swear I can’t even finger-paint. Also, PE. But I can handle Bio, Calc, and English.”
“Well, okay then. At this rate you’ll have all the core stuff out of the way quite quickly. If we plan it right, you can have your associate’s degree by the time you get your high school diploma. You’ll enter your first semester outside of high school as a college junior.”
My smile turned a little tight. I could feel it, the way the corners of my mouth stiffened; it felt impossible to hold like that. It was a silly reaction, really, because she was only rehashing the things we’d already talked about, agreed to. I’d always intended to graduate high school with my two year associate’s degree because that was what Dad wanted, what Mom expected. “Um, right, that’s the plan,” I said.
“Are you sure? Technically you only need seven credits a year, and you’re set up for nine. At this rate, you’ll have enough for your diploma by the time you’re halfway through your senior year. But your dad … ”
I let go of my smile and simply nodded, pursing my lips. “He talked to you? I thought that wasn’t allowed.”
And suddenly she drew herself up to her full height. Well, her full sitting-down height, and considering she was a hair over five foot, it wasn’t that impressive. “Of course, I didn’t discuss specifics with him about what we talk about when you’re in my office. This is a safe room, and you can tell me anything you want. You know that.”
Like hell I know that.
What I did know was that, apparently, my dad had visited my high school counselor, asked her to encourage me to take more classes. Asked her to push me.
Push, Push, PUSH. When would it ever end? When could I just … breathe?
“However, he is of course allowed to know which classes you’re taking. He has to sign the enrollment paperwork, so that information is relevant to him.” She stared down at the first quarter enrollment forms, where I could plainly see my father’s scrawling signature. “So I felt no need to hide it, as he’d see it anyway.”
“When did he visit?”
“What?” she asked, glancing up from the sheet.
“My dad. Was it five minutes ago? Maybe it was yesterday and then again this morning, to be sure you knew what was expected? To be sure you didn’t screw it up, that you accomplished what he needed you to?”
Her only reaction was to flare her eyes a little bit, probably in reaction to my rising voice.
Get a grip, I told myself. “Sorry,” I finally said, after the woman just kept blinking at me. “I just didn’t think he’d talk to you. I don’t really want to … ” And then I let my voice trail off.
If I told her I didn’t want to take nine courses this year—when my high school classmates had seven—it wouldn’t matter. And worse yet, she’d go straight to my dad and tell him, and then my dad would arrive home and I’d listen to a forty-minute lecture on the importance of education, on how he’d spent his whole life wishing he’d pushed just a little bit harder, reached just a little bit further.
I don’t understand why he can’t just push himself. Why he can’t be more than a high school PE teacher. Maybe if he had his own freaking aspirations, he’d stop pulling on my strings and notice I’m not smiling anymore, not enjoying this.
I haven’t even had any real friends in years. Years. My best friend in the whole world moved away in seventh grade, and I’ve never really replaced her. There’ve been study friends and ballet friends and neighbors … but God, I have no true friends. Not really.
And for once, if my dad would stop pushing, maybe I’d stop feeling like my every action was controlled by someone else, like my mind and arms and legs were being yanked up and down and around with strings.
“Never mind,” I said, that same old feeling of hopelessness seeping in.
“Okay then,” she said brightly, all too happy to dismiss my momentary freakout. “Let’s talk about what you’re going to take next quarter. The catalogs will be out soon, and courses fill quickly. We don’t have to decide today, but we should start—”
“Math, science, history,” I said automatically. “I need all three, and I might as well take the higher level math and science courses right after the introductory ones, so that it’s all still fresh in my mind before I move on to other stuff. Just tell me which ones count toward the high school requirements.”
“Are you sure you don’t want something lighter this time? Photography, perhaps?”
It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. Photography. Yeah, I’d be super good at that. Lots of experience there, getting out in the world, creating art.
“No, I’ll stick with … ”
What’s expected of me.
What I have to do.
Who I’m meant to be.
Who they’ve planned for me to be.
“Can we decide this another day?” I asked, a strange sense of power washing over me.
And as she smiled at me, that candle flame grew, bending and licking, thawing something around my heart. Something that had nothing to do with you, Bennett.
Yet somehow it had everything to do with you.
That Saturday, I waited in my car for you at the foot of Mt. Peak. I arrived early because I didn’t want to miss you.
They should know that. If I hadn’t gone to the edge of town that day, hoping and wishing for another hike, you never would have taken the next step. Things would have stayed inside that classroom of yours, and your wall—made up by button-down shirts and V-neck sweaters, beakers and cylinders, the PowerPoint and the syllabus—would have stayed between us.
