Awake in the World Page 3

  “Good!” She clapped once. “We know each other.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Rhyzkov said your name,” she explained, walking beside me. “I think she got it wrong.”

  “Yeah, but you knew my name already. From class.”

  Vanessa shrugged. “I’m bad with names.”

  “Maybe you’re bad with uncool people’s names.”

  “Touchy.”

  “I think it’s pronounced too-shay,” I corrected.

  “Nope. That’s tushy.” She pivoted and lightly tapped her butt with one hand. I must have colored slightly, because she laughed. “That was my butt,” she said. “I just touched my butt.”

  “I think only grandmas say tushy,” I pointed out. “Maybe Southerners. Are you from the South?”

  “Santa Barbara. So … technically, yes, though that’s not what you meant.”

  It didn’t occur to me until we’d arrived in the main hall that she’d somehow taken control of our destination. I’d started walking, but now she was leading. I couldn’t figure out how she’d done that. But: I also didn’t stop walking with her.

  “College fair is Friday,” she said. My response was a grunt. “You’re not turning backflips.”

  We passed a flyer, one of a hundred pasted up around school. Vanessa tore it from the wall. “Have you looked at this thing?”

  “Not really.”

  Day-Glo yellow paper. Huge black letters.

  CLASS OF 2103 COLLEGE FAIR

  She flicked the paper with the back of her hand. “You see what I see?”

  “I see I’m stuck here a hell of a lot longer than I planned.”

  “Ninety years longer.”

  “So we can skip college fair Friday, then,” I said. “We’ve got, like, eighty-nine years before we need to figure out our futures.”

  She laughed. Not the kind of laugh I expected to fall out of a face like hers. No, this was the laugh of a woman who’d smoked three packs a day for at least fifty years. Throaty, deep.

  I liked it.

  “I mean, just imagine what it’ll cost in the twenty-second century,” Vanessa said. “Probably a hundred million in annual tuition. Per student.”

  “Not even close,” I said. “By then we’ll have achieved enlightenment. Education is a human right. You can’t charge for human rights.”

  Vanessa directed us to B wing, and I waited while she popped her locker open. She pulled out the messenger bag and her bike helmet. She rapped on the helmet with one knuckle. “My stepfather says I should earn the money for my first car on my own,” she said. “So I bike.”

  “Because you disagree?” I wondered what that was like. The ability to save money for anything at all.

  Another shrug. “Driving seems … less fun.”

  “Than what?”

  “The wind in your hair. Coasting down a long grade.” She buckled the helmet to her bag. “Besides, if I got a job, my grades would take a hit.”

  “The valedictory pool,” I said. “Yeah. I’ve heard about it.”

  “Cece can have it.”

  “Not in it to win it?”

  She shut her locker. “I keep the grades up for other reasons.”

  “You’ve got a dream school,” I speculated. “You are excited about college fair.” She began walking again, and my feet—mind of their own, those things—joined her. “What school?”

  “Cornell,” she said, eyes glittering. “What’s yours?”

  “My dream school? I … don’t have one.” Suddenly I didn’t want to have this conversation anymore. “I hear Santa Barbara’s really nice. I hear a lot of famous people live there.”

  “Katy Perry had sleepovers at my house.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Farts. In her sleep. A lot.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I can’t imagine why you left.”

  “My mom got married. And here we are.”

  I walked with her to the bike racks, where she paused beside the most elegant contraption I’d ever seen. “What … is that?”

  “It’s a Kestrel,” she said. I detected a hint of embarrassment. “My stepfather bought it for me.”

  “I used to have a car. I think your bike helmet cost more than it did.”

  She fastened her helmet strap. “Do you ride?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Shit.” She looked at the empty bus lanes. “Did I make you miss your bus?”

  “No, I walk.”

  She blinked. Palmer Rankin wasn’t exactly in the heart of Orilly. “Is it a long way?”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “How far to your house?”

