How to Be Brave(62)

I get hourly texts from Evelyn with little notes about the—and I quote—shitty-ass hospital food and the young male doctors who are beyond sexxxy.

And I get hourly kisses from Daniel, which are the best.

I never thought I’d be the one to say this, but I wish high school weren’t ending so soon.

On the last Thursday before graduation, Marquez calls me over after class, and for once, he doesn’t ask me to go sit outside on a bench. “Congratulations on a great year,” he says, shaking my hand.

“Thanks.”

“Sit down. What are your plans for fall?”

“Not sure.” I shrug. I tell him about the U of I and my move to California. “I don’t really want to go, though. I’m not sure how I can tell my dad that. I was hoping to get accepted to U of I just so I could stay in Illinois. It would have been a great excuse. I just don’t see myself as a California girl.”

“What about Columbia College? They have rolling admissions. It might not be too late. Go online and fill out the application, and I’ll make a couple of phone calls. I can’t promise anything, but you never know. If not in the fall, maybe in the spring? You’re going to do art, right?”

Oh. Wow. What?

“To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t thought about what I’m going to do, but that would be amazing if you could—”

He interrupts me and puts up his hand. “You are going to do art. That much I know.”

Really? Is this what I want? To be an artist?

To live the same life as her?

I watched her swim in colors and drown herself on the flat surfaces of canvas and ask questions about the universe without living in it.

I watched her sit in her studio, sketching, reading, painting, destroying—for hours and hours, days and days sometimes—disconnected from us, from her body, from what was real.

I watched her deteriorate. I watched her wither. I watched her shrivel.

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, sepsis, death.

She didn’t choose this life, but she didn’t fight against it, either.

And here I am, an artist. Starting out, just like her.

What is it that I want?

“Do I have to decide right now?” I say this aloud, but I know the answer right as I finish the question.

Marquez looks surprised and, frankly, a little disappointed, but then he says finally, “No, you don’t have to decide anything. You have to live your life. No one else is going to do it for you.”

I hear my mom’s words: Be brave, Georgia.

The bravest thing I could do right now is to step out into the unknown, away from her.

Maybe I will go to art school.

Maybe I won’t.

But I know that there are other options. Other items that aren’t on the list. Other lists, long lists, that have yet to be written.

*

I almost don’t go to graduation because I hate last things. But I do, for my dad. I’m sweating under my polyester gown and the ceremony is cheesy and long and I can’t sit for this long in the glaring sun, but in the end, when we throw our caps into the air, I can’t help crying. We need finality. We need conclusions. We need to know when the old ends and the new begins.

After the ceremony and the obligatory Greektown lunch with Maria and all the cousins who drove in from the suburbs, Dad and I drive home in silence. He closed the restaurant for the day (only three weeks left until he closes it for good), so we have the whole day to ourselves, which is something we’re really not used to.

“Tell me, koúkla mou, what now? What should we do?”

I blurt it out. “Dad, I don’t want to move to California. I want to stay here in Chicago. Go to school here. Maybe live with Evelyn. Make sure she’s okay. I want to live my life here.” I don’t even realize that this is what I want until I say it aloud. And when I say it, I know it’s exactly what I need to do.

He looks over at me, and he isn’t at all startled or worried or unnerved. “Okay, koúkla. Whatever you want. We can figure it all out in good time.” He pauses. “But, I meant to say, what do you want to do today? For the rest of the afternoon?”

Oh.

I think for a moment. #8. “I want to go fishing. Do you know how?”

We stop home to change, and then he drives us up to the North Side, where we rent fishing gear and stroll along the Des Plaines River, where the forest preserves drown out the suburbs.

He shows me how to hold the rod and cast the line and how to sit quietly and wait. We catch a few pike—they are golden, stolid creatures—and then we unhook their mouths and throw them back in.

“Dad,” I say as we’re packing up the car, “I’d like to go skydiving, too.”

He plants a kiss on my forehead. “Not today, koúkla. Maybe tomorrow.”

*

Somehow, I’ve made it this far. And now, somehow, despite all my deeply ingrained fears, I have to learn how to swing from four ropes twenty-five feet off the ground.

Shit.

But I made a promise to myself.

And to my friends.

With the money I earned from my painting sales, I offered to pay for their trapeze lessons if they would do it with me. There’s a place on the lakefront where they teach you how to fly. “Come be a monkey with me,” I told them. Of course, they were all in, no questions asked.