Chapter Seven
Edvin Nilsen. Founder of Alpha Fellows. CEO of Nexus, a data analytics company specializing in defense. I don’t really know what Nexus does—since they work with the government, they keep everything hush-hush.
“Uh,” I say, like an idiot. It feels like someone is pumping air into my skull. My feet start moving by themselves, taking me farther and farther away from Lola and Zach.
“The committee was wowed by your application,” he says. “We wanted to extend you an invite to our summer program.”
“Uh,” I say again. This single syllable may demolish whatever impression Edvin Nilsen has of my intelligence.
He launches into what sounds like a prewritten script about logistics.
The program is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the MIT campus.
It runs eight weeks long, from mid-June to mid-August. All expenses are covered, including flights and lodging.
The main component of the program is a hackathon, a competition where students team up to build technical projects—video games, mobile apps, hardware devices, sentient AI, whatever.
One team will be awarded a hundred thousand dollars and considered for early admission to MIT.
He talks like all of this comes so easy. Like he lives in a universe where the most abundant element is not hydrogen, but money.
When I applied to Alpha Fellows, I saw that Edvin is a Forbes billionaire. A billion has nine zeroes. Three commas. Even in binary representation, it only takes thirty digits to represent a billion. Written out, it doesn’t look like a particularly big number.
But it might as well span an entire galaxy between Edvin Nilsen and me.
“So, can you confirm your participation?” he asks.
The answer should be obvious, but suddenly I picture my mom, all alone, stuck in Chinook Shore. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” There’s this edge in his voice. I can tell that he’s not somebody who is used to being told no.
“Sorry, this is, um, a lot to process.”
“I don’t think you understand,” he says. “This is one of the most prestigious summer programs in the country. You’re the only student from Oregon we’re admitting this year.”
Wow. How is this even real? I’m tempted to ask if he’s sure he got the right Charise Tang, but I don’t want to be annoying. “I, uh. I need some time to think it through. Sorry…”
Edvin’s voice is crisp. “Okay, let us know. There are plenty of students on the waitlist. You have until tomorrow to decide.”
Tomorrow? That’s, like, zero time. “Wai—”
But he hangs up, and then I’m listening to dead air for a few seconds.
I turn around, but Lola and Zach are gone. She probably dragged him back to the restaurant. Might as well go meet them.
I walk toward the Lucky Panda. The street is wide and empty and sad in its emptiness.
It’s close enough to the sea for the salt to gnaw away at the buildings, but not quite close enough for Airbnb vultures to start circling.
I pass by abandoned storefronts, sidestep bottle-green glass shards on the sidewalk that nobody bothered to sweep up.
Chinook Shore. The whole town feels like a sigh.
Lola is leaning against the brick wall of the Lucky Panda exterior, beneath a lamp that pins her in an orange pool of light. She brings a vape to her lips.
“Those things are liquid cancer,” I say, even though I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s true. Maybe I’m thinking of cigarettes. I’m probably thinking of cigarettes.
She exhales a thin, white wisp. “Darlin’, at least my cancer will be strawberry flavored.”
I don’t say anything else, because Lola and I have argued about her vaping before, and I lose the argument every time. Really, I would’ve thought her mom going through chemo would’ve made Lola quit, but if anything, she’s only gotten worse.
We all have our ways of coping. Hers is a Juul. Mine is—well, was—a cute guy who feels me up in his dad’s girlfriend’s car.
“What happened to Zach?”
“Begged the manager not to call the cops. You shoulda seen the blubbering. Snot and everything. He’s washing dishes for a month.” She pushes off the wall and starts walking toward the parking lot. “Quinn said we should clear out. I’ll drive ya. I put your stuff in the trunk already.”
At least Mom is fine. “Thanks.”
We climb into her car. But Lola doesn’t reach for the ignition. She’s staring through the windshield at the restaurant door, her mouth a thin line.