  “I’m not going home. I have one of those things. A … job, I think you call it?” I was mildly amused by her discomfort. She was different right then, which made me wonder how much of the sliding-up-to-the-locker thing had been an act. “Don’t forget your mirror,” I added.

  She touched the folded mirror attached to her helmet, then blushed. “I feel like a walking cyclist-hipster catalog in front of you.”

  “You’d have to be wearing bike shorts under your clothes to achieve that,” I said. She looked mortified. “You are, aren’t you. You’re totally wearing spandex shorts under your clothes. Were you just planning to strip down right here in front of—” The turn of her smile said it all. “I get it. You’re fucking with me.”

  “You’re an easy target.” She threw a leg over her bike. “See you at college fair, yeah?”

  “Next century,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Grammatical atrocities!” she howled as she pedaled away. I watched her go, then turned toward Maddie’s Market. Though it wasn’t far, my ankle throbbed uncomfortably by the time I tied my apron on.

  I’d live. Always managed to.

  8

  Vanessa

  Orilly didn’t rate its own college fair, so we were off to San Luis Obispo. I boarded the old bus behind Cece. Zach was already there, a sketchbook open across his knees. He was working on something serious, frightful: the ocean, ominous and dark, rising up against a little seaside town. The curl of the waves looked like fangs, white and hard and cold; the sliver of moon above like a heavy-lidded eye.

  This was a boy who needed some cheering up. As I passed him by, I tapped the tip of his nose with my fingertip. “Boop.”

  He flinched, then gave me a shaky smile.

  By the time the bus chugged out of the parking lot, Cece was prioritizing the schools she planned to visit at the fair. I bumped her elbow—I’m a pest when I’m bored, what can I say?—and sent her pen looping across the page.

  “Stop that,” she chided. “I’m busy.”

  “You’ve already gone over that list fifty times.”

  “Listen, just because some of us have safety schools and backup plans…”

  “Don’t start,” I warned. “Anyway, you can’t work. We have to talk.”

  She shook her head, still bent over her list. “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes. I think you’re not telling me something. So we do.”

  At that, she did look up. Her cheeks had flushed pink. “No,” she began, but I cut her off.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Couple of days ago. You had this—I don’t know. This look. So let’s hear it. What’s the big secret?”

  “I don’t have a secret.”

  I tapped a finger against my chin and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “High school girl … easily embarrassed. Has a secret but can’t confess it. I mean, there’s only one thing it could be.”

  She caved remarkably quickly. With a look left and right, she said, “You can’t tell anyone.”

  “We’re on a bus full of kids. Nobody here knows how to keep their mouth shut.”

  “Forget it, then.”

  “Except me. Spill it.”

  “No.”

  “Fine,” I said. I raised my voice: “Cecily Vasquez, you have a crush, and if you don’t—”

  “Knock it off,” she hissed. When she was certain nobody
was paying attention, she curled back the cover of her notebook, like a poker player on TV. Written over and over on page after page was a single name.

  Ada Lin.

  Oh my god, I mouthed.

  I know, Cece mouthed back. I don’t know.

  I mean, she’s beautiful.

  “She is, isn’t she?” Cece whispered, breaking our silence. Her voice was so soft I could barely hear her over the rumble of the bus. “She’s my partner in AP English. I start sweating any time she looks at me.”

  “Does she know?”

  “No.” She blanched. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe when you look like Ada, you just assume everybody’s into you.” I raised my butt off the seat and peered over the head of the boy in front of me. “Is she on our bus?”

  “Sit down. Right now.”

  I did, grinning. “She is. She’s on our bus.”

  “She’s not.”

  “She’s sitting right next to Zach.”

  Cece sighed. “Well, there goes your crush. Sorry about that.”

  “My crush?”

  “Yeah. He’ll have eyes only for her by the time we get to SLO.”

  “Wait. My crush?”

  She laughed at me. “You forget how well I know you.”

