by Allen, Jacob
7:59.
I opened the clock. Now I was literally counting down the seconds. I wondered how many other nervous teenagers across America were doing this like me. Was Adam? Probably not, his dad was a former dean at Vanderbilt. Emily had the easiest evening, already having been accepted early decision into Vanderbilt. Jackie and Kevin had gotten into Knoxville already and both accepted, confirming they would continue.
Nick…
No word on him yet.
How appropriate that the two of us were probably the only ones who had no idea where we stood.
8 p.m.
It was time.
I refreshed the page on Vanderbilt.
Seconds later, it confirmed I had gotten in. At least we’re starting on a good note. Vanderbilt was not even close to my top choice, but depending on how the decisions of others at Providence Prep went, it was an option I would seriously consider. Of course, that was assuming that none of the other schools accepted me.
I closed it out, not yet smiling. I refreshed the page on Duke.
I was in.
Now I could smile. Now, I was almost certainly leaving this area. It would take a miracle to get me to choose Vanderbilt over Duke, no matter who went where. Duke was far removed from the Providence Prep lifestyle, far removed from the drama, and far removed from anyone I knew. As far as I was concerned, I was one hundred percent not going to Vanderbilt or Knoxville.
But as great as it was to get into Duke, that wasn’t the top choice. It was a great choice, but it wasn’t the best choice. Now the real drama began.
I went to Yale. I had a feeling this one would say a lot. If I got in there, I’d feel much better about my chances of getting into Yale. If I didn’t, I’d refresh the page on Harvard with extreme nervousness.
I refreshed Yale. I…
Denied?
Oh, shit. Oh, no. I’m good enough for Duke, but not the Ivy Leagues.
Now panic was starting to set in. I closed the page to Yale, but I prayed I hadn’t closed my chances of Harvard. This was the dream. One click of the mouse to refresh the page was going to reveal everything—but would the reveal make me smile, or would it depress me?
The foreshadowing suggested I was not going to be a student at Harvard. Duke would be wonderful, and by the time June hit, I supposed I’d be quite happy there, but…
I closed my eyes. I clicked refresh. Please, please, please…
I turned away and looked at my phone. Not surprisingly, messages were already flooding the chat. Adam had gotten into Vanderbilt, and he and Emily were going to continue their relationship there. Jackie and Kevin were already set. I said that I’d gotten in at Duke—I did not mention Vanderbilt, as I did not want to give them any opportunity to be persuaded—but was waiting on Harvard. No one said a word about Nick.
I put my phone down. The answer was already on my screen.
I turned.
“Dear Samantha Young,
Congratulations!”
I screamed. I didn’t see anything else. I screamed for joy, thrust my fists in the air, and jumped up and down in my room. I put my hands on my face and began to sob tears of joy. For all that I’d gone through, for all that I’d sacrificed, for how close I’d probably come to throwing it all away with the in-school suspension… it didn’t matter. As long as I didn’t suddenly fail my last semester—which I was in absolutely no danger of doing—I was in.
I was going to be a Harvard student.
“Oh my God!” I screamed.
My mother and father came rushing in. I smiled and hugged them tightly. I didn’t care that they were cold and distant emotionally, I didn’t care that they could sometimes be almost more invested in my academic success than they were.
I just cared that they had gotten me into Harvard.
“Samantha?” my father said, a hint of a nervous wave to my voice.
“I did it,” I said in between sobs. “I got in to Harvard.”
My parents hugged me and cheered, and for what seemed like the first time in ages, they showed emotion. My mother started to cry. My father kissed me on the top of my head and held me tight. We were actually a close family.
“Oh, man,” I said, finally pulling away, finally gathering myself. “This is all so, so crazy. I don’t… I don’t even know what to think!”
My parents laughed.
“We couldn’t be prouder of you, Samantha,” my father said. “We’re happy to celebrate however you want.”
“Yes, please,” I said with a chuckle, ideas running through my head.
First, I had to text my friends the good news.
I grabbed my phone and looked at the text updates.
“I GOT INTO HARVARD!” I wrote in all caps with multiple emojis.
The congratulations came pouring in almost immediately. Both Jackie and Emily loved the text and sent GIFs of celebration. They said even Adam and Kevin were sending their congratulations as well.
And then came the text that didn’t worry me as much as I might have once feared. In fact, in a way, I almost welcomed it.
“Nick also got a walk-on offer at Harvard,” Emily wrote. “Deciding between there, Brown, and Princeton. Won’t go to Vanderbilt.”
How interesting. How amusing would that be, the two of us at the same campus.
But you know what? Now that it was here, I was willing to face any challenge that came my way. I had, after all, already overcome the biggest challenge yet—getting into my dream school.
18
Nick*
Six Months Ago
“So you’re telling me that you don’t have any scholarships?” my father said.
