“I read about it.”
“Where, in The Little Golden Book of Converting? You scare me, Alby. Slow down, brother. You don’t have to know everything already.”
“Yes I do. Ask me a question, and I’ll tell you the answer.”
“Okay,” said Cory. “When did the dinosaurs go extinct?”
Alby slapped his forehead. “That’s too easy,” he said. “Sixty-five million years ago.”
“He’ll be good when he gets to Paths of Imagination,” Greer said. “He’ll whip right through it.”
“Yeah, he’ll kick Taryn the Recycling Girl’s butt.”
“By the time he’s in school,” said Greer, “Taryn the Recycling Girl will be sitting on her porch thinking about the highlight of her life, the time when she was a child and got into The Guinness Book of World Records.”
“Actually, she’ll probably be dead,” said Cory. “The toxic chemicals in all the bottles she collected will have given her cancer and killed her.”
“Who’s going to be dead? Give me another one,” said Alby, full of lofty excitement.
Cory thought about this. “Okay,” he said, and he smiled at Greer. “Try this one. Define love.”
Alby stood up on the plastic surface of the couch, which crunched beneath his feet. He wore a thin old red Power Rangers sweatshirt, handed down from Cory and already too small, the image and the lettering half rubbed off and cryptic. “Love is when you feel, like, oh, oh, my heart hurts,” Alby said. “Or like when you see a dog and you feel like you have to touch its head.” He looked at Greer. “Like the way Cory is touching your head now.” Cory stopped the movement of his hand, just froze there in her hair.
“Whoa,” said Cory softly, taking his hand away. “You’re like the Dalai Lama, man. I’m afraid to let you go walking around outside. Some people might come and bring you back to their country and make you live in a gated palace.”
“That would be good,” said Alby. “They can do that if they want.”
Greer suddenly reached over and touched Alby’s small, sleek head. Cory watched his girlfriend pet the head of his brother, as if Alby were a cocker spaniel, smooth-furred and enormous of eye.
Cory and Greer would try to be together for college; that was what they agreed, and they were optimistic it would happen. On the spring day when most of their college decisions would be revealed online after five p.m., they rode home from school barely talking. The hydraulic doors of the district school bus unshuttered and released them with a vacuum pop onto the mouth of Woburn Road. Behind them, distantly, was Kristin Vells. Kristin was not on an academic track, and so they had never even had a conversation with her over all these years; they thought she was dumb, and she thought they were dumb, each in a different way. Kristin went home to her house, probably to smoke and nap, and Cory and Greer ran pounding down Woburn toward the Kadetskys’. It was only three thirty. They lingered for a while in Greer’s bedroom, undisturbed.
“Whatever happens today, we’re solid, right?” he asked her. “And we’ll be solid next year too.”
“Of course.” She paused. “Why, what are you expecting to happen?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just that they don’t know us, these admissions committees. They don’t know what we’re really like. Or that we do best when we’re with each other.”
They had decided that they would find out their college decisions together, first at her house, and then at his. At five p.m. Greer went first, sitting at the kitchen table and logging in to the relevant websites one after another, alphabetically. Her hand shook a little as she entered her password and waited. “We received a record number of applicants . . . ,” came the tumble of words. The shock of rejection was strong: Harvard, no. Princeton, no.
“Oh shit, oh shit,” said Greer, and Cory gripped her hand.
“It’s insanely competitive,” he murmured. “But really, screw them, Greer. They’re just wrong.”
“This is what you meant when you said we’re solid, isn’t it?” Greer said, her voice rising. “You thought I wasn’t going to get in, and you were trying to prepare me.”
“No, of course not.”
The Yale decision still hung there at the end of the alphabet, but by now Cory felt sorry for her and worried for himself, and didn’t hold out too much hope for her for Yale, if she hadn’t gotten into those others. Greer clicked indifferently on the Yale link and entered her password, and when the music flooded out all at once, the Yale fight song—“Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow wow wow!”—they both started to shout, and then Greer cried and he put his arms around her, so relieved, and said, “Nice work, Space Kadetsky.”
Her parents wandered in then, her father looking for something to eat and her mother cradling her flip phone and talking into it about a new shipment of ComSell Nutricle bars, “which,” she was saying, “we now have in Banana Blast.”
“What’s going on?” Rob asked, and then Greer told them, and he said, “Oh shit, it’s already five? We lost track.”
Cory wanted to say to Greer’s parents: You lost track? Are you shitting me? Don’t you know what you have here with this girl? Don’t you know how hard she works, and how much she loves it? Why can’t you be more proud of her? Why can’t you appreciate her? It’s so easy to do.
“Mom, Dad, I got into Yale,” Greer said. “You can read the letter. I left it up on the computer.”
Next he and Greer ran across the road and up the incline, and right away Cory sensed something strange going on inside his own house. Both of his parents knew that today was when decisions would be handed down. They were so invested in this whole process, and yet where were they? They were behaving almost as cavalierly as the Kadetskys. They should have been waiting for him by the door, he thought. But then his mother was upon him out of nowhere, throwing her arms around him. “Around my legs,” he later insisted, hyperbolic. How such a small woman could have given birth to this tall, thin pole-child was bewildering, as even Cory’s father was only of medium height and build. Their first son had gone beyond them in all ways.
“What’s going on?” Cory said, and deeper in the house other voices rose up. He heard his brother shouting, “He’s home!” followed by the thumping of Alby’s sneakers as he raced overhead and then leaped down the stairs with Slowy in hand, arriving at the same time that Aunt Maria pushed into the room from the kitchen, carrying a large aluminum pan containing a sheet cake. His father was right behind them, carrying a second cake. Cory was confused. The first cake was spread thickly with blue-and-white frosting, with a brush fire of candles on top. The air in the room was tinged with a distinctive birthday smell.
“Look at the picture,” his aunt said, and at first neither Cory nor Greer understood why the cake had been decorated with an illustration of an animal.
“A cow?” Cory asked. “But why?” It did look like a cartoon cow, though not quite, with a freckled face and an angry expression. No one answered, and Cory said, “Listen, you guys. You know the decisions are live online right this minute, right? These cakes are great, but I really have to go check.”
“Cory,” Alby said, gesturing in the air with the hand that held his turtle, which waved in halfhearted protest. “Don’t you get it?”
“No.”
“It’s a bulldog.”
As soon as Cory hesitantly said, “Yale?” his father presented the second sheet cake to him. This one was frosted white and orange with a big rust-colored animal in the center. Though it too resembled a farmyard animal, Cory and Greer both understood now that it was supposed to be the Princeton tiger.
“You got into both places. A full ride!” said Alby, as if he really understood the significance of this.
Cory stared at his family. “But how do you know already? I haven’t even logged in.”