Page 21 of One-Star Romance

Now, Rob’s mother gave his father a diffident pat on the shoulder to indicate that he should stop talking and pay attention to his son. Rob grasped the microphone. He couldn’t stop himself from looking at Natalie, who was leaning back in her chair, arms folded across her chest, an eyebrow raised. He yanked his eyes from her, cleared his throat, and began.

“Hello, everyone.” Irritatingly, his mouth was dry, despite the recent whiskey sip. He forced a swallow, then went on. “I met Angus in the spring of eighth grade, when I transferred schools. Now, being a boy with pimples and a changing voice, coming into a group of ruthless middle schoolers who have known each other for years…” He paused for effect, just as he’d practiced. “This may surprise you, but it’s not the optimal way to make new friends.”

A murmur of laughter from the audience, and Rob’s shoulders loosened a smidge.

The key to a good toast was understanding what to leave out. The strangers in this ballroom did not need to know where the story really began, the confluence of factors, the decisions small and large, that led to Rob’s transfer in the first place.

But if he were to tell the whole story, he’d begin with the fact that his father was a legend. Professor Stuart Kapinsky, Princeton University’s preeminent constitutional scholar. Admired, feared, and sucked up to in equal measure. If you wanted to see a perfect public speaker, all you had to do was attend one of his classes—if you could get in.

Rob loved academia as a child. How could he not? His father brought him into class once or twice a semester, where college students doted on him. Professor Kapinsky would have Rob come up to the front to help illustrate a point, and all these almost grown-ups would laugh and coo and beg to babysit. Sometimes, at night, he and his parents would get ice cream from one of the many shops dotting the small downtown and wander the campus, stopping off in an archway to listen to a concert by one of the student a capella groups, and as they sang some Paul Simon song in perfect harmony, Rob would think he’d never heard a more beautiful sound. Everywhere, great minds discussed great topics. Someone could be solving some heretofore unprovable mathematical theorem, and you’d never know it because they’d be sitting in the student center wearing baggy sweatpants, unwashed and ripe, like any other student, clutching a Red Bull in one hand and scribbling furiously with the other.

It all made his own education feel a little boring. After you’d sat in on your father’s special seminar—hundreds of students applied for it, and his father only picked fifteen!—junior high history classes paled in comparison.

But when Rob was in eighth grade, a teacher came in and shook everything up. Ms.Lindsay was twenty-four. She wore flared jeans and drove a car with a bumper sticker that read this is what a feminist looks like years before corporate America decided feminism was something to splash all over tote bags and coffee mugs. For their first lesson in American history, she held up a copy of the pocket Constitution.

“This document governs how we live our lives. A bunch of brilliant men wrote it hundreds of years ago, and there’s so much good in it,” she declared to the class in a raspy, thrilling voice, a voice that indicated that she’d spent time smoking cigarettes or maybe even marijuana. “But we’ve got some bright minds in here too.” Then she ripped the pages in half. “And I think we could do better.”

In that moment, thirteen-year-old Rob fell in love for the first time.

Their assignment was to write an essay proposing what they’d put into a new Constitution, a document to govern the country now if they were starting from scratch. They’d all present their ideas and use them to make a Classroom Constitution. “After all,” Ms.Lindsay said, “so much has changed since these old dead men wrote the rules. They didn’t even consider Black people and women to be full citizens with rights!”

Rob went home, put his head down, and worked harder than he ever had before. He was determined to impress Ms.Lindsay. And more than that, he liked the assignment, which made him think differently about something he’d always taken for granted. That night over dinner, he presented what he had to his father, knowing that he’d have excellent notes. Rob imagined burnishing his arguments, presenting them in front of everyone, Ms.Lindsay trying to collect herself when he was done. She would put her pen down, take a deep breath, and say, “Well, class, I think we’ve found our Thomas Jefferson.”

But instead, when Rob stopped talking, his father frowned for a long moment. Then he sat back, folded his hands together, and said, “The entire premise of this assignment is flawed. Of course the Constitution is an imperfect document. That’s why the founders gave us the ability to write amendments. But to suggest we toss the whole thing out is, frankly, ridiculous.”

“But don’t you think that the world has changed a lot since they wrote it?”

“Sure it has. So the fact that the core tenets hold up so well only confirms the brilliance of the founders.”

Arguing with his father was like being tossed around in an angry ocean. Professor Kapinsky was relentless, letting you catch your breath for a moment only to knock you off your feet again before you could formulate a full response. (No wonder all the other professors in his department seemed to fear him.) And he was not pleased that Ms.Lindsay had ripped up a sacred document in what he dismissed as some “pandering display of theatrics.” By the time he was done, it was hard for Rob to remember what he’d liked about the assignment in the first place.

So, the next day in class, when it was Rob’s turn to present his ideas, he stood and said, “I disagree with the premise. I don’t think we should throw out the Constitution.”

Ms.Lindsay smiled. “Dissent! I like it. But you do still need to do the assignment. I’ll come back to you tomorrow.”

But the next day, Rob refused again, egged on by his father, who told him that he was standing up for his principles, just like the founders did. Ms.Lindsay admired that Rob had a strong point of view. But he simply didn’t do the work, so he left her no choice. She gave him a D.

