Avery’s relationship to her parents was like that of a business owner to a bank. At the beginning, they were happy to finance her way to big dreams. Hank and Lonnie Adams justified the money they spent on private coaches and summer basketball camps with the assumption that Avery’s future would be financed by her skill in basketball. But the more time passed, the more the pressure built for Avery to perform, and the more uncomfortable they looked writing the checks. Every day, her mother asked whether or not any college coaches had called, and while she waited for an answer, Avery could see her mother doing math behind her eyes. Have you been worth it?
Walking toward the kitchen, Avery held up the towel around her body and filled her empty cup with water, guzzling it quickly to counteract the anonymous pink punch she’d imbibed earlier. A cooler of beer sat on the counter and the smell of weed wafted in from outside, pungent and earthy. She wasn’t much of a smoker, especially not during the basketball season—it took away her edge—but the smell sent her shoulders rolling down her spine. Maybe she would stay a little while longer. After all, what good was having an edge if she was just going to end up in the same place as everyone else?
“Yo, Avery!”
Turning, Avery spotted Kevin Walters across the kitchen, holding a corded telephone in his hand. The plastic spiral dangled from the phone to the floor and back to the wall, where it was plugged into the base. Rotund and jovial, with bright red cheeks and dark brown hair, Kevin had avoided years of bullying by making fun of himself before anyone else could, gathering friends by the dozen. It also helped that his parents were frequently out of town and chose to ignore the signs that he held ragers in their absence.
“Phone’s for you,” he said. He held a puffy hand over the receiver and extended it toward her.
Avery’s thin, tweezed eyebrows immediately crunched together in confusion. Who in the world would be calling her here? Swallowing hard, she walked across the kitchen, still barefoot, aware of the sticky layer of smut she was accumulating on the pads of her feet.
It couldn’t be her parents.
Definitely not. In four years of high school, they hadn’t once asked where she was going. They never waited up on the couch when she didn’t come home by curfew. She wasn’t even sure she had a curfew. If she did, her parents had never enforced it. Maybe that was because they’d assumed Avery would be like her older brother, Blake—bookish and square. At sixteen, her younger brother, Caleb, had only had his driver’s license for a month. Plus, it wasn’t like he had anywhere to go. Caleb was a sophomore with nerdy friends that were always watching sci-fi movies or playing board games, the names of which Avery couldn’t pronounce. Settlers of Catan. Dungeons and Dragons.
But as lame as Caleb Adams might have been, at least he could keep a secret. Any time Avery arrived home from a party in the single-digit hours of the morning, smelling of guilt, her little brother would pretend not to notice. Bleary-eyed and drunk, Avery would place a single finger over her mouth in the universal symbol for “shhh,” and then tiptoe up the stairs to her room. It was their secret. Don’t ask; definitely don’t tell. And Caleb never told.
She took the phone from Kevin.
“Hello?” Avery plugged her other ear with a finger, trying to block out the sound of Dave Matthews in the background.
“Avery?”
The voice on the other end of the line was quiet, shaking—and unmistakable.
“Caleb? Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“I need you—” her little brother said, hiccupping like he’d been crying for hours. “I need you to come get me.”
“Okay,” she said, quickly trying to assess whether or not she was sober enough to drive. “I’m on my way. Where are you?”
“The Riverview police station—”
“The what?”
“—on the parkway. Hurry, Avery. They say they’re going to call Dad.”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Avery’s little brother sat in the passenger seat of her beat-up Honda Civic, his Kurt Cobain hair hanging like a sheet in front of his eyes.
A six-inch piece of duct tape held a rip in the back seat together and the left rear window hadn’t rolled down in more than a year, but there was no money to get this piece-of-shit car fixed.
“It has four wheels and an engine,” her father had said. “Be grateful.”
For her eighteenth birthday, Avery’s mother had given her one of those cassette tapes with a cord that attached to her portable Discman, so at least she could play her CDs. That fact alone had bought the car another few years of life. Plus, she wasn’t about to ask her parents for anything else. Not before, and definitely not now. Sitting in the driveway looking at the split-level house in front of them, she realized that this night would destroy any chance she’d ever had at getting a new car.
