Vegan Virgin Valentine (12 page)

Her name is Roberta Kerr, but among seniors she’s the Gateway to College. She’s the one who helps compile your transcripts and test scores and recommendation letters for college applications. She’s the one who will put in a call to the Office of Admissions at your top choice if she thinks you’re an extra-special candidate. It’s crucially important to be on Ms. Kerr’s VIP list. Thankfully, I am.

We small-talked for a minute and then Ms. Kerr said, “So what’s up?”

“I’m going to drop the improv dance class I’m taking through 3-1-3. I just wanted to make sure it won’t affect my final GPA or show up on my college transcripts.”

“Mara, I’m surprised to hear you say this. What’s wrong with the class?”

I shook my head. “I just don’t like it.”

Ms. Kerr rotated her chair around to the wall of filing cabinets. She pulled out my folder and thumbed through the contents until she came to SUNY Brockport letterhead.

“It’s too late in the semester to switch to another class,” she said after scanning the paper. “You have enough credits to graduate, so it’ll be no problem there. And if you officially drop the class, it won’t show up on any transcripts. But the problem is that since you’ll only be taking one college class this semester and you took two last semester, you’ll just have three college classes when you go to Yale. As you know, the goal of 3-1-3 is to have taken four.”

“I’ll be taking two more courses at Johns Hopkins this summer,” I said. “Remember that precollege program I applied for?”

“Oh, yes.” Ms. Kerr quickly flipped through more pages of my file. “Yes, of course.”

“So that means I’ll enter Yale with
five
college courses.”

Ms. Kerr pressed her lips together. “Are you sure about this? When we admit people to the 3-1-3 program, they are representatives of Brockport High School. Anything they do reflects on us, so therefore we do not encourage or condone dropping a class.” She paused before adding, “Even if you don’t like it.”

How could she say this to me? I have been a freaking
ambassador
for this high school for nearly four years! At Model UN, yearbook conventions, leadership conferences. I raised the mean SAT score for my class by several points. I got into Yale, which not only reflects positively on the high school but on her job as well. How is it that I can perform with flying colors a thousand times, but then I stumble once and I’m vacuumed off the red carpet?

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure about this.”

“I assume you’ve discussed this with your parents?”

No, I had not discussed this with my parents. If I had, they would have talked me out of it for sure.

“Yes … they said it’s okay.”

“Well, then.” Ms. Kerr cast a disappointed look at me. “If you’re certain about this, I’ll send an e-mail over to the college registrar and let them know you’re dropping.”

After I left her office, I stopped in the bathroom across the hall. My nose had gotten so clogged I needed to give it an all-out honking blow. As I was throwing a wad of tissues into the trash, I saw those square black letters:

I’d actually seen this one before. It had appeared that first week the graffiti showed up and, according to Ash Robinson, it was hands down the cruelest. I remember being amused that whoever wrote it was smart enough to spell
degenerate
correctly. But now it hit me how awful it was that someone trashed V all over the bathroom walls. Sure, she got off to a less-than-savory start, but why couldn’t people cut her a little slack?

I headed up to my locker, where I rummaged through my pen basket until I found the permanent marker that I used for making the sign above the candygram table. I walked back to the bathroom and quickly scribbled over the graffiti until I couldn’t read a single word. Then I dashed down to the basement bathroom and up to the second-floor bathroom and into every other bathroom that Ash had told me about, scribbling and scribbling until there was nothing left but long black rectangles and smudges of ink all over my fingers.

My mom came into my room on Sunday afternoon. “How about a drive to Letchworth?”

“Letchworth?” I asked.

That’s this state park about forty miles south of Brockport. They call it the Grand Canyon of the East because it’s a dramatically deep gorge with gushing waterfalls. We usually go hiking there in the fall when the foliage is blazing.

My mom nodded. “I thought it would be nice to get out of the house for a while. It’s sunny, the roads are clear, and I’ve finished my work.”