It was the worst grade he’d ever gotten, and his father was incensed. Not at him. At Ms.Lindsay. Professor Kapinsky rode his high horse all the way to the principal’s office for a meeting in which he railed about the curriculum. What were Ms.Lindsay’s credentials, anyway? Also, she had a public profile on this new Myspace website, on which someone had posted a picture of her drinking in a bikini—was that not incredibly inappropriate for a teacher of children?

Rob was one of the quieter kids in class, but he wasn’t unpopular. They’d all grown up together, and the friendships he’d formed in the sandbox had mostly stuck. But as the news of his father’s war against Ms.Lindsay spread, Rob got caught in the crosshairs. Everyone liked Ms.Lindsay, who started coming into class dampened and sad, holding on to her job but on a sort of probation that made her scared to do anything but teach straight from the textbook. Many of Rob’s classmates stopped speaking to him or called him “Daddy’s little prince” or worse. Rob’s father wasn’t overly concerned with harming someone’s career—he’d done it before to up-and-coming colleagues who threatened his position or when it helped his own advancement. That was simply what you needed to do to succeed in this world, and didn’t Rob want to succeed? Didn’t he want the things that his father had? But if Rob couldn’t deal with the fallout, if his son was too sensitive…well, then Rob’s father would pull him out of that school and send him to a private academy half an hour away, a cliquey, competitive school where Rob seemed doomed to have even fewer friends than he already did.

“The first day of my new school, no one spoke to me,” Rob said now to the wedding guests. “I found out later that the most popular kid in class had made a rule that no one was supposed to talk to new kids for at least the first week, and nobody was brave enough to defy him. So I ate lunch in the bathroom, which was very unhygienic. I resigned myself to going through the rest of the year unhappy. But things changed the second day. Because on my first day of school, one kid from my class had been absent. And that kid was Angus.”

A knowing murmur from the crowd. Rob took another deep breath, feeling more and more in control.

“Day two, I was sitting at my desk, and this kid with a startling amount of headgear takes the chair next to me. Despite having been informed about the new-kid rule, he leans over and offers me a Capri-Sun. For some reason, his backpack was full of them. I later found out that he carried them around to offer to people whenever they were thirsty. And he says, ‘Hey, buddy! Where did you come from?’

“And from that moment on, I wasn’t alone. Let me tell you what it’s like to go through the world with Angus at your side. He cheers you up. He makes life into an adventure.” Rob was feeling so good, he decided to go for an ad-lib, of all things! “For example, he might decide to zip-line into a wedding.” The crowd laughed again. Oh, Rob was riding high. Perhaps public speaking was not so terrible after all, when you felt strongly about your topic. He continued, not even needing to glance at his written copy. “And then along comes Gabby, a smart, hardworking woman who embraces Angus’s irrepressible spirit but also grounds him in a way that has been really heartening to see. And, Gabby, though we don’t know each other as well as we’d like to yet, I get the sense that the reverse is true for you. That Angus loves you for your drive and focus while also encouraging you to, every once in a while, walk into a pond in your wedding dress.” Gabby laughed and nodded, and Rob squared his shoulders to deliver his final lines. “So, Angus and Gabby, I know you’ll approach your journey through the world together with the same curiosity and kindness that Angus had even as a headgear-wearing eighth grader. And the world will be all the better for it.”

Gabby put her hand over her heart. Angus mouthed a Thank you, his eyes red. And Rob held up his glass, prompting the ballroom to raise their own in a cheers to the happy couple. Rob sat back down amid a hearty round of clapping, resisting his urge to shoot a triumphant glance at Natalie. His speech was good, and his speech was done. The groomsman sitting next to him clapped him on the back. “Nice job, man!”

Then, at the next table over, Natalie rose to her feet.

“Let’s give our best man one more round of applause,” she said, baring her teeth in his direction. A tendril of hair had unwound from her updo over the course of the day’s exertions, and now it clung to the soft curve of her neck, the same way her blue dress clung to the curves of her body. “A beautiful speech and a tough act to follow.” She paused. Collected herself. “But I’ll do my best.” Then she shot the crowd a smile of such confidence and ease that Rob knew he was screwed.

“I’m Natalie, Gabby’s maid of honor, and I met her in college, so at that point, she was past the ‘unfortunate orthodontics’ phase.” There it was, the first chuckle from the audience, and with an ad-lib too. Natalie held the microphone steady in her hands as she went on.

“Gabby has an amazing way of making you feel at home. So it made perfect sense that, our senior year, she became a resident adviser. Which was great for me, because as her roommate, I got to live in a sweet dorm room without having to do any of the work of comforting homesick freshmen. No surprise, Gabby thrived as an RA. You should have seen this girl lead icebreakers. Those freshmen in our dorm were the luckiest kids in the world—Gabby kept them in a constant supply of snacks. She made sure they were all getting 4.0s and held their hair back when necessary. There was a line out our door of kids who claimed they were having a hard time adjusting, but really, they just wanted an excuse to hang out with her.

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