I didn’t say any of this, of course. But as he finally turned and began to walk across the lot, it occurred to me that all I’d wanted from him was the unconditional love you get from family, that strong, innate connection so unlike anything else. For whatever reason—time, circumstance, distance—he wasn’t able to give it to me himself. But he did give me Benji, and I would be forever grateful. With love like that, you can’t get picky about how it finds you or the details. All that matters is that it’s there. Better late than never.
21
I HAD TO admit, it was different.
“I’ll swipe the card!” Benji yelled, running out ahead of me as we entered the station. He did, and I pushed through the turnstile, feeling a blast of hot, smelly city air as I did so. A moment later he joined me, and I peered down the dark tunnel, trying to get my bearings.
“Which one are we getting on, again?” I still hated not knowing where I was, or was going. Part of growing up in a berg, I supposed.
“The R. It’s this way. Come on, I think that’s one right there.”
He grabbed my hand and we ran together along the platform, getting to the train just as the doors were closing. Inside, we found a single free seat, which he gallantly gave to me. He hung onto a pole instead.
“You’re sure you have the invitation?” he asked me, for about the millionth time.
“I have the invitation,” I told him. “But even if we didn’t, I bet we could get in. We do know the artist’s assistant.”
“True,” he said, taking a spin around the pole. It was mid-November, only three months or so since I’d last seen him, but I’d swear he’d shot up a good foot. Add in his new haircut—a sort of a faux-hawk—and I’d almost not even recognized him when he and my father picked me up at the airport a few days earlier. Almost.
We’d planned this trip all the way back in August, when he and my father had left Colby. In the end, they’d stayed three more days, which allowed us to do all the big Colby things one last time: shrimp burgers, arcade, check-ins. On the last night, I’d kept my promise, emptying out our Summer Ending Tax jar, which held just enough for two tickets to the Surfside Ferris wheel. In the end, though, we didn’t have to pay. High School Special.
As for my father, things had remained distant, especially as there was more distance between us. While I called and texted with Benji regularly—he loved that phone of his—I did not hear a thing from my father for two full months. Then, in the beginning of November, I opened up my e-mail to find a message. It had no subject, and no greeting, and just said this:
What are you reading for school that you love? What do you hate?
For a full week, I left it in my inbox, where again and again I’d open it, scan these words, and then close it. I owed him nothing and hoped he knew to expect as much. But the one thing that had always worked for us was e-mail. So eventually, I wrote him a response, telling him that I liked Chaucer but found Milton impossible to understand. Within three hours, he’d written back. Since then, we’d kept up a steady discourse, solely about literature. It wasn’t parenting, but I had that in spades with my mom’s regular calls and texts. And he did know an awful lot about Paradise Lost.
“This is our stop,” Benji called out now, as the train began to slow down. We followed a clump of other passengers out, then up the stairs, to my great relief. As a beach girl, being underground still felt weird to me. If I couldn’t have water in sight, the sky was the next best thing.
“Okay,” I said, pulling out the directions my father had printed out for us. “From the station, we go two blocks east, then three west. The gallery should be on the corner.”
“This way,” he said, turning right. “Follow me.”
I did, the control freak in me requiring that I pull out my phone, where I’d programmed the address as well, to make sure we were going the right way. With all the noise and bustle of the city, I felt constantly uncertain. A year ago, it would have been my worst nightmare. But by now, after being the same old way for so long, I’d learned a little newness could be good for me.
My first semester at East U was a classic example. Even though it was only two hours from Colby, it was a different world. The campus was large, based on the edge of a city easily twice the size of Cape Frost, and I shared a dorm suite with three other girls. They were all nice and we got along fine, but I still found the training my mom and sisters had given me in my old room came in awfully handy when it came to our shared space. Despite my assumptions that it would be otherwise, no one else from my high school had ended up in my dorm or in any of my classes, which was both exciting and frightening all at once. No one had known me since kindergarten, so I could be anything or anyone. But no one had known me since kindergarten, so no one knew me, period.
Okay, maybe not no one. There was Luke, whose dorm was right down the block. He’d been a great comfort during those first, fierce days of homesickness, just as he had the night Benji ran off.
After my father and Benji went back to North Reddemane, Luke had driven me to the Pavilion, where I was able to catch the tail end of the party. He stayed, helping us clean up, and even went along when Ivy, a bit loopy on white wine and in a celebratory mood, insisted we all go dancing at Tallyho. There, she and Amber hit the floor together, with Morris and Daisy in tow, while I sat off to the side, nursing my blistered feet and a soda water.
“Thank you,” I said to Luke, who was beside me, a watered-down beer in his hand.