The assistant coach at Harvard, sitting in my home, did his best to remain calm before my typically demanding father. My father liked to run these meetings with prospective coaches, as if they wanted to run everything in my athletic career. I couldn’t wait for the day when I would never have to deal with them again.
“The Ivy League does not give out scholarships for athletics, this is true,” the coach said. “However—”
“Then we’re done here,” my father.
“Dad!”
“If you want to waste time here, playing football in front of a few dozen people instead of NFL scouts, then go ahead.”
My father got up, grumbled something about how the Lockes would dominate the NFL someday, and then departed. I was left sitting awkwardly in the room, trying to force a smile at the assistant coach who looked like he felt he’d wasted his time coming.
“He’s like that,” I said. “But I don’t have a lot of other offers elsewhere. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say that, but—”
“Son, it’s fine,” he said with a chuckle. “We know that if we’re competing for kids who have offers to Alabama and Clemson, we’re not going to reel in those recruits, no matter how smart they are.”
I nodded. At least we were on the same page. It was oddly nice having this level of transparency; there were no games like the Vanderbilt coaches and other SEC coaches had played with my two older brothers.
“However, here’s what we can say,” he said. “We have the grades. If you want to come to Harvard and will commit to play for us, we’d be glad to have you on. Obviously, you’d have to get your old man to sign off, but the offer is there.”
In a way, that was one of the best things I’d heard. If Harvard—freaking Harvard!—was the backup, then that wasn’t too bad.
But unfortunately, my father wasn’t the only one obsessed with getting me a scholarship. I was too.
I couldn’t be the only one without one in the Locke family. I couldn’t look like a failure in comparison to Clarke and Andrew. I literally couldn’t think of a worse outcome than that.
But, on the flip side, as far as “worse outcomes” went, being a Harvard student wasn’t too bad, I suppose.
“I’ll let you know,” I said. “Maybe it’ll work out that way.”
“Maybe,” the coach said. “Just keep us informed.”
>
Hopefully, the answer is no.
But if it isn’t…
* * *
Present Day
It was as I had expected.
Vanderbilt had officially used up all of their scholarships for next year. They were happy to extend me a preferred walk-on spot, but they could not pay for me to go to school there next year.
But even if they had, after my conversation with my brothers, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to go. My family wasn’t lacking for money; it wasn’t like without a scholarship, I couldn’t go to college. And even if I had to take out loans, I didn’t want to continue the misery.
I liked football. I even loved it. But I hated the stress and the pressure that had come from trying to get a scholarship to appease my father. I just wanted to go someplace where the game could be played for fun, without concern about making it to the NFL or getting paid. At this point, I wanted to use football as a means to get an education, not as a means to play more football.
It was more painful than I wanted to admit to let this go. If I’d had this thought even a month ago, I would have sworn and cussed up a storm.
But now, my brothers had shown me there were better options. And I never would have guessed that “better options” would have meant Ivy League schools.
As of about fifteen minutes ago, I officially had offers from Harvard, Brown, and Princeton—on the condition that I joined their football team. That wasn’t a hard thing to agree to, as the issue had never been with the sport of football, but the mindless, futile comparisons that came with pursuing football. If my father was really going to bitch about his last son going to an Ivy League school because it didn’t technically offer scholarships, well, that was too damn bad.
Now, of course, the fun began with trying to figure out where to go. And immediately, it was down to two schools. Harvard or Princeton—Brown just lost too much for me to give it any serious thought.
Both were pretty much the same in many ways except for one, one confirmed to me through a text by Adam.
Samantha was going to go to Harvard.
Did I want to go to the same school as her, or did I want to get far, far away from her, never to see her again?
I knew I wasn’t going to make any decisions immediately. Even if Samantha and I reached some sort of understanding—hell, even if we fell in love somehow or became friends with benefits in the next few weeks—I wanted to make sure I made the rational choice. I’d made so many irrational choices since Christmas, I owed it to myself to pick something good.
I suppose one thing that could have helped was to actually communicate with her.
I suppose I could have actually answered the text she sent a week and a half ago, the one that I never answered. I pulled open my phone and looked at that text again, for what felt like the twentieth time since it had first popped up in my inbox.
“Hey, I know things have been quiet, but I don’t want you to think I was toying with you. I understand why you did what you did last time we hung out. I just have issues being more comfortable opening up.”
It didn’t contain a question, but as far as I was concerned, it was offering me the chance to ask her several more. Why did she act the way she did if she wasn’t trying to mess with me? Why was she so willing to forgive me for trying to grab her ass when she seemed so repulsed by it? Why did she had issues opening up?
And, for that matter, what did open up mean? Sexually? Emotionally? Romantically?
I put the phone down, thinking that this was all just stupid. Was I really going to make a decision for where I attended school based on a girl that I’d kissed once in my life, let alone loved or had sex with?
Well, are you? She is someone that you were drawn to at the library. She is someone you’ve always had a strange thing for from afar. You never acted on it, but you had the chance. She is someone who you’d have more in common with than you realize.
