_*_ 51 _*_
As we were walking to gym the next day, Finn asked me to go to see a school with him.
“We’re already in school, dummy,” I said.
“No, goof.” He gently hip-checked me. “College. My mom set up an interview for me, tomorrow. I don’t really want to go, but if you come with me, we can make it into a road trip. An epic road trip.”
“Epic is a stupid word,” I said. “Ninth graders call the cafeteria nachos ‘epic.’ That actress, what’s-her-name, the stoned one, she says her dog is ‘epic.’ And her lipstick.”
“It’ll get us out of here for a day,” he said. “And my mom will pay for the gas.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded.
I kissed him. “That’s potentially epic, I’ll grant you that much.”
Forging my father’s signature on the excused absence card was cake, and it felt good, in a bizarre way, to watch Ms. Benedetti’s face light up as she officially approved the absence. I wrote a note on my hand to bring her back a souvenir.
He picked me up at the corner the next morning. I thought he’d be buzzing on energy drinks and the epic-ness of the adventure, but he hardly said a word. Barely looked at me. When we got to the Thruway, he took a hard right into the commuter parking lot instead of driving through the tollbooth.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did the oil light just come on? Is the engine overheating?”
He shook his head, but I craned my head for a look at the dashboard, just in case. The indicator lights showed no impending disasters. Finn sighed heavily, but still didn’t say a word.
“Want me to drive?” I asked.
“You said you didn’t have your license yet.”
“Not technically.”
He didn’t even smile at that.
“It’s not the car, is it?” I asked.
He sighed again, watching the line of cars rolling through the tollbooth. “I had a fight with my mom this morning,” he said. “Before she even had her coffee.”
“Why?”
“She was telling me a bunch of stupid, ass-kissing things to say in this interview and then she got on me again for quitting the team. Next thing you know, she was bitching about the rent going up again and what a rotten son I am. For the first time ever, I yelled back.” He pounded the steering wheel gently with his fist. “I made her cry. Didn’t think that would happen.”
“Call and apologize,” I suggested. “Text her, at least.”
“I already did. That’s not the point.” He leaned forward and wiped the condensation off the windshield with his sleeve. “This interview is a waste of time. I don’t want to go to Oneonta.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Told you the other night. Swevenbury.”
“What’s so great about it?”
“Swevenbury College, home of The Wanderers? Voted Strangest Small College the last three years in a row? You get to design your own major; there are, like, only two required courses and everybody has to study overseas for a year. Swevenbury is what all other colleges want to be when they grow up. They say the grounds are seriously hallowed. Step foot on the campus and it changes you forever. It’s. . . .”
He paused like he was searching for the right word, something I’d never seen him do before.
“It’s Nerdvana!” he finally declared.
I nodded. “How far away?”
“One hundred eighty-three miles, north by northeast.” I shrugged. “Let’s go.”
“So I can be tortured by the magnitude of its awesomeness? No, thanks. I’d need a winning lottery ticket to go there.”
“That’s not why we’re going, numbnuts,” I said. “Road trips can make things look different. Trust me.”
He sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You have nothing to lose,” I said. “The look on your face when you said Swerva-whatever—”
“Swevenbury,” he corrected.
“See? Just saying it makes you smile.” I said “You promised me ‘epic,’ Finn-head. Point this car to Nerdvana and floor it. Or at least try to make the speed limit.”
I tried to goad him with stories of my years stalking ivory poachers in Southern Cameroons and the time that the Dalai Lama and I got snowed in on a mountaintop and played checkers until dawn, but Finn wasn’t interested in talking. He drove hunched over the steering wheel, his face stuck between a frown and pout (a prown? a fout?). I finally gave up and crawled into a book. Three and a half hours and one thick novel about dragons later, we drove under a massive stone arch with the words swevenbury college carved into it. A few minutes later, the forest opened up and the main campus came into view: old stone buildings, impossibly green lawns, and expensively dressed students. It looked like a supersized, Americanized version of Hogwarts, without the robes.
We parked and got out of the car.
“That grass looks like it’s been combed,” I said.
“Whatever,” Finn grumbled. “This way.”
The admission office was in a red stone castle, complete with turret and winding staircase. The receptionist there explained that we’d missed the first tour group, but we could join the next group after lunch.
Finn grunted.
She handed us a stack of glossy brochures and badges that had guest printed on them in red block letters.
