Begin Again(94)

It’s clear from the way he takes his sweet time pulling out that he’s enjoying every second of my shock. “You what?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s how we met.”

“Excuse me?”

My dad laughs again, easy and low, a laugh I remember from a long time ago. It’s less like I am discovering things about him today, and more like I’m finding them again. I wonder if he feels the same way about me.

“Your mom was incensed that she didn’t get a ribbon at the pie-eating contest. Claimed she should have won because the girl who upchucked halfway through should have been disqualified—I think her exact words were, ‘That was at least half a pie she tossed, so I beat her.’” My dad shakes his head with laughter. “She came knocking down my door at ten o’clock at night—”

“You never told me this,” I accuse, the words bubbling with a laughter of my own.

“Oh, your mother would have killed me.” He glances at me conspiratorially. “But I figure she’d have let you know by now.”

Oddly, I have no trouble imagining my mom finding true love in a pie brawl. It’s the other part of the story that I can’t quite process. “You started the ribbons?”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat, suddenly sheepish about the whole thing. “Well, with a dozen or so other kids.”

“What?” For someone who wants to answer people’s questions for a living, I suddenly can’t form a single coherent one to save my life. “How? Why?”

My dad shrugs. “It’s like I said. I liked making plans. We needed a way to get around the new organization ban on campus, so . . . I ran with it. Turned it into a series of events that would turn into organizations. They couldn’t ban something that technically hadn’t formed yet. Which is why,” he says, pointing at my white ribbon, “anyone playing had to have one of those. To prove they were there for the game, and not to rat us out.”

My brain feels like it’s about to explode, trying to process all this at once. For so long I thought of the ribbons as something belonging to my mom that I never once factored my dad into it. Never once did I consider that he might have other reasons for tucking her ribbons away for all these years. That the memories behind them weren’t just hers, but theirs.

I glance at him cautiously, but he’s shaking his head with a fondness that makes him look younger than he is. “As for your mom—the instant I heard her ranting about the pie, I knew. Her voice was unmistakable. She was the Knight who clued us all in to the mishandling of administration funds that led to the ban. The one we’d been working with to drop all the clues.”

In a strange role reversal, it’s me who has to look away from him; me who needs a quiet moment to collect myself as I absorb this piece of their story, as I make it a part of my own. I’d known all this time I was walking on the ground where they’d trod, but I didn’t understand how directly, how luckily, it led to everything else. To them falling in love. To them sharing a life together. To me.

I find my voice and manage, “That’s incredible.”

My dad’s smile quirks. “We were fairly badass back in our day.”

We stop at a light. I’ve waited for this secret for so long. Too long. And now that all these other secrets are unraveled, I need to know.

“So . . . you know what they’re for? Each of the colors?”

My dad plucks the milkshake from my grasp, taking a comically long sip, his eyes teasing. “You have friends who aren’t freshmen. None of them have told you?”

I make a mental note to harass Val and Milo as he passes the milkshake over to me. “Nope.”

My dad raises his eyebrows. “I am deeply impressed by everyone’s commitment to the secret. Damn. It’s been—what? Twenty years?”

“The secret?” I repeat.

The light changes. His eyes are on the road, but still full of mirth. “You’re sure you want to know?”

I can’t help myself. “I just want to know which one Mom was in,” I blurt.

My dad’s head tilts back in surprise, but then settles in a quiet appreciation. Like this means more to him than any other question I might have asked. “Oh. Well. That’s easy—she was in the red one.”

I can’t even explain why my eyes flood with tears. Red doesn’t even mean anything to me. I have no way of differentiating it from the others. It’s just that for every fragment of my mom that I can still hold, I know there are a thousand others I’ll never know about—things she might have told me, things I might have found out on my own. It doesn’t matter how I get them. They’re all precious just the same.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says my dad fondly. “And I was in blue.”

I’m fully aware I’m pushing my luck when I ask, “So . . . what do they mean?”

My dad makes a show of pretending he’s not going to tell me for a moment with this near-clownish expression. It is, perhaps, the most aggressively like a dad he’s ever been.

“Well—you’ve got more than enough to qualify for any of them, so I guess there’s no harm in telling you. They’re all volunteer societies.” He glances down at my backpack. “You might have noticed there are some themes to the qualifying events. Social and campus activities are red, academic ones are blue, nature ones are yellow. If you get enough ribbons for any of them, you get to choose which society to join and help do volunteer work with.”