I Was Told It Would Get Easier(11)
I frowned. “Okay you don’t want to watch a movie, okay you don’t want to watch TV, or okay something else?”
She frowned at me. “Uh . . . I don’t feel like a movie. But go ahead.”
“Won’t that bother you?”
She waved her earbuds at me, then popped them in her ears.
I hesitated for a second, then said, “Don’t you think it would be nice to do something together for once?”
She didn’t hear me.
“Em? Emily?”
“What?” She pulled out a single earbud and glared at me. “Why do you talk to me when you can see I’m not listening?” The human voice is capable of many subtleties, but she wasn’t employing any of them.
I shot back, “Why don’t you listen when you can see I’m talking to you?”
She sat up a bit. “Alright, what is it?”
I sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Clearly it does. What? Is it about the trip?”
“No, I was saying it might be nice to do something together.”
She waved her hand around at the room. “We are doing something together. We’re spending a week looking at colleges and stressing out about my lack of future. Isn’t that enough?” She paused. “It sure is for me.”
That hurt a bit. I knew I should let it go, but I don’t know . . . I was tired, I had expectations I shouldn’t have had, and I was hungry.
“Well, I’m sorry being around me is so exhausting.” I knew as soon as the words were out that I had just put myself in the wrong, which is an incredibly galling realization. It’s one thing to be irritated, it’s another to express it, and it’s a third to relinquish the high ground with your first salvo.
I know Emily so well I could literally read her thought process. A minute widening of the eyes—she wanted to fire back. A breath—she knew she shouldn’t, because right now I was the one who owed an apology. And then her mouth opened and clearly her hormones had come crashing around the corner of her mind and told her to fire on all cylinders.
“It’s not exhausting, being with you. It’s . . . stressful.” Her tone was calm. Then she stuck in the knife. “It’s not like I get to do it all that much so, you know . . .”
Somewhere she has a list of my buttons, I swear. There’s probably an app for it. “Well, you have me all to yourself for a week now.”
“Do I?” She sounded scornful. “Did you leave your phone at home?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Did you even put a vacation bounce on your email?”
I said nothing, because I hadn’t. This is the problem with being able to work from anywhere . . . you end up working from everywhere.
She regarded me coolly for another moment, then sighed and turned back to her screen, putting her earbuds back in so she didn’t hear my sigh.
I went to take a shower. When I stepped in I felt like crying, but managed to wash that away with everything else.
When I came out of the bathroom, she was asleep. Or pretending to be asleep. It’s a funny thing; at home she never goes to sleep before I do, but right now she was sacked out at 9:00 p.m. Which wasn’t even 9:00 p.m. for us, seeing as we had just arrived from the other coast. At home she wouldn’t even have started her homework.
But I climbed into bed and turned out my light, too. Two can play at that game.
Monday
Washington, DC
8:00 a.m.: Warm-up breakfast
10:00 a.m.: Georgetown University
12:00 p.m.: Lunch near the White House 2:00 p.m.: George Washington University 3:00–6:00 p.m.: Optional Ford’s Theatre visit or tour of the Mall (included in your package) 7:00 p.m.: Dinner and dancing at El Presidente—wear comfortable shoes! (three-course meal included, drinks extra) Overnight in Washington
4
JESSICA
In the $2 billion industry that is college admissions consulting, Excelsior Educational Excursions—or E3, as they’ve recently rebranded themselves—is a pretty big player. They certainly rule the Los Angeles market and when parents say, about college tours, “Oh, we’re E3-ing the whole thing,” it’s a quick way to identify themselves as the kind of parent I like to call Private Helicopter Parent. They aren’t bad people, necessarily—I mean, here I am, doing it myself—but they enjoy ostentatiously subcontracting their parenting, whereas I’m mildly anxious about it. They love to drop phrases like our Latin tutor, our tennis coach, our college admissions professional. I would like to think it’s because they’re as freaked out as I am by the responsibility of successfully launching a brand-new boat into a perilous ocean, but I think it’s because they’re dicks who like spending money and showing off about it.
E3 offers a highly personalized, custom tour itinerary, and yet manages to book ten kids with accompanying parents on every tour. I guess they’re all individual in exactly the same way. The woman in charge had set up a “meet and greet breakfast and information session” in a small conference room at the hotel. Our arrival was not auspicious.
“Crap,” said Emily, pausing as soon as we stepped into the room. “It’s Alice.”
Alice Ackerman was a girl in her grade, and her mother was supposedly a friend of mine.