First & Then(2)

Ugh. She sounded like a brochure. I suppressed an eye roll and opted for a noncommittal head bob.

It was quiet for a moment. I thought she was going to dismiss me, but when I looked up, Mrs. Wentworth was examining me through narrowed eyes.

Her first name was Isobel. She wasn’t very old in the grand scheme of things, but by high school standards, she seemed it. She wore patterned sweaters and long, shapeless floral skirts. Still, Mrs. Wentworth’s eyes were very beautiful. Her lashes were thick and dark, and the color was just as vibrant, just as green as it must’ve been when she was my age. I liked to think that she was incredibly popular in those days. All the guys would follow her around and offer to drive her home and tell her that she looked like the girls in the magazines. And she would laugh and flip her dark curls and have no idea that there would be a time in her life when she would be Mrs. Wentworth, and care what some obnoxious girl wrote to get into Reeding University.

“Devon,” she said, and somehow I felt like the voice speaking was a little more Isobel and a little less Mrs. Wentworth. “Do you want to go to college?”

No one had ever asked me that. College was the natural order of things. According to my parents, between birth and death, there had to be college.

“I don’t know what else I would do,” I said.

“Join the army,” was her simple reply.

I made a face. “I hate being yelled at.”

“The Peace Corps then.”

A choking noise erupted from my throat, something like a cat being strangled. “I hate being selfless.”

“All right.” The twitching around Mrs. Wentworth’s lips started up again. “Get a job.”

“Just start working? Just like that?”

“Lots of people do it. Some very successful people never went to college.”

“Yeah. Look at Hollywood.”

“There’s one. Go to Hollywood. Become a star.”

“But I can’t act. I’ve never even talked in a play.”

“So join drama club.”

“Oh yeah, chorus member number twelve will be my ticket to stardom.”

“Why not?”

“First, you have to like doing that kind of stuff, which I don’t, and second, you have to be good at it, which I’m not.”

“So what are you good at?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, really.”

“Now how can you say that?”

I couldn’t express it right, not without Jane’s help. Those turns of phrases she used that gave elegance to even the unpleasant things. She would say I was wanting in singularity. Staunchly average. Spectacularly … insufficient, in situations like this. In the face of all caps ACHIEVEMENT. Because what if you didn’t have it in you? What if, deep down, you were just one of those background lions?

“Everyone’s good at something,” Mrs. Wentworth said after observing me for a moment. “You’ll find your niche. And you know a good place to find it?”

“College?”

“See, you’re a good guesser. There’s something already.”

I smiled a little.

“I think you’re a perfect candidate for college. Don’t think I’m trying to dissuade you here. I just want to know why you want to continue your education.”

“My parents,” I said. She could’ve just asked that straight off the blocks.

“To get away from them?”

“To keep them from murdering me.”

A particularly fierce twitch seized her lips. “I want you to get involved,” she said, sticking the essay back into my file. It was the only thing in there, save the crumpled postcard from Reeding University I showed her at our first meeting. “And give the personal statement another try. Heck, write the whole life’s story while you’re at it.”

I made another face.

“All right, all right, I won’t get ahead of myself. Have a good day, Devon.”

“You, too,” I said, and left the office.




I walked down to the football field after our session and thought about what Mrs. Wentworth had said. Mostly I thought about the essay—a page from the story of my life. I imagined writing about myself in the Peace Corps: a philanthropic Devon, traversing jungles and deserts, filled to the brim with the chance to self-sacrifice for the good of others. That’s the kind of shit those college people wanted—some spectacular tale of unflinching originality, sandwiched between your grade point average and your ACT scores. How many volunteer hours have you performed, and tell us exactly when your stunning triumph over adversity occurred.

I felt like I had never done anything. I had never suffered. I had never triumphed. I was a middle-class kid from the burbs who had managed to be rather unspectacular for the last seventeen years. A triumph over mediocrity—that was what I needed.

“Did college club get out early?”

Wherever I was, Foster had a way of finding me.

Until this past summer, he had been the kind of cousin that you see only every fourth Christmas or so. His family lived in California, we were in Florida, and that had been perfectly fine, a perfectly acceptable dose of Foster. But things had changed, and the new dosage of Foster in my life was pretty hard to tolerate at times.

He threw his bag to the ground and plunked down next to me on the bleachers.