But it didn’t, Bennett. Because you pulled up in that S-10 pickup, Voldemort tied up in the bed hopping up and down and barely able to contain his excitement.
You were just planning on a normal hike. A hike like a thousand others you’d probably taken. But I’d planned a hike like just one other I’d taken.
It’s me who’s responsible for us getting together that day. It was always me, giving us the opportunities, nurturing our relationship along. Is that manipulative, do you think? Looking back, it does kind of seem like it. It didn’t feel like it at the time. It just felt like you were irresistible and I needed more.
I climbed out before you came to a stop, as if
to act like I’d only just arrived. I pulled my coat out of the back seat, zipped it up, and proceeded to walk toward the trail head like I hadn’t even noticed you.
Voldemort gave me my excuse. He barked and I turned to look at him, pretending to be surprised. Did it look real, Bennett? Did you buy my act?
Had you been hoping to see me, the way I’d wanted to see you?
All I wanted then was for us to keep sharing this secret, these hikes that were only for us.
Remember that. As I waited for you in the shadow of Mt. Peak, I still never dreamed we would become what we did. I just liked the way I felt around you, liked that for one moment in my existence, I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.
I suppose that’s irony at its finest, that I got to be myself around someone who thought I was someone else entirely. But you should know that my age is the only thing I never shared with you. Everything else, that was real.
When you climbed out of your truck, you were wearing a hooded sweatshirt. It had a big Seahawks eagle on the front and the pull-strings had been removed. It was faded and fitted.
I still have that sweatshirt, you know. I forgot to take it off that morning you dropped me off and never looked back. I hope it’s okay if I keep it. It’s all I have left.
That and memories of you as we set out on the trail, Voldemort jumping and wiggling and bursting with excitement, kind of like the way my heart felt whenever you met my eyes.
“So, Madelyn,” you said, as we rounded the first curve and entered the dappled shadows of the forest.
“So, Bennett,” I said, tucking my hands into the pockets of my coat. You looked at me when I said that, a little bit of surprise in your eyes. I guess you forgot that you’d told me your first name.
“Big plans for the weekend?” you asked.
I shrugged. “Oh, you know, just a marathon of bad movies and junk food in between studying. I have this Biology teacher, see, and he’s a slave driver. We have these really annoying worksheets … ”
You laughed and pushed me playfully on the arm, and I giggled, so happy you’d done that, so happy you’d touched me again. Was it meant to be flirting, Bennett, or more of a playfulness between friends?
I suppose that’s splitting hairs, though. Maybe you don’t even know.
Then you rolled your eyes and asked, ignoring my barb, “What qualifies as a bad movie?”
“Anything from the ’80s,” I quipped.
And you laughed again and shook your head but you couldn’t wipe the smile from that gorgeous face of yours. “I like you,” you said.
It was a simple thing to say, a simple sentiment to feel—you probably liked a lot of things—but it changed my world.
Because it changed what I thought we could become. Those three simple words, and I wondered if maybe it did matter that you were single, it did matter that we were out hiking together, it did matter that you and I seemed to have something real between us.
That was the moment I decided, Bennett, that I wanted to be with you, and that even though there was one very good reason we couldn’t be something, I could come up with one million reasons why we could.
I threw my hair over my shoulders in mock arrogance, smiled at you, and said, “I know, I’m impossible to resist.” I could see that you liked confidence, and I wanted to be that girl, the girl who owned who she was, enjoyed it, played with her girly side. A girl I’d never tried to be anywhere else.
You have this look, Bennett, this very special glowing sort of look when you’re trying to rein in your smile but aren’t quite able. Your eyes sparkle and you look just plain beautiful.
The silence settled in as we hiked, and it was comfortable, but I wanted to talk more, I wanted to connect.
“What about you? Big plans for the weekend?” I asked.
“Labs,” you said. “I have about three thousand labs to grade.”
“There are only twenty-five students in your class,” I pointed out.
“I have three classes,” you said.
“It’s a good thing you’re a science instructor,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because your math sucks.” I grinned at you, feeling clever.
I’d never felt clever, you know. I always felt smart, yet somehow never clever, never witty. In high school I felt like one of twelve hundred students, every one of us lost and confused and unsure of ourselves in one way or another.
But you made me different. You made me smart and funny and daring.
“Fair enough,” you said. You paused for a second to whistle at Voldemort because he’d raced too far ahead on the trail. He whirled around and tore back to us, and three feet shy of us, he turned again and jogged back up the trail.