  Cece and I had met at Aaron’s company barbecue last summer. As he’d taken Mom around, making introductions, I’d searched for faces my age. There had been plenty of kids: playing Frisbee, knocking a volleyball around. But I’d spotted a girl beneath a sprawling oak, reading a book. I’d sucked in a deep breath and tried to be confident, like Mom.

  “You’re Mr. Bartlett’s new wife’s kid,” the girl said, after I’d introduced myself.

  “That’s my name. It was a little hard to fit on the birth certificate,” I said. “And even harder to time travel in order to make it happen. But I pulled it off.”

  “You’re a smart-ass,” she said. “That’s too bad.”

  “Why?” I blurted.

  She shrugged. “One smart-ass is the limit to every friendship. If both people qualify…”

  “You’re messing with me.”

  “I am.”

  I sank to the grass. “I’m Vanessa. Which is your parent?”

  “Like you know anybody here.”

  “I don’t,” I confessed.

  “Then it doesn’t really matter.” She put out her hand. “I’m Cecily Vasquez. Ernesto’s my dad.”

  “Is your dad a lawyer, too?” I asked. Aaron was Bernaco Oil’s in-house counsel.

  “Just your average hard hat.”

  She was reading a book about the Supreme Court. Not exactly summer reading, I thought. “But you’re into law?”

  She shrugged. “I’m into a lot of things. Law’s one of them. You?”

  “Space.”

  “Going?”

  “Looking.” I leaned forward until I was uncomfortably close to her and stared.

  She pulled back. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking,” I said. “I like your eyes. They’re like Japanese pears.”

  “You’re a serial killer.”

  I mimed plucking and eating one of her eyes, and, happily, she laughed. We’d hung out the rest of the summer, and through Cece I’d met a few dozen seniors before the school year began.

  And now here we were, on a bus to college fair, our respective crushes possibly crushing on each other.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I admitted to her. “Zach’s … interesting. Like you.”

  “I think we’re both idiots,” Cece said. “High school’s almost over. Afterward, you’re off to New York. I’m off to…”

  “Harvard. Columbia. Alpaca college.”

  “That’s not a thing.”

  “Might be.”

  “It’s not. I promise.”

  “Takes all kinds of people to make a world, Cece.”

  “My point,” she continued, “is that we’d be stupid to act on our crushes. I can’t exactly see Ada at law school. Or Zach at Cornell.”

  “So we’d be signing up for heartbreak. That’s your point?”

  An emphatic nod. “I say we focus on college. Ignore them both. Let Zach fall for Ada. That’s probably happened already, actually. We just move on and preserve our exciting futures.”

  “I dunno,” I said, casting another glance toward Zach. “I’m … intrigued.”

  Cece grabbed my arm. “Don’t go toward the light, Vanessa.”

  “Whatever. You’re intrigued, too.”

  She deflated. “It’s true.” Then her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Subject change: You’re a moron.”

  “What?”

  “You have to have a safety school. At least one.”

  The bus lurched to a stop in front of the Madonna Expo Center, and my stomach swayed. “Tell me something nice,” I said. “I am nerv.”

  Cece thought for a moment. “Less than a hundred yards from here sits a Cornell goddess who wishes to talk to you, and only you.”

  I buried my face in Cece’s dark hair. “More.”

  “Someone,” she went on, “from the very halls where Carl Sagan once walked—”

  “Dr. Sagan,” I corrected.

  “—from the school where the mythic, mighty Dr. Sagan once enlightened the unwashed peoples of the world,” she continued, “stands just inside this hallowed hall, waiting to sweep you away to the sparkling green hills of Ithaca, land of starstuff, where you, too, will navigate the solar tides in your sturdy Viking longboat—”

  “Okay,” I said, lifting my head. “You’re overdoing it.”

  “Good. I was running out of purple words.”

  “They’ll want me, right?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Well … you are more emotionally flimsy than their usual applicants…”

  I thumped her shoulder. “Right?”

  “I promise they’ll save a brochure for you,” Cece said, standing up. “A postcard, at least.”

