“Is that your phone?”
“What?”
He nodded at my pocket, adding another shrimp puff. “Your phone. I think it’s ringing.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I slid it out and glanced at the screen, then hit the mute button. “It’s just my father. He’ll leave a message.”
“You don’t want talk to him?”
I tried a wasabi pea. Ugh. I took a sip of wine, which didn’t help matters. “I rarely do, actually.”
“I’m surprised,” he observed, now making his own plate. “You seemed pretty close the other night at the Laundromat, when he came to help Clyde with that hole in the ceiling.”
I picked up a piece of chicken. “That was my dad.”
“Your . . . ?” He looked confused. Then, “Oh, right. I keep forgetting you have two.”
“Only one dad. And one father.”
“Similar words,” he pointed out.
“But not similar things. At least not in my life.” I was feeling myself getting less and less hungry by the second, discussing this. “It’s a long story.”
“We’ve got time.” He took a sip of his wine, savoring it. “I mean, if you feel like talking about it.”
I didn’t, actually. But since I was also now keenly aware of a woman in a Finz shirt power walking down the beach past our little date, eyeing us disapprovingly, I needed a distraction. “My father got my mom pregnant the summer before her senior year of high school. He disappeared from our lives pretty soon after. She married my dad when I was three. My father and I haven’t ever been close, really. The only stuff we’ve ever had in common has been school related.”
“School,” he repeated, pouring some more wine.
I nodded. “First just what I was learning, reading, that kind of thing. But when I was sixteen and started looking into colleges, he was suddenly very invested. Said he would handle tuition, bought me books, coached me about applications and essays. He really wanted me to go to an Ivy, or someplace of equal stature.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
I glanced up at him. He was listening while swishing around the wine in his glass, something I’d noticed was a habit of his. It was like it tasted better if he kept it moving, or something. “No. But then, when I did get into Columbia, he told me he actually couldn’t pay after all. And then instead of explaining why, or really saying anything, he just disappeared. Again.”
Now, he looked up at me. “You got into Columbia?”
I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered or insulted by how surprised he sounded. “Yeah.”
“Wow. You weren’t kidding about the SAT thing,” he said. “You must have seriously aced that verbal.”
I had. Not that I needed to tell him that, so instead, I shrugged. “I did okay.”
“Why aren’t you going there?”
“I couldn’t afford it.”
“That’s what student loans are for, though,” he said. “Debt is part of education.”
“Well,” I said. “Not in my family, I guess.”
“Your parents didn’t want you to go to Columbia?” he asked. “That’s crazy. Do they even know how hard it is to get into?”
“My dad’s a contractor,” I pointed out. “And East U gave me a full scholarship. It made no sense to go into some huge debt.”
“Yes, but they’re not the same caliber of school. I mean, no offense, but really . . .” He shook his head. “Not even close.”
“Yeah.” I bit my lip. “I guess not.”
He looked at me, but I just turned my head to the ocean, forcing myself to take a deep breath. Here I was, sitting on the remains of someone’s house, drinking wine I didn’t like, with food I could barely tolerate, while rehashing the worst part of the past year. There are just moments when you look up from any one place and realize, suddenly, you have no idea how you got there.
“Wow,” Theo said after a moment. I was still studying the waves, crashing in front of us. A few tern circling overhead, taking occasional dives. “Our First Fight. And it only took ten days.”
Even after such a short time, I could say that this sentence was pretty much Theo encapsulated. Not only did he know the exact duration of Our Time Together, but our first fractious moment already had a moniker. “Are we fighting?”
“I offended you.” It was a statement, not a question. I turned to look at him. “I’m sorry, Emaline. I just . . . education is a big deal in my family. It arouses passions.”
I nodded. “We feel that way about college football.”
I was kidding, although I realized, a beat later, he might not have realized it. We sat there another moment in silence while I tried another wasabi peanut. Still kind of gross. But the wine, surprisingly, was kind of growing on me.
“And,” he added, “I didn’t get into Columbia.”
I raised my eyebrows. “No?”
“My verbal was nothing to sneeze at, either.” He sighed. “It was my first choice.”
“No way.”
“Yep.” Another wrist flick, sending the wine swishing. “Don’t get me wrong, I love NYU. But it still nags at me sometimes.”
I didn’t say anything. Instead I just looked down at the table and the faint layer of sand covering it. I drew a circle in it with my finger, slowly. “I know a lot of people would have found a way to make Columbia work. But it just wasn’t going to happen for me. But the fact that he never explained what happened and disappeared . . . it just made it worse.”