And for that matter, what other differentiating factors are there? Really? What else are you going to use as judgment? You like both football teams the same. The academics are basically the same. So… have you got anything else?
Not really.
This still felt slightly crazy. The boys may have gotten softer with the end of high school approaching, but they would still kick my ass if I let a life-changing decision come down to romance. My brothers, especially, would kick my ass, and this time, I couldn’t argue. At least it’s not like Memphis versus Harvard.
But what was going to drive me crazier, not seeing her and trying to guess at a decision from afar, or biting the bullet, letting things unfold, and then seeing what happened?
I picked up the phone and started typing.
“Heard you got into Harvard. Congrats.”
I sent it with a quick sigh, as if pushing away the part of my brain that warned me not to text her. I wasn’t acknowledging her previous text, but I knew she wasn’t thinking about that text right now. She certainly wasn’t thinking about me.
I thought that, at least.
Then the text bubble popped up showing that she was already in the process of writing me back.
“Hey! Thanks! Feels great. You did too?”
I swore I could have sensed that she wanted to put more to that text, but that she was being reserved. After everything that had happened between us, who could blame her?
“Yep! Still deciding between Harvard and Princeton. Feels good.”
That’s not enough. You’re going to have to say more to her, dude.
“Btw, I saw your text from before. I appreciate you being more open. Would’ve been nice then, but better late than never.”
I closed my phone after sending that text, relaxing on my bed. I wouldn’t need to wait long for her to reply, that was sure. I just needed a moment to relax. Sending texts like that was surprisingly stressful, especially since, apparently, I cared more than I would have guessed.
I felt my phone buzz less than thirty seconds later.
“Yeah, well, I’m a slow learner socially.”
I snorted. I waited for her to add something more.
But she didn’t. No question for me, nothing. It was like I had to carry the load, as if I had to prove that I really wanted her.
Which, if that was how it was going to be…
You’re the one asking the questions, Nick. You should be the one to keep asking them.
You’re the one that wants to meet up, right? You’re the one that made the first move all these times. Well, make the first move again. You may have gotten rejected three times, but if you want to be accepted on the fourth…
“Well, in any case, I’d love to celebrate our acceptances into Harvard. Would you like to meet up?”
I didn’t have time to close my phone before she liked the message and wrote back “Yes.”
I smiled. The hard part was done.
Now, the harder part had arrived—getting Samantha to push past whatever awkwardness and fears she had.
The question was, how far was I willing to push?
19
Samantha
All I knew was that when Wednesday morning had come, the day after, when everyone was gossiping about who had gotten in where, Nick had approached me with a simple message.
“Meet me at my car Friday after school.”
I nodded, and that was enough for him. The rest of the school week, he ignored me, though it didn’t seem malicious. It just seemed like he was figuring things out—whatever they were—in his head and wanted to have the space and clarity to do so away from me.
It was all a little surreal. If I hadn’t gotten into Harvard, I wouldn’t be talking to him right now. If I hadn’t gone on spring break with the girls and overheard Adam and Kevin talking, I wouldn’t have ever thought to text him. Allowing Nick a third—a fourth? A ton, absolutely—chance seemed foolish and irrational.
Guess you’ve used enough rationality to get into Harvard. Now it’s time to use a little irrationality to see what might be here. If
you’ve got another four years of him, you might as well at least get on good terms.
As soon as the last period bell rang, I felt my nerves fire and the butterflies in my stomach increase. I had done my best to pretend that I didn’t care that much about this moment, that I was just doing this to close the circle on something in my life the past couple of months, but that was a lie. It was a bad lie, too, because I was very bad at fooling myself.
Imagining Nick’s scent, his body near me, his control over me… yeah, my mind went some places it should not have. Being in that spring break house all week, having to listen to my two best friends have sex constantly, without me getting any was a little annoying. I felt left out, yeah, but it also drove my libido as high as it had ever felt.
Not that I was going to do anything here, I told myself. I was hanging out with Nick, not going to the bathroom to suck his dick. My first time was going to be special and it was going to be good; at the very least, it wasn’t going to be crass and somewhere cheap. And as much as Nick was a polarizing figure in my head, I did not imagine that he was going to be able to pull that off tonight.
When I walked outside the school and got to his car, he was already waiting. He had sunglasses on, a Tennessee Titans hat on, and a smirk with his arms folded.
“Get in,” he said.
Well, I’d agreed to show up, hadn’t I? I got in the front door, which he was gentlemanly enough to open, and sat down, staring straight ahead at the shrub of bushes in front of the car. Nick walked around, sat in the front seat, and revved the engine.
“So, where are we going?” I asked.
But Nick didn’t have much interest in answering me right now. He kept his eyes on the road, turning his head to check for oncoming traffic, before he sped like a bullet onto the main road, hitting seventy miles per hour before slamming the brakes for a traffic light.
“Jesus, Nick,” I said. “Are you trying to die?”