  9

  Zach

  Oh, man, did I ever not want to be at a college fair.

  I’d barely had time to take in the layout of the expo center before I was swept along by a river of students rushing from booth to booth. The safest place in the building, I soon learned, seemed to be the outer track, far from the booths themselves, and I aimed my feet and held my breath and—eventually—washed ashore there. My only company on that narrow beach were the teachers and parent chaperones from a dozen different high schools. A man in a tracksuit looked me up and down, then looked away.

  Yeah, I wouldn’t have bothered with me, either.

  The sidelines offered a better view of the presentation floor: a flotilla of college booths sprawled beneath a complicated sky of catwalks and lighting grids. A banner dangled high above: CENTRAL COAST COLLEGE FAIR—WELCOME CLASS OF 2013.

  I spotted Vanessa and Cece as they entered the stream. They split up quickly, Vanessa rising on her toes to scan the booth banners. Cece appeared to be driven by two competing interests: the list in her hands and the bobbing head of the girl she seemed to be following, not inconspicuously. I recognized the girl: She was my seatmate from the bus. Ada something.

  “You’re not going to map your future from the sidelines,” a voice said, and I turned to see the tracksuited man studying me again.

  “What?”

  “I said you’re not going to map your future from the sidelines.” He nodded toward the crowded floor, framing the view with two hands, like a cinematographer. “Your future’s out there.”

  Sigh. “Thanks,” I said, wondering if I could put some distance between me and this guy. He nodded curtly and wore a satisfied smile, as if proud he’d set me on the right path.

  The college fair wasn’t explicitly a mandatory event … but it was definitely more than a suggestion. I’d tried arguing with Ms. Grace that I had no plans for college. She’d suggested we talk to my brother … and I really didn’t want him getting the idea of college in his head, so I caved. And wound up here, where I couldn’
t be more out of my depth.

  Vanessa and Cece, they belonged at a place like this. Those girls couldn’t be more unalike—Vanessa’s family had money, judging by her bicycle, and she’d probably get to go anywhere she wanted; Cece was more like me, from the kind of family where everyone had calluses on their hands as they passed food around the dinner table—but they were both wickedly smart. Money or not, they’d both be in college soon. Graduate top of their class. Line up six-figure jobs.

  It wasn’t that way for me. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart. I was smart enough. But that didn’t factor into it. Things were different. Because my family needed me. Needed me at home. All hands on deck, so to speak.

  I let the current carry me around the building, taking in the booths that represented futures completely out of my reach: Harvard, Yale, Princeton. All the California schools: UCSB, UCLA, UC Berk, UC Davis, USC, Stanford, Cal State, San Diego State … Even the schools I’d never heard of were walled-off paths.

  Ms. Grace thought I didn’t care about college. But that wasn’t it, either. If things were different … But I had reasons to put college out of my mind right from the start. If she’d asked, I’d have told her why I wasn’t going to college. I had a whole list.

  1.  College costs a hell of a lot of money.

  2.  College = staggering debt. For, like, years.

  3.  College ≠ guaranteed job. So you get to live with that debt. Forever.

  But those are just the practical reasons. The real reasons I can’t go to college have names. Rachael. Robin. Mama. Even Derek. If they didn’t need me, if they didn’t need every extra digit I could add to my paycheck, then yeah, things could be different. I’d let myself think about college then. Hell, it wasn’t even like I’d have to actually go. I could just imagine it. I could join in the hallway conversations I heard every day: What college did you get into? No WAY. The other kids thrilled at the idea of leaving Orilly. They were all straining at their leashes. They’d all caught a whiff of that impending freedom, the freedom that would land on them with a jolt as soon as they walked the stage at graduation.

  Just to feel those things myself—that could almost be enough. A guy could live a lifetime in a moment of feeling like that. Come back to your body feeling like, for just a second, you’d been somewhere else. Been someone else. A second of feeling like that could probably float a guy for years.