that I was failing. I wanted to tell him it was going well. So easy, I imagined myself saying.
“Not great,” I said instead. “I had no idea it would be this hard.”
The line was silent, and I imagined Dad’s stern face hardening. I waited for the jab I imagined he was preparing, but instead a quiet voice said, “It’ll be okay, honey.”
“It won’t,” I said. “There will be no scholarship. I’m not even going to pass.” My voice was shaky now.
“If there’s no scholarship, there’s no scholarship,” he said. “Maybe I can help with the money. We’ll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Come on home if you need.”
I hung up, not sure what I’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the next time we spoke everything would be different, the tenderness of this moment forgotten, the endless struggle between us again in the foreground. But tonight he wanted to help. And that was something.
* * *
—
IN MARCH, THERE WAS ANOTHER exam in Western Civ. This time I made flash cards. I spent hours memorizing odd spellings, many of them French (France, I now understood, was a part of Europe). Jacques-Louis David and François Boucher: I couldn’t say them but I could spell them.
My lecture notes were nonsensical, so I asked Vanessa if I could look at hers. She looked at me skeptically, and for a moment I wondered if she’d noticed me cheating off her exam. She said she wouldn’t give me her notes but that we could study together, so after class I followed her to her dorm room. We sat on the floor with our legs crossed and our notebooks open in front of us.
I tried to read from my notes but the sentences were incomplete, scrambled. “Don’t worry about your notes,” Vanessa said. “They aren’t as important as the textbook.”
“What textbook?” I said.
“The textbook,” Vanessa said. She laughed as if I were being funny. I tensed because I wasn’t.
“I don’t have a textbook,” I said.
“Sure you do!” She held up the thick picture book I’d used to memorize titles and artists.
“Oh that,” I said. “I looked at that.”
“You looked at it? You didn’t read it?”
I stared at her. I didn’t understand. This was a class on music and art. We’d been given CDs with music to listen to, and a book with pictures of art to look at. It hadn’t occurred to me to read the art book any more than it had to read the CDs.
“I thought we were just supposed to look at the pictures.” This sounded stupid when said aloud.
“So when the syllabus assigned pages fifty through eighty-five, you didn’t think you had to read anything?”
“I looked at the pictures,” I said again. It sounded worse the second time.
Vanessa began thumbing through the book, which suddenly looked very much like a textbook.
“That’s your problem then,” she said. “You have to read the textbook.” As she said this, her voice lilted with sarcasm, as if this blunder, after everything else—after joking about the Holocaust and glancing at her test—was too much and she was done with me. She said it was time for me to go; she had to study for another class. I picked up my notebook and left.
“Read the textbook” turned out to be excellent advice. On the next exam I scored a B, and by the end of the semester I was pulling A’s. It was a miracle and I interpreted it as such. I continued to study until two or three A.M. each night, believing it was the price I had to pay to earn God’s support. I did well in my history class, better in English, and best of all in music theory. A full-tuition scholarship was unlikely, but I could maybe get half.
During the final lecture in Western Civ, the professor announced that so many students had failed the first exam, he’d decided to drop it altogether. And poof. My failing grade was gone. I wanted to punch the air, give Vanessa a high five. Then I remembered that she didn’t sit with me anymore.
When the semester ended I returned to Buck’s Peak. In a few weeks BYU would post grades; then I’d know if I could return in the fall.
I filled my journals with promises that I would stay out of the junkyard. I needed money—Dad would have said I was broker than the Ten Commandments—so I went to get my old job back at Stokes. I turned up at the busiest hour