Bookish and the Beast - Ashley Poston Page 0,59
was an accounting major,” Dad fills in.
“So I want to go there, too—except for English, not accounting—but the essay prompt is horrid.”
“What’s the essay about?” Vance asks.
“Basically, what makes me a good fit for NYU, but what I think they want is why should they pick me over so many other gifted students? And I…don’t know.” I shrug. “And I just don’t think they want a sob story about a dead mom.” I force out a laugh, because it’s just getting too depressing thinking about it. “I’m really not that amazing.”
“I’m trying to tell Rosie that she is amazing,” Dad says.
“Dad,” I say. “I’m not.”
“Not as amazing as me, anyway,” Vance agrees ignobly, but I’m beginning to realize that that’s his kind of humor. Sort of self-important, but self-deprecating at the same time, because he doesn’t believe it himself.
And a part of that’s really sad, too.
“Which is not amazing at all,” I reply, and he mocks a dagger to the chest.
* * *
—
DAD SITUATES HIS SUITCASE IN THE CORNER of our room and plops down on the end of the bed. Finally, his mask falls away, and he looks about as tired as I would have guessed. I sit next to him and rest my head on his shoulder. He smells like home.
“I keep forgetting how handsome Elias is,” he says, and I can hear him smiling. “I should come over more often!”
“Dad.”
“Is he single?”
I elbow him in the side, and he chuckles. It isn’t really rocket science that my dad isn’t as hetero as some people may think. He was the first person Quinn came out to as nonbinary—the second being me and Annie. He wears rainbow suspenders all through pride month, and he has a graphic framed on his desk with NSYNC and the words BI-BI-BI!— but I never guessed he would like Vance’s guardian. “Wait until I’m done working for them, at least.”
“No promises,” he jokes, and tousles my hair and asks me where the shower is. I point him in the direction of the one Mr. Rodriguez showed me earlier and change into my pajamas.
I grab my laptop from his satchel and retreat down into the living room. Mr. Rodriguez has already put the leftovers away, and the lights are out, so I turn on a lamp and curl up in the corner of the couch. I boot up my laptop, figuring I might as well try to write that college essay again, but every time I try to start it, I can’t figure out where to go.
Like I had said at dinner earlier—my life hasn’t been any sort of spectacular.
It’s been me trying as I might to chase after the disappearing shadow of my mother.
I stare at the blank page. The cursor blinks. In, out, in, out, like a heartbeat. I rub my first fingers against the ridges of the F and the J, trying to will some sort of word, some sentence, some semblance of why I should go to NYU and not anyone else. Why I’m spectacular. Why I’m me.
Argh, it’s no use.
I give up and close my laptop, and find my way into the library again. I don’t turn on any of the lights, and in the darkness the room reminds me of the first time I snuck into this house. I run my fingers along the spines of the books, closing my eyes, remembering the way Mom used to sit in her reading chair in those golden afternoons she loved so much, reading page after page after page, as if she was running out of time.
I wonder if she knew that she was.
I try to hang on to those memories, where she’s sitting at her sun-drenched chair with her round glasses pushed up the bridge of her nose, her brown hair pulled high into a bun, chewing on her fingernails as General Sond or Carmindor or Amara spiraled through the galaxy. But whenever I think of her at her chair, I remember that we no longer have that room filled with all of those books she loved. I remember that we had to sell the house to pay for the medical costs. I remember that we had to sell those books to close her casket.
Some days I still wake up and forget that she’s buried in Haven Memorial Gardens at the edge of town.
I don’t talk about my mom often. Whenever I do, my heart hurts in a way that nothing can really help. Like there’s this hole drilled into