“You’ll need these get into the library and student center,” she said. “Those coupons are good for five dollars off your meal.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Finn handed back his badge and the coupons. “We don’t have time.” He walked out of the office without another word.
“Sorry.” I took back the badge and coupons. “He needs some chocolate milk. We’ll be back for the tour, thanks.”
She winked. “Good luck.”
I caught up with Finn at the top of the front steps of the building. “What’s your problem?”
“You want a tour? I’ll give you a tour.” He pointed behind me. “Over there is the School of Teaching Rich Kids How to Become Richer. Behind that—”
“Get over yourself.” I followed him down the stairs. “This place is amazing. Look at how that stone is worn down in the middle.” I pointed to the marble steps. “Worn down by people carrying books! How cool is that?”
“I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this. Did you see the cars in the student lot?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “I was looking at the castles.”
“Give me the name of one college you’ve visited that didn’t have a castle on it. We should leave.”
“No!” I said. “I’ve never visited a college before, asshole, and I want to see it. Stop whining. You’re smarter than most people on the planet, you have nice teeth, and your parents can afford your glasses. Your life does not suck that bad.” I started down the steps. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot at three.”
“Wait.” He stepped in front of me. “Can we back up? You’ve never visited a college before?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Not even when you were in middle school, like on the way to a band competition or something?” Finn tilted his head to the side a little, like he was confused, like he couldn’t imagine a life that didn’t include college visits on the way to band competitions.
I’d given him bits and pieces of my peculiar life, but colored softer and funnier than they had been. I’d painted my dad as Don Quixote in a semi, on a quest for philosophical truths and the best cup of coffee in the nation. I’d explained Dad’s craziness with the ax as a rare night of too much drinking and avoided the subject ever since.
He raked his fingers through his hair. “Your dad never took you?”
I wasn’t going to ruin the day by discussing my dad’s parenting style.
“Go to the library,” I said. “Absorb the dork energy. I’ll find you when I’m done walking around.”
He bit the inside of his cheek. “Am I really being an asshole?”
“Yes.”
He stared at the students walking up and down the steps for a moment, absently nodding his head like he was having a conversation with himself. Finally, he took a deep breath and exhaled hard.
“Please forgive me, Mistress of the Blue.” He rolled his right hand in front of his belt buckle, then swept a low bow in front of me. “This day shall henceforth be dedicated to your education of all things related to, but not exclusively concerning, this institution of post-secondary, ivy-choked, divine education.”
“Rise, knave,” I said regally. “Rise and let the merriment begin.”
Finn was right; we didn’t need a tour guide. He’d memorized every inch of the campus from the website. He showed me the new behavioral sciences building, the athletic center, where one vast room was filled with treadmills, each with its own television monitor, and a massive swimming pool, and a student center filled with people who looked impossibly comfortable and happy. When he told me the number of books in the library, I didn’t believe him, so I asked at the reference desk, and the dude showed me a screen with a summary of their collections. It made me so faint I had to sit with my head between my knees for a while.
Better than all that was the simple act of walking down hallways where classes were being held. We lingered by a few open doorways, catching random bits of lecture and arguments about Kant and Indonesian history and bonding equivalencies and scansion and King Lear. We peeked through the windows into lecture halls and argued about whether a board filled with symbols was physics or astrology.
Finn gradually transformed from Grumpasourous maximus into my hot, skinny, almost-boyfriend. (I hadn’t decided if I was using that word yet.) We used our coupons to buy lunch and sat underneath an ancient oak tree in the middle of the quad feasting on subs, chocolate milk, and a peanut butter cookie the size of my face. Halfway through the cookie Finn lay back in the combed grass with a sigh.
“Nerdvana?” I asked.
“Not yet, but I am slightly less despondent. You were right. It was a good idea, coming here.”
The bells in the clock tower boomed. I pointed at a dude riding a skateboard from one end of the quad to the other, typing on his phone. “You really want to be like him?”
“If he’s here on a full scholarship and majoring in political science, I’d give my left nut to be that guy. Maybe minus the skateboard.”
“Then go,” I said. “Be nice to the admissions receptionist and ask if you can get an interview with somebody. Anybody. Give it your best.”
“But if I get an interview and apply and get in, what do I do then? And worse, what if I apply and they turn me down?”
