Page 7 of The Someday Daughter
“Would you like some coffee?” Magnolia interrupts.
Sadie’s gaze flickers between us, tracking the tension in this marble hull of a kitchen. “Yes,” she says finally. “Please.”
“Mom,” I say. Everyone turns to look at me. I don’t want to do this in front of Dr. Stone, but there’s nowhere else to do it. Our flight leaves in four hours. “I’m not going with you.”
My mother draws a breath, her eyes flicking to Dr. Stone. She doesn’t want to do this in front of her, either. “Audrey, you can’t go to UPenn.”
“Yes, I—”
“I already pulled the tuition, honey.” She holds my gaze, and the kitchen hazes out around her—like my whole brain has gone static. “Weeks ago, when we scheduled the tour. There’s no place for you there.” Her voice gets smaller, fades until I can barely hear her at all. “Your place this summer is with us.”
6
It’s Ethan, in the end, who convinces me to stay. There are only two hours between my conversation with Camilla and our scheduled departure for LAX, and I spend the first one on hold with the Penn admissions office. It’s a stilted roulette ofYes, hi, I’m calling about the Pre-College Biomedical Sciences IntensiveandPlease hold, let me transfer youandYes, I was enrolled, Audrey St. VrainandNot seeing you on the roster, please holdandNo, wait, I—
Anyways, my mother was telling the truth. My place at Penn has been filled.I’m sorry, sweetheart, someone named Yvette finally told me, her words carrying through the line on a big sigh.We’ve already got a wait list two pages long. I can add you to it, but with classes starting in just a couple days...
It didn’t occur to me that Camilla would do this, though I realize that was idiotic—wishful thinking I should know so much better than by now. When my mother told me about the tour, I said I’d take care of notifying Penn—which I didn’t do, because I wanted to hold my place there for a gigantic and likely-to-come-in-handy “just in case.” But she’d circumvented me to seal my fate.
And so I spent my remaining hour pacing the shoreline downthe steps from the house, gaming this out. The one time I glanced up I could see all three of them watching me: Sadie Stone, Magnolia, and my mother standing in a line in the glass-cased living room. I moved closer to the ocean, away from them.
I had the UPenn syllabus pulled up on my phone. The maroon-and-navy logo beamed up at me like a swift kick to the ribs.
Week 1: Introduction to biomedical ethics
Week 2: Going cellular—humans at the micro level
Week 3: Nontraditional medical therapies
Week 4: Emergency medicine and trauma
Week 5: Infectious diseases—their causes and cures
Week 6: Human anatomy intensive (cadaver dissection)
I wanted to reach two-handed into the bright rectangle of my phone and grab on for dear life.God, I wanted this. I’d worked so hard for it.
We’ll review the readings together every day, Ethan had told me, backpack in his lap as we sat in his parents’ car on our way to the Denver airport just a few days ago.And I can send you my lecture notes and give you the highlights from all the labs.
Getting the ghost of the Penn program over video chat is better than nothing, but it’s not what I want. I want to be where Ethan is. I want to work with professors whohaven’tseen me in my pajamas. I want the summer I planned for.
So I pick up the phone, and I call him.
Ethan answers as a particularly breathy gust of wind buffets the side of my face, and I can barely hear him. “Audrey?”
“Ethan, hi.” I turn my back to the sea, pull up the hood of my sweatshirt. “Hey. Can you hear me?”
“Hardly,” he says. But even through the wheeze of the ocean,his voice has the tug of a magnet. He sounds like my real life—like the version of it that makes sense. “Where are you?”
“At my mom’s house,” I say. “On the beach. Look, this—”
“What happened last night?”
I hesitate, stare up the sloping lawn. There’s definitely a storm rolling in; the sky’s almost the same gray as the house’s concrete exoskeleton. The thing is, Ethan never would have done what I did at the theater last night—he’s a committer down to his toenails, through to his bones.
In the English class where we met he’d read the entire syllabus before the semester even started, then reread every book along with the rest of us. It wasn’t because he wanted to be better; it was because he didn’t want to miss a single thing. That’s how he does everything—completely. There are the world’s ideals, and then there are Ethan’s. He’d rather not do a thing at all than do it only halfway, and I don’t want to show him the part of me I can’t hold to that standard.
“I just realized that this is wrong,” I tell him, not exactly a lie. “I shouldn’t be with her this summer, talking about some self-help book; I should be at Penn. But I called them this morning and my place is gone. I won’t get off the wait list by Wednesday.”