“Shit, Caleb,” Avery said. “Do you even realize how much a lawyer costs?”
“I’m going to be sick,” he said.
“Oh God. Not in the car. Open the door!”
And he did, spilling the contents of his stomach onto the concrete in the driveway.
Avery’s jeans and black T-shirt were wet from the bathing suit she still wore underneath, and she shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Her brother sat up again, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Dad’s going to kill me.” A moment passed, and then he leaned forward, his head in his hands. “How could I have been so stupid?”
“If you’d just set the beer down, they probably would have let you go with a warning,” Avery said. “Why did you run to the car? Why’d you take the keys?”
Caleb turned his gray-blue eyes on his sister, looking like a hurt puppy. Saliva gathered at the corners of his mouth. “How was I supposed to know, Avery? I’ve never even been to a party!”
“Shhh, shhh. Calm down.” She worried his shouts might wake the neighbors. She looked at their house—every light was on. “It’s going to be okay. Just . . . when we get inside, go to your room. I’ll deal with Mom and Dad.”
“He’s going to kill me, Avery.”
“He’s not going to kill you. It’s going to be okay.”
She wasn’t certain it would be. But, assuaged by her promise, Caleb walked up to the house, through the front door, and disappeared down the back hall. The bathroom door slammed hard behind him, followed by the sound of a loud retch. Liquid splattered against porcelain, then she heard the toilet flush.
At that moment, Avery’s mother, Lonnie, appeared in the hallway, her shining face and worried eyes showing all that Avery needed to know. Her mother tightened the red terry-cloth robe around her waist.
“How did this happen?” her mother snapped. Her voice was as thin and cold as the snowflakes still falling outside. “Were you with him?”
“No . . . he called me from the station. Seriously, Mom. Everything’s fine.”
Moving past her daughter, Lonnie hustled down the hall toward the bathroom and began to bang on the door. “Caleb! Caleb! Open up. Now!”
From the front door, Avery could see into the kitchen, where her father, Hank, paced back and forth across the linoleum floor, holding the cordless phone to his ear. Lean and imposing, Hank Adams had dark features and a permanent five o’clock shadow that looked as though he’d spent his life in a coal mine, which, to be fair, he would have, if he’d been born a quarter century earlier. He was fit, though, with muscles that hadn’t diminished over the years since he’d played football at Notre Dame. And despite the fact that he spent his life above ground, selling coal, there was always dirt under his fingernails, always a rasp in his voice, like he carried an aluminum pail to work every day. Avery felt the same grit in her blood, just underneath the surface, trying to break free. Coal was stubborn that way. It stayed in your veins.
“Sure,” Hank was saying. “Can we do it in installments? Oh. Okay. Understood. Well, then, we’ll get the retainer to you tomorrow. All right, Dan. We’ll see you Monday.”
Slamming the phone on the base, Hank
turned to look at Avery, who put her chin up, pretending to be calmer than she felt. She’d never seen her father’s eyes look so intense, his pupils so small. The dark hair on his forearms seemed to stand on end.
“Two thousand dollars, just to take on the case,” her father told her.
A silence filled the room, so thick Avery struggled to breathe.
“Dad . . . I—”
“He watches you, you know,” her father said. His lower lip quivered. “You go out. Drink. Carry on. And what happens? You get voted homecoming queen. He does the same thing, and his life is fucking ruined.”
“Dad.” Avery nearly felt like crying. “His life isn’t—”
“What exactly do you think you know about life, Avery? Huh? I’m sorry to break it to you, but beauty doesn’t exactly pay the bills. And you have the audacity to tell me about life? That’s rich.”
He paused his rant, rubbed his temple.
“All I know is, you better be on your knees thanking God that this wasn’t you. Because you and I both know, it could have been.”
He pushed past her and down the hall. “Caleb! Open the damn door!”