“If they can’t see that you’re perfect for this place, then they suck. And if you’re smart enough to go here, then you should be smart enough to find a way to pay for it, right? Now go.”
I watched until he’d disappeared inside the red stone castle (practically skipping), then I stretched out on the cool grass. This was not hallowed ground. It was dirt, brown dirt, crawling with ants.
I found the college’s website on my phone and looked up the application. Stupidest thing ever. How could filling in a bunch of blanks and writing a fluffy essay about the “moment of significance” in my life let them know if I was good enough to go here? The other essay prompts were just as bad:
recount an incident or time when you experienced failure.
reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea.
discuss an event that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.
Who wrote these things? What the hell did they have to do with how smart a person was or how ready she might be for college?
I tried to hop on the school’s Wi-Fi because we couldn’t afford the data charges. The passwords I guessed (welcome, guest, wanderer, spoiled, nerdvana) failed, which pissed me all the way off. I wanted a map so I could find a some shortcut to get home.
_*_ 52 _*_
I gave Ms. Benedetti a Swevenbury Owls pencil at the end of fourth period the next day.
“What did you think?” she asked. “Want to go there?”
I snorted. “No way.”
“There are lots of scholarships,” she said, her forehead wrinkled into the earnest lines of sincerity.
“Not for me,” I said on my way out the door. “But thanks.”
After school on Thursday, we parked in a secluded place and made out until the alarm on his phone went off. We adjusted our clothes and buckled up.
“Do you know what you’re going to wear tomorrow?”
he asked as he started the car.
A simple question, right? Maybe it should have raised a flag or something, but I was still swooning, because daaaang that boy could kiss. He could have asked me anything, like what’s the specific gravity of honey or what kind of bra did Marie Antoinette wear, and I would not have found it odd.
“Hayley?” He waved his hand in front of my eyes. “I said, do you know what you’re wearing tomorrow?”
I blinked, still not getting it. “No, not yet.”
“I know, right?” he replied.
Had I been less swoony it might have struck me as weird that he was asking about my wardrobe, but a block from my house we parked again and got tangled up in a good-bye kiss and I forgot all about it.
My Chinese homework, that was partly to blame, too.
I’d started it, but then I had to go online to look something up and one thing led to another and suddenly I found myself gaming with Finn in a distant galaxy. Totally pwnd him. His manly pride took offense at that and so we had to play again. And again. We would have played until dawn— me winning, him losing—except that I got a text from Sasha, who had become my drill partner in Chinese, asking me if the test was just going to cover chapter four or everything since the beginning of the year.
I don’t know what came over me. You could blame the kissing, I guess. His saliva had infected me with a strain of Finnegan Ramos Conventional Success Syndrome. I stopped gaming and stayed up past three trying to memorize eight weeks’ worth of Chinese characters.
I woke up with my face on the keyboard, my phone screaming inches away from my nose.
“I’ve been waiting out here for ten minutes,” Finn’s voice said. “Are you okay?”
I hadn’t changed into pj’s the night before, so I didn’t have to waste any time getting dressed. I grabbed my stuff, staggered out the front door, down the street and into the Acclaim, which smelled more like burning oil than ever.
My first glance at Finn made me wonder if I were still asleep.
“Like it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.
I was speechless.
He pointed to the cardboard cutout of an old-fashioned pipe sitting on the dashboard. “Can’t you guess who I am?”
“What’s on your head?”
“A deerstalker,” he said. “It’s a detective hat. This,” he plucked at the ugly gray thing he was wearing over his shoulders, “is a cape. I should have on fancier shoes but they don’t fit anymore. Looks good, huh?”
“I just woke up, Finn. You’re confusing me. What’s going on?”
“Elementary, my dear Kincain,” he said in a lousy British accent. “It’s Halloween!”
* * *
He filled me in on the details as we drove (almost reaching the speed limit for several thrill-filled moments), but I didn’t believe him. My mistake.
Our principal was dressed as a spider. The secretaries were all convicts. The janitors had transformed themselves into Luigi clones. All of the teachers were in costumes. The cafeteria ladies, too: beehive hairdos and poodle skirts from the 1950s.
Gracie was wearing a T-shirt that said disfun on the front. Topher’s T-shirt said ctional. They were as keyed up as six-year-old kids at a birthday party with unlimited candy and cupcakes.