I hadn’t been doing much, just going through my CDs and weeding out the ones I never listen to anymore. My mom had been working on a fundraising letter in her room, and my dad and V had just left for Rochester, where V had a marathon five-hour SAT review course.

“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”

Twenty minutes later, we were heading south on Route 19. My sniffle was considerably better, but I’d stuffed several tissues in my coat pocket. My mom put some music on. I stared out my window as the flat landscape gave way to more and more hills. It was early March, a few weeks before the start of spring, but the trees were still skeletally bare and the corn fields were blanketed with snow.

We’d been driving for about thirty minutes when my mom turned the volume down. “You’ve been quiet,” she said. “Anything on your mind?”

“Not really.”

“Can you believe you have less than six months until Yale?”

I shook my head.

“We should plan a trip to the mall soon, get some sheets and towels for your dorm room. You’ll need them this summer, too, in Baltimore.”

I shrugged. I didn’t feel like talking about college or summer academic plans, even though it’s the number-one way my parents and I relate.

“Have you figured out what courses you’re registering for at Johns Hopkins?” my mom asked. “I was flipping through the catalog the other night and everything looks so fascinating.”

I shook my head again. When I first got accepted, I’d read the course catalog from cover to cover and dog-eared pages about international affairs and neuroscience and bioethics, but I hadn’t picked it up for several weeks.

“It’s so amazing to think that between SUNY Brockport and Johns Hopkins, you’ll have six college classes under your belt by the time you get to Yale. And then factor in your AP classes. I hope they accept all the credits and advance you to second-year status.”

I got this anxious feeling in my stomach. I still hadn’t told my parents about dropping improv dance. I’d been planning to detonate the bomb all weekend, but every time I came close, I thoroughly chickened out.

“Are you sure there’s nothing on your mind?” my mom asked.

I shrugged again and looked out my window.

We didn’t say much for the rest of the drive. I continued staring at the snowy fields and the blink-and-they’re-gone towns along Route 19. We finally reached Letchworth and drove along the main road until we got to the parking lot where we usually start our hikes.

We pulled our hats down over our ears and our scarves up over our noses and started toward the trailhead. But thirty steps later, a stinging wind blasted across the parking lot. We grabbed each other’s hands and mad-dashed back to the car, careful not to slip on any ice.

My mom turned up the heat and we pressed our fingers in front of the vents. As we were warming up, we got kind of giddy. It all began when we joked about what my dad would do if the state troopers called him to say we’d been discovered, frozen solid, in a Letchworth parking lot. Of all my dad’s paranoid fears about harm that could be brought upon his family, Parking Lot Danger ranks near the top. He’s constantly reminding us to watch out for drivers who zigzag across empty spaces and runaway shopping carts and, of course, predators who hide behind parked cars.

We were still laughing when my mom gasped, “Oh my God!”

“What?”

She pointed her finger across the nearly empty parking lot, where a silver SUV was two rows up and three spaces over. I stared at it for a second before noticing that prominently displayed on the bumper was a sticker that proclaimed
MY CHILD BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT.
It was in the exact same colors and font as the bumper sticker on my mom’s car, which of course says
MY CHILD IS AN HONOR
STUDENT.

I cracked up. “Do you think I’m in imminent danger?”

“If we see them, I’ll take off. Let’s just hope they don’t notice the Yale sticker on the way out!”

Neither of us said anything for a moment. I blew my nose and then glanced at my mom. “Remember before, when you were talking about college classes?”

She nodded.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“You know that improv dance class?”

“You mentioned something about the teacher. You don’t like him, right?”

“
Didn’t
like him. I dropped it on Friday, which means … It means I’ll only graduate with three college credits. But I’ll make it up at Johns Hopkins this summer and can still hopefully get second-year status in the fall.”

“Why didn’t you talk with us about it?” she asked.

“I thought you and Dad would tell me to stick with it, and I’ve just been feeling like…” I paused. All the thoughts I’d been having were so new. I didn’t know how to say them out loud. Or even whether I wanted to.

“Why did you think we’d tell you that?”