I think Voldemort meant to say we were walking too slowly, but I didn’t want to go any faster. I wanted that hike to go on and on and on.
If I had that superpower, the one that could speed up time, I would have used it that day to slow things down. That hike would have gone on for days and days.
“Do you hike a lot?” I asked, because I felt like my lungs were burning, on the edge of exploding, and you were only a little winded.
“Yeah. A few times a week, at least.”
“Where else do you go?”
You glanced up at the sky, a shimmery blue between the trees. “My favorite is High Rock,” you said.
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Mt. Rainier National Forest. Way out past Eatonville and Elbe.”
“What do you like about it?”
We hit a switchback and the trail narrowed, and you paused so that I could walk in front of you. I wondered if you were watching me hike. The back of my neck prickled and I wished I had eyes in the back of my head because I wanted so much to know if you were watching me. I tried to make my hips swing like Katie’s did but I don’t know if it worked, and since I was hiking, it was really hard and just made me more breathless, so I gave up on that.
“It’s hard to explain. I should take you some time,” you said. “You’d love it.”
I was so unbelievably overjoyed and surprised by your invitation that I lost all ability to speak. My jaw flapped open and shut and it’s a good thing you were behind me and couldn’t see me like that, looking like a fish out of water.
“Yeah, that’d be awesome,” I said.
A few beats of silence stretched out between us and I wondered if you regretted asking me that, like you’d said it but figured I’d decline.
You told me later it had been reflex, something you’d said before you could check yourself, remembered that I wasn’t a friend, not really, and that’s why the silence stretched out. Because in that moment you realized you shouldn’t have invited me.
You also realized you wanted to. I think maybe, for you, that was the moment you acknowledged you wanted something with me, too. Maybe not yet a relationship, maybe not what we became, but something.
I glanced back over my shoulder at you, a little bit of hurt squeezing in my chest because I knew, I just knew, you were going to say something else, like But we can’t do that, because I’m your professor.
You didn’t say that, though. You just said, “We’d have to go soon. Once the snow stacks up, it closes for the winter.”
“Name the time,” I said. “Because now you have me curious.”
“We could go next weekend,” you said, and part of it sounded a little more like a question than a statement. There was just the tiniest bit of hesitance in it, and I knew you still weren’t quite sure what you were doing, even as the words came out. Sometimes, with us, it’s like our hearts spoke for us and our brains weren’t on board. “Instead of hiking Mt. Peak again,” you added.
My heart sang, Bennett. It climbed out of my chest and soared right up that mountain.
I don’t know what you felt in that moment. E
xcitement, worry, both? You had your career to think about, and you thought you were breaking the school’s rule.
Or maybe the rule is only about dating, and hiking surely couldn’t be considered that, right? Is that what you told yourself?
“That sounds fantastic. I’m in.”
We chatted as we climbed the mountain, about nothing and everything. And when we got to the top, I was pretty sure that view was even prettier than it had been the week before.
The next week was agony. Did it feel that way for you?
Did you ever regret inviting me on that hike, Bennett? I don’t mean now, when you know how it all ended up, because I know you must regret it now, but back then, when nothing but possibility stretched out before us.
Back when you thought I was eighteen, Bennett. Did you regret it then?
It would just about kill me to think that you regretted it, that you spent all of that week thinking up ways to get out of it, to cancel on me without making a big thing of it. Because that hike—the promise of it—got me through so much that week.
My brother came home that Monday. My Very Perfect Brother. Dad cooked his Very Famous Lasagne, and Mom actually left work early so we could have a Nice Family Dinner, like we did when I was little, when I was the Very Obedient Daughter. I guess maybe I still was that girl, since it’s not like I ever made a misstep, ever did anything unexpected, ever colored outside the lines.
Until you, anyway.
Dad made me polish the silver because we had a “guest” coming, even though it was just Trevor. My Ivy League, over-achieving brother, who apparently was supposed to give a rip whether or not he ate with fine china.
Dad and Mom are So Very Proud of Trevor. Dad brags about him non-stop, while Mom talks to him about numbers and angles and whatever garbage they study in engineering. He’s the exalted one, that one I am supposed to follow.
Remember how I told you I was good at math, at science? It’s because of Mom. Me and Trevor, numbers just click with us. Good genes or something.
I never wanted to be what Trevor is, but Mom and Dad never saw that, because by the time I realized it they’d already settled on the idea, grown it up like an enormous beanstalk, and how could I chop it down? When I didn’t know what other choice I’d even make? That’s something a two-year-old does—throws a temper tantrum without knowing what they’d choose instead.