Dreamland(12)

“And your family?”

“My dad’s a surgeon. He emigrated from the Philippines in the 1970s to study at Northwestern. He ended up going to medical school at the University of Chicago, where he met my mom. She’s a radiologist, German-Irish stock from Minnesota. Her family had a cabin on a lake up there, where we spent a part of every summer. And I have a sister, Heidi, who’s three years younger and looks nothing like me, and even though we couldn’t be more different, I think she’s amazing.”

I smiled. “Your family sounds anything but typical.”

“I don’t know,” she replied, then shrugged. “A lot of my friends’ parents were doctors or lawyers, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, and their families came from all over the world, too. I don’t think my family stood out at all.”

Where I’m from, they definitely would. “And you’re the same kind of overachieving academic as your parents, I take it?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because you just turned twenty-one and you’ve already graduated from college?”

She laughed again. “That had less to do with grades and SAT scores than my desire to get away from my parents. Trust me—my sister is a lot smarter than I am.”

“Why did you want to get away from your parents?” I asked. “It sounds like you had a pretty comfortable life.”

“I did, and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I’m not,” she hedged. “But it’s complicated. My parents can be…overprotective.”

When she paused, I glanced over at her. In the silence, she seemed to be debating how much to tell me, before finally going on.

“When I was seven, I was diagnosed with a pretty severe case of scoliosis. The doctors weren’t sure how my condition would progress as I grew, so in addition to having to wear a back brace for sixteen hours a day, I ended up having a bunch of surgeries and procedures to fix it. Obviously, since my parents are doctors, they made sure I saw the best specialists, but as you can imagine, they worried and hovered and wouldn’t allow me to do the things other kids did. And even though I eventually got better, it’s like they still see me as the damaged little girl I once was.”

“That sounds rough.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I know I’m not being completely fair to them. I know they care about me; it’s just that…I’m not like my parents. Or my sister, for that matter. Sometimes it feels like I was born into the wrong family.”

“I think a lot of people feel that way.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

I smiled. “Does that mean you’re not going to become a doctor?”

“Among other things,” she admitted. “Like…I love dancing, for instance. I started in ballet because the doctors recommended it, but I got hooked. I also learned tap, jazz, and hip-hop, but the more I got into it, the less my parents approved, even though it was good for me. Like I wasn’t quite measuring up to their expectations, you know? Anyway, to answer your question, by the time I started high school, I was already itching to get out and become an adult, so I started taking classes at community college and did a summer session at IU. I took accelerated classes so I was able to graduate early. And, yes, I was pretty much one of the youngest freshmen on campus. I’d only been driving a little more than a year.”

“And your overprotective parents were okay with you leaving home that young?”

“I threatened that I wouldn’t go to college at all. They knew I was serious.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“I can be a bit headstrong,” she offered with a wink. “But what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you go to college?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I never liked school all that much to begin with, so it wasn’t really in the cards.”

“Do you regret not going?”

“I probably would have failed out.”

“Not if you tried.”

“I likely wouldn’t have tried.”

She smiled. “I know that school’s not for everyone. And you still figured out what you want to do early on, which is more than a lot of people can say.”

I considered what she’d said. “I have a knack for farming,” I conceded, “and now that most of the transition work is behind us, my days aren’t as long as they once were. But it’s not what I grew up imagining that I’d be doing.”

I could still feel her eyes on me, her delicate features intermittently illuminated by passing headlights.

“You love music,” she announced. “That’s what you really wanted to do, right?”

“Of course.”

“You’re young, Colby,” she pointed out. “You still have plenty of time.”

I shook my head. “It’s not going to happen.”

“Because of your family?” Though I didn’t answer, she must have seen my expression, because I heard her expel a breath. “Okay, I accept that. Now, changing gears, since I told you about my boring childhood, what was your life like growing up in North Carolina?”

I gave her the highlights, trying to inject some humor into my dumb middle and high school exploits and responding in detail to her questions about the farm, about which she seemed endlessly fascinated. When I finished, I asked her what she liked most about college.