I ran my fingers along my seat belt. “Because of Aimee. How she dropped out of college. I didn’t want you to think you’d have to go through that whole thing again.”

My mom shook her head. “I may have suggested you talk to the teacher, but I wouldn’t push you to do anything you hated.”

“But I always feel like you’re so worried about how Aimee has turned out, like I’m the daughter who has to do it all.”

My mom didn’t say anything for a minute. It was weird. I’d been contemplating these things for practically my entire life, but I’d never actually voiced them out loud. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if she confirmed it and said something like,
Yes, Mara, you are our only hope, so don’t screw it up.

Finally, my mom said, “We don’t talk about this much … about you … about
how
you … came to be.”

Was she talking about what I think she was talking about?

I didn’t know whether to disappear into my seat or shake the words out of her as hard and fast as I could. I have never talked to my mom about how
anyone
came to be. She was totally understating it when she said we don’t talk about it much. We don’t talk about it AT ALL.

My mom’s cheeks flushed. “But I think you should know that Dad and I… We didn’t… You weren’t…” She quickly touched her hand to her face. “I was forty-three when I had you, and I’d already started menopause, so I didn’t think I could get…” My mom paused before saying, “What I’m trying to say is that we didn’t have you to compensate for Aimee.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Are you saying I was a
mistake
?”

“Let’s call it a surprise.”

I was too shocked to even be embarrassed by the fact that my mom just disclosed to me that I was an unplanned pregnancy. I’d always assumed I was brought into this world to provide my parents with award ceremonies and Yale bumper stickers and everything that Aimee didn’t give them.

My mom continued. “I’m just telling you this so you don’t feel pressure to ‘do it all,’ as you said. Of course, Dad and I are proud of your accomplishments and the high standards you have set for yourself. But we love Aimee just as much as we love you. We
do
wish she’d gone to college, and we wish she’d given V a more consistent upbringing, but she’s still our daughter, and we love her no matter what.”

I stretched my seat belt out as far as it would go and let it zip back in again. “What if I changed my plans and didn’t go to college? What if I decided to live in Brockport and work at Common Grounds full-time?”

My mom laughed, like I was making a joke. I remained quiet.

“I’d be surprised,” she finally said. “No, I’d be shocked. But it wouldn’t change how I feel about you. I wouldn’t love you any less.”

That was all I needed to hear. I let out a long, slow breath.

“You’re just being hypothetical, right?” my mom asked. “You’re not
really
planning to defer Yale?”

“Right,” I said, laughing. “Purely hypothetical.”

We spent the next hour driving around Letchworth, past the Glen Iris Inn and the Mary Jemison statue and the high railroad trestle. We didn’t talk about anything much, just pointed things out along the way.

As it was getting dark, my mom’s cell phone rang. It was my dad, telling her that V had another hour of SAT prep and then they were going to eat in Rochester. After they said goodbye, my mom asked if I wanted to grab dinner on the way home.

I was definitely getting hungry, but the only restaurants between here and Brockport are roadside diners where it’s nearly impossible to find anything vegan. Every salad has bacon bits, every mashed potato has butter, every soup is made with chicken stock. It’s frustrating for me, but I also hate driving waiters crazy, asking about the ingredients of various items on the menu and then just ordering a bowl of kidney beans and raw broccoli.

My mom must have read my mind. “No vegan options?”

I nodded. “It’s so annoying.”

“Do you ever think about not eating vegan?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat meat again. Eggs still gross me out, too.”

“So you think about dairy?”

“Cheese,” I said. “I think about cheese sometimes.”

Talk about understatements! I CRAVE cheese. I LUST after cheese. I DREAM about cheese.

“You know, Mara,” my mom said, “sometimes we make decisions about our life and they feel like the right decision at the time. No, they
are
the right decision at the time. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be the right decision forever. And you know what I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older? There isn’t a definite right and wrong anyway. Sometimes we do what
seems
wrong, but we have good reasons for doing it, so it’s not wrong after all.”