ON MONDAY, HER parents took her little brother, dressed in an oversized suit and tie, for their first meeting with the lawyer. Avery drove herself to school and pretended to pay attention in class, when in reality, all she could think about was the disappointment painted all over her father’s face as he’d yelled at her Saturday night, and as he’d ignored her the next morning. For years, Avery had lived her life without fear of any consequences. But watching her brother suffer because of her bad example, she suddenly felt like she’d swallowed a toxic cocktail of anger and shame. Anger that her father would accuse her of causing Caleb’s mess; shame that he was probably right.
ON FRIDAY EVENING, the gymnasium doors opened at five o’clock, sending a flood of light and a pack of girls into the darkened parking lot. They walked slowly under the weight of their backpacks, chatting idly while parents pulled up to pick up the freshmen. Soaked in sweat that defied the near-freezing temperature outside, steam rose off of Avery’s bare limbs into the cold.
“Great job at practice today, Mandy,” Avery said to one of the more promising freshmen. “I liked that little behind-the-back pass you did.”
Mandy quickened her pace to catch up to Avery’s side. “Thanks. Hey . . . I was going to ask, are you going to Kevin’s tomorrow night?”
Avery walked with her chin up, blond hair glistening with sweat. She knew instinctively that Mandy Hightower wasn’t looking for information; she was looking for an invitation.
“Doubt it,” Avery replied flippantly.
She reached for the keys in her backpack before remembering with a surge of anger that they weren’t there, and wouldn’t be for another week. In a rare feat of parenting, her father had grounded Avery from driving—for what she wasn’t quite certain. It wasn’t like she was the one who’d been arrested. As she made her way across the parking lot, Mandy followed, hoping, Avery assumed, for the invitation that wasn’t going to come.
“I’ve got a shit-ton of homework this weekend, Mandy,” she said by way of explanation, “and nothing good happens at those—” She was going to say parties, but at that same moment, she noticed a dark and hulking figure standing in the middle of the parking lot. So instead she said, “Shit.”
Following Avery’s gaze, Mandy’s eyes filled with concern. Standing on the passenger side of Avery’s black Honda Civic, a short and stocky man waited with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Who’s that?” Mandy asked. “He’s hot.”
With a sigh, Avery shifted the backpack on her shoulder and started walking faster toward her car. “That’s my dad.”
“Oh. Well, call me. Maybe we could go to Kevin’s together on Saturday!”
When she reached her car, Avery rolled her eyes.
“You don’t have to make such a scene, Dad.”
Avoiding her father’s gaze, she threw her backpack in the backseat and reached for the handle of the passenger-side door.
“Ah, ah, ah!” he said. “We had a deal.”
Next to each other, Hank and Avery looked nothing alike. Avery was ethereal and glowing, her father earthen and rugged. But they shared a competitive spirit, or a persistent stubbornness. And any time Avery reached a goal Hank set for her, he raised the bar higher.
“We never had a deal,” she said. “You had a deal.”
Starting Avery’s freshman year, Hank had driven up to the school like all the other parents, pretending to pick his daughter up from basketball practice. But instead, he’d instruct her to throw her backpack in the back of his car, start a timer, and send her on the three-mile run home. Each day she tried to beat the previous day’s time. He’d presented it as a game—a way for Avery to work on her endurance.
Within a few months of starting high school, Avery could run a six-minute mile without breaking much of a sweat. Her father’s mantra rang through her head as she ran: The only way to run faster is to run faster. In four years, Avery had learned that she could outrun just about anything. She could outrun her teammates. She could outrun the competition from other schools. She could even run the insecurities right out of her head, if she was willing to go hard enough. It was easy to be confident when you were faster than the boys.
The game had ended last year, when she’d started driving herself to school. But now, here he was, looking at the watch on his wrist. “You better get going. Clock’s started.”
“Dad,” Avery said, her voice sounding desperate. “Coach made us do thirteen suicides at the end of practice. I can’t.”
Hank laughed out loud. “This from the girl who applied to West Point? It’s hard enough to imagine you with a gun, Ave. But you gonna say ‘I can’t’ when they hand you a fifty-pound rucksack and say go?” His tone turned dark. “You’ve gotta get serious.”