“I don’t understand,” I said again. “Why is the staff more dressed up than the kids?”
“Because they get to make the rules,” Gracie said.
“Because the students all wanted to be inappropriate,” Topher said.
“It’s a game,” explained Sherlock Finn Holmes. “A game afoot! The challenge: to walk the thin line of costuming that separates what the administration has labeled—”
All three of them made bunny-ear quotation marks with their fingers: “Distractions!”
“And those that are merely, ahem . . .” Sherlock stared at me.
“Lame,” finished Gracie. “Your ignorance is mind-boggling. What time should we pick you up?”
“Who is ‘we’ and why are ‘we’ picking me up?” I asked.
“Trick or treating, duh!”
The entire day was surreal. Ms. Rogak taught English dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein. My Chinese teacher was a ham-and-cheese sandwich. She canceled the test and let us watch a movie. My forensic science teacher was dressed as a crime scene, dusted with fingerprint powder, sprayed with Luminol, and wrapped in yellow police tape. As the day wore on, I found myself liking it, actually loving it. Halloween—the day when we could pretend to be whatever we wanted—seemed to be letting everyone be who they really were. Wearing face paint and masks gave everyone in school permission to drop the zombie act. Even the kids who were hinting at actual zombification by the way they walked and moaned seemed more human to me than ever before.
When I was called down to the guidance office at the end of last period, I took my sweet time getting there so I could admire the decorations that made the music hall look like the palace of Versailles. (The chorus teacher and band instructor had dressed as Mozart and Scarlatti.) If every day could be like this, I bet test scores would go through the roof.
Gerta, the guidance secretary, was completely covered by orange rubber fish scales. An enormous clam, opened to show a pearl inside it, sat on her head.
“No costume?” Gerta asked as I signed in.
“I’m going to wear something different tonight,” I said. “Right now I’m disguised as a rebellious, irritating teenager.”
“Very convincing. I hardly recognized you.”
Ms. Benedetti, dressed as an old-school, guaranteed-topiss-off-the-Wiccans witch with a pointy hat, wart on the chin, cobwebs and plastic spiders nestled in her wig, opened her door.
“Ger-a agh-agh allowee,” she mumbled, beckoning me in and brushing aside the thick cobwebs that drooped from the ceiling. “Ome ee.”
I had to squeeze by an inflatable cauldron and step over life-sized plastic rats to get to the chair.
“I o oou own my—” Benedetti began.
“Ma’am.” I interrupted and pointed at her fake teeth. “Would you mind?”
“Oh.” She pulled out the teeth and took off her hat. “Feels so natural, after a while you forget you’re wearing them.”
It took all my strength, but I resisted the temptation to comment.
She pushed a plastic orange bowl across the desk. “Candy corn?”
I didn’t want to take anything from her, but my stomach overruled my head and I snagged a handful.
She waited until my mouth was full.
“Hayley, we have a bit of a problem.”
I stopped mid-chew, mind racing with the countless disasters that could follow an opening statement like that.
“I had a meeting with Mr. Cleveland,” she continued.
I started chewing again.
“He said he’d set you up with tutoring.”
I nodded, hoping she didn’t notice the blushing because my tutoring sessions no longer had anything to do with math.
“And yet your grade hasn’t improved at all.”
I shrugged and took another handful of candy.
“He said you had shown some interest in helping revive the school newspaper, but that has fallen by the wayside, too. In addition—”
“Did you tell my father about Trish?” I asked. “He said he talked to you.”
“We didn’t talk about Trish,” she said. “We discussed her concerns.”
“What were those, exactly?”
“Most had to do with your father’s unconventional approach to your homeschooling. He confirmed that he had not been entirely truthful about your lessons.”
“Was he angry?”
“Not at all. He simply asked if I thought you were struggling in any subjects. According to your teachers you haven’t had any problems with the material, with the exception of math, of course.”
“You said ‘most.’ What else?”
“In trying to understand the whole student, it’s helpful to have a picture of the larger family dynamic.”
“That sounds like a load of crap,” I said. “Did you ask Dad about this ‘dynamic’?”
“I tried.” She picked up a piece of candy corn with her fingernails. “I got the impression that you’d have more to say about that than your father.”
The final bell cut her off.
I jumped up. “Can we talk about this on Monday?”
“I imagine so.” The witch sighed and popped the candy in her mouth. “Be careful tonight.”