In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(26)

I thought back to the night I’d gotten my acceptance from Duquette. The thick envelope, the slice of scissors across the top, the way I went too far, the sharp metal sliding against my finger, the bright spark of pain, but it didn’t matter. Because the paper, pressed red with my blood, said Congratulations, and then there was the look on my father’s face, the one I’d been waiting for my whole life.

“It was the best school I got into.”

“No school’s worth that…” Coop’s voice trailed off.

No school’s worth saddling yourself with this kind of debt, Jessica. You don’t understand what you’re doing. You’re burying yourself alive. My mother’s words, sharp with anger. But it didn’t matter what she said, or how many times she said it, because none of her warnings compelled me. None of her criticisms compared to what Duquette gave me with my dad.

The day my father crashed our car and nearly shattered the windshield, my mother screamed for hours. I’d never heard her yell so much. Even though I locked myself in my bedroom and stuffed sheets in the crack under my door, I could still hear her intermittently, the words serious problem and kill yourself and has to end. I couldn’t believe she was finally speaking up. For as long as I could remember, my dad’s problem was something she and I had borne silently, addressed only obliquely, even when it was just us.

Although the truth was unspoken, I knew it was the pills my dad swallowed, day and night—such small, innocuous things—that made him the living dead. Gone from the world for hours, or awake but high, so disoriented, walking into walls. Stretches of days where he couldn’t take off his bathrobe. Those days used to be occasional, but they’d grown more frequent. Someone from work had called, left a message on our answering machine. He was in danger of losing his accounting job at the steel company, which he hated, which was beneath him, which we needed.

In the days after the crash, he seemed lucid more often, but that only made me terrified to be in the same room with him. What if he looked up from his cereal bowl and noticed me—really took me in for the first time in years—and hated what he found? I tiptoed through the house, trying to be invisible.

Until it was time for college applications. One day I passed him at the kitchen table, wearing his Harvard University alumni shirt, and paused. Heart hammering, I told him I was filling out an application to Harvard.

A light went on inside him. He looked at me—really looked—and asked what my grades were, my SAT scores, my extracurriculars. He started talking feverishly, tapping his leg against the chair. I brought him the application and he pored over it. Getting into the best school in the world was imperative, he said. It would mean I was the best, the cream of the crop. When he got into Harvard, his parents told him it was the proudest moment of their lives. I knew he was telling the truth, because my grandparents brought up Harvard at every holiday. In their eyes my father was perfect. Smart, flawless, always one step away from getting his life back on track and becoming something big.

They didn’t know about the pills.

My dad became obsessed with college applications. The moment I got home from school each day, I rushed to get them, fourteen in all, safeties and reaches, and we spread them over the kitchen table. Talked about answers to questions, reworked essays. We revised the Harvard application seven times until it was perfect, and then he took off a day from work so we could mail it together, ceremoniously. He kissed the stamp and closed the mailbox and I felt, with every fiber of my being, that my father loved me.

For months we waited, speculating about which dorm I’d get assigned to, where my classes would be. He was so normal, a version of himself I barely remembered but was thrilled to have back. Even my mother couldn’t complain. When she wasn’t in the room, he talked in a low voice about moving with me to Cambridge. Four whole years of father-daughter time.

Then the letter came in a thin envelope. We regret to inform you, it said, and the thing I wanted was gone, closed, ripped away. I wasn’t good enough.

I waited for my father to say something—anything—but he locked himself in his bedroom and didn’t come out for two days. When he did, he wouldn’t look at me.

Two weeks later, the envelope came from Duquette. Not Harvard, but the next-best school on my list, number sixteen in the country. When I showed it to him, the light came back, and he broke his silence.

Good job, Jessica.

After that, it didn’t matter that I didn’t win a scholarship, that Duquette offered me no financial aid. There wasn’t a universe in which I would have made a different choice.

I couldn’t find the words to describe this to Coop, even if I wanted to. So instead I said, “You wouldn’t understand.”

He was quiet for a beat, then repeated in a low voice, “I wouldn’t understand…”

I looked out the window. Below us was the central thoroughfare, a promenade that ran the entire length of campus—Frankie liked to run it every morning before football practice. Beyond that, a rolling expanse of treetops, broken by the elegant spires of teaching halls and dormitories.

“Jess.”

When I turned, I found Coop leaning so close our knees almost touched. I inched back. My heartbeat notched higher. And I realized: It was just the two of us. In a private room.

“I understand everything about you. I know you’re obsessed with making Kappa the top sorority because the Chi Os rejected you. I know you’re obsessed with Mint and the Phi Delts because everyone else is, and it’s a status symbol. I know you sneak Adderall to study all night even though econ makes you want to kill yourself. And now I know you charge thousands of dollars to a credit card you can’t afford just to fit in.”