Staring at his dark features, Avery knew suddenly why he was here. This wasn’t about her future in Division I basketball, or even the long-shot application she’d mailed to West Point six months earlier, which he was now apparently using against her. This was about Caleb.
The parking lot cleared of cars, leaving rectangular imprints outlined with dirty snow. Avery stood in silence until she realized her father wasn’t going to back down.
“I’ll be in counseling someday talking about how you made me run three miles home every day like a maniac.”
“Nah.” He waved a hand through the air. “You love it.” He unlocked the door of his daughter’s car and jumped inside, immediately starting the engine and the heat. His hands slapped together, rubbing out the cold. “Better get moving.”
“Hold your horses!” She pulled off her sweaty jersey, grabbed a dirty long-sleeved fleece from the backseat of her car, and yanked it over her head with force. Then, shooting her father a murderous look and a middle finger, she took off running.
Fury drove her legs over and over again against the cold. Tucking her fingers into the sleeves of her shirt, Avery pushed the pace. From her high school to their home was exactly 3.4 miles. She’d measured it at least ten times with her car odometer, hoping it would get shorter, which it never did. Wind whipped over her ears and eyes, giving her a slight headache. Note to self, Avery thought as she hit her stride, tomorrow, pack a hat.
Once her breathing steadied, she settled into a rhythm. That was the sole benefit of these long runs: they provided time alone, time to clear out the clutter in her mind.
First and foremost—she hated the fact that her father was using West Point against her. Back in the fall, her AP history teacher, Ms. Williams, had forced her classes to fill out West Point’s initial screening form online. In the library computer lab, Avery typed out her GPA, SAT scores, list of extracurriculars, without thinking twice. But that night, the phone rang, and suddenly there was a deep-voiced man on the other end of the line, asking Avery a series of questions with military precision. When she’d placed the phone back on the stand
, Avery stared at it for a long time before her mother’s quiet voice broke through the silence.
“Well?” Lonnie Adams had asked. “What was that all about?”
Avery’s parents were sitting still at the kitchen table, their forks suspended in midair. Oblivious to the phone call that had just taken place, Caleb shoveled a bite of spaghetti into his mouth.
“That was an admissions officer from West Point,” Avery had said. “They want me to apply.”
“You?” her father had grunted. He shook his head and went back to eating. “Will they let you wear your tiara while you shoot your gun?”
“West Point?” her mother repeated. “Do they even admit girls?”
The disbelief in their eyes was all it took for Avery to decide to apply. In the weeks after that phone call, Ms. Williams had helped Avery navigate the application. She explained that the U.S. Military Academy wasn’t just an athletic and academic powerhouse of a school—it was also free. Free. As in zero dollars. That fit into Avery’s framework. She didn’t want to owe her parents anything anymore. And she was smart enough to know that they didn’t have savings just lounging around in some bank account.
After some research, Avery learned that in exchange for that free education, West Point graduates committed to serve for five years as officers in the U.S. Army. But that didn’t sound like that bad of a deal. She had a cousin who’d joined the military and got stationed overseas in Italy. So, a free education and a guaranteed job after college, possibly in an exotic location? To Avery, that seemed like the deal of the century.
Almost too good to be true.
After Avery passed the Candidate Fitness Assessment—the push-ups, sit-ups, and shuttle run came easy—Ms. Williams told Avery that she needed a nomination from a congressman, a senator, or the vice president.
“Uh,” Avery had said with a laugh, “my family doesn’t know anyone in politics.”
In response, Ms. Williams set up an interview for Avery with the famed Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter. When his nomination came in the mail, Avery started to think that she might just have a chance. On her own, she’d reached out to the women’s basketball coach, a woman named Catherine Jankovich, whose e-mail address had been listed on West Point’s athletic website. She’d mailed the coach videotape of games and practices, as requested. The coach had offered Avery a position on the team if West Point offered her admission, but Avery noticed she’d placed particular emphasis on the word if.
Beyond the Point Page 3