“Meet my parents.” She squeezed his elbow. “You could come over for dinner.”
Manning, at the dinner table? With Dad? Tiffany had brought home two guys before—an older man who owned a tanning booth and a guy with dreadlocks. Neither had lasted a week past dinner. Dad didn’t even like Tiffany’s friends, much less her boyfriends. He went out of his way to make them feel small, and Tiffany knew it.
“I don’t think he should,” I said.
“Don’t be rude,” Tiffany said.
“But you know how Dad is.”
“How?” Manning asked.
I recited my mom’s excuse for Dad whenever he insulted someone. “People just don’t get his sense of humor.”
“Manning can handle it,” Tiffany said, trailing her fingers over the giraffe’s neck. “Can’t you?”
Tiffany’s words from the other night came back to me. The construction workers pissed Dad off, and she liked that. Maybe she even wanted it.
“Is it all right with you?” Manning asked me.
“Why should she care?” Tiffany asked.
“Because I’ll be eating dinner with your family, and she’s an entire quarter of it.”
“You want to come?” I asked.
He looked back at me. “Might be a good idea to meet your parents.”
He said it to me, not Tiffany. He wanted to meet my parents. And while I should’ve felt uneasy about it, the idea that Manning had any interest in my life had the opposite effect.
It made my heart soar.
7
Lake
My dad rarely took days off, unless it was for something he deemed more important than work. Not much fell into that category, but USC always did.
That was why? at four o’clock on the Monday after I’d gone to the fair, my dad and I were finishing up our annual visit to the campus. My dad proudly called me a prospective student to the other parents on the tour, and I wore an old Trojans t-shirt that’d belonged to him before he’d shrunk it in the wash.
This year felt different than our past five visits. I really was a prospective student now, only two years out from starting here. As college sharpened on the horizon, the students around me no longer seemed ancient. They were just a couple years older than me. I’d even gone to school with kids who attended now. Female students wore strapless tops, cut-off shorts, and bared their midriffs. A boy rode by our tour group on a skateboard. I’d never even been on a skateboard, and showing too much skin was a punishable offense at my school.
When the guide dismissed us for the afternoon, Dad pulled me away from the crowd. “You heard what she said about starting college classes now?” he asked. “Since USC is too far of a drive, we can sign you up at a community college to get some credits out of the way.”
“My teacher said a college class might be too much at my age.”
“Your teacher’s an idiot. It’ll be Disneyland compared to where you’re headed. You should have no trouble keeping up.”
If he believed I could do it, then I’d try. He’d pushed me to take advanced classes all my life, and although they were hard, I’d always earned A’s.
The buildings were large and named after people. Students came in and out of every door, disappearing around corners or zipping by us. “How old were you when you came here?”
“Twenty. I couldn’t afford anything other than community college, so that’s where I started, but eventually I transferred to USC on a scholarship. I graduated at the top of my class and went on to complete my MBA. Imagine what you can do starting even earlier.”
I thought back to my conversation with Manning about my interests and how he’d promised to get me books from the library. “I haven’t decided on a major yet. Do you think I should do business?”
“You don’t have to. You can be anything you want. Doctor, lawyer, accountant.”
“Mona wants to be a teacher.”
“The world needs teachers,” he said as we headed down the concrete path. “But we also need leaders. If you like working with children, like you do at camp, you could be a pediatrician. Then you get to spend all day doing something valuable. Saving lives.”
I couldn’t remember much about doctor’s offices, but my dentist was in a perpetually bad mood. “Wouldn’t that be sad, dealing with sick kids? What if I can’t make them better?”
“If you decide to go that route, there’re different paths you can take. You could be an obstetrician. Try being sad while delivering a baby.”
“How many years of school is that?”