I shift in my seat. “Soooo… Should we go?”
Suddenly she smacks the steering wheel. “God-freakin’-dammit! Just… Why would he do that? Duh, college ain’t easy. Tough shit. But he ruined it. Why would he ruin it?”
“It sounded like maybe he didn’t have a choice,” I say.
She stares at me incredulously. “There is always a choice. Always.”
I don’t know why she thinks that, given that our entire lives seem to be written by other people, but I’m not in the mood to argue about the existence of free will. This isn’t sad philosopher hour. So I repeat, “Should we go?”
“Mmm-yeah,” she mumbles, and then we’re finally moving.
As we roll down the street, she asks, “What was your phone call about, anyway?”
I explain about Mrs. Lombardi, Alpha Fellows, and Edvin Nilsen.
“That’s amazing, Char.” We stop at a red light, and she takes the chance to give me a quick side-hug. “So when are you leaving?”
I keep my eyes fixed on the road. “I haven’t decided yet if I’m going.”
Lola swerves around a pothole. “What is there to think about? Isn’t it all expenses paid?”
For some reason, my brain decides to remind me of Zach’s face. How defeated he looked. I was supposed to be the one who made it out. It pissed me off when he said that. Like he thought he was so much better than the rest of us. But he’s the loser who ran out on a thirty-dollar restaurant bill.
I don’t know why I’m thinking about Zach.
“Weren’t we going to spend the summer together? Go to the county fair? Try every ice cream flavor at Scoops? Flirt with tourists?” I wanted us to live our best lives. Channel all the main character energy.
But Lola’s not smiling, so I add, “Didn’t you say Taylor Swift has a new album coming out? Mercury’s in Gatorade.”
“Retrograde, dummy,” she says. “Char, I got something to say.”
“Oh, right, you mentioned before. What’s up?” Maybe something happened with her not-girlfriend Rachel. Lola hates how Rachel abuses the gritted-teeth emoji. She says it’s so boomer.
We turn onto my street and my house comes into view.
Lola silently pulls up to the curb by my front door. She grips the steering wheel tighter. “I’m graduating this June. I’ve been taking classes online to get the credits.”
What.
My mind pinwheels. Our final year we were supposed to have together, just…
deleted. No more lip-syncing to Chappell Roan, no more hate-watching The Kardashians.
No more sneaking leftover scallion pancakes from the Lucky Panda.
No more senior prom. No more signing yearbooks, decorating graduation caps, fretting over The FutureTM.
There’s so much I want to say, but all that comes out is, “Why?”
“I’m enlisting right after my birthday.” She turns eighteen in July.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” The question comes out louder than I meant for it to.
At school, there are free sign-ups for the ASVAB, a standardized test for joining the military.
Every fall, recruiters set up tables right outside the cafeteria and chat with whoever will listen.
Each year, there are a handful of kids who end up in the army or Air Force.
But Lola’s always dreamed of being a fashion designer.
She wants to serve looks, not our country.
“Char, chill.”
I lower my voice. “You think camo print is a crime against humanity.”
“It is. But my recruiter said Mari could get her green card and good health insurance.”
Right. Lola’s mom doesn’t have citizenship. Mine does; when I was thirteen, I helped her study for the naturalization test. She snagged a green card through marriage. I’ve wondered if that’s why she was in such a rush to lock a guy down after my father left.
But there are other options for Lola and her mother. There have to be.
“What about the scholarship contest?”
She blinks fast. “I didn’t win.”
My heart squeezes.
“I’m sorry,” I say. The words seem so freaking inadequate, but I don’t know what else to say. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Felt stupid, I guess.”
“Not winning isn’t stupid.”
“Not because I didn’t win. But I was delulu to ever think I could. I stalked the winner on Instagram. She goes to a bougie art academy in Chicago and her mother is this famous fashion designer whose clothes Billie Eilish wore to the Met Gala.”
“So she didn’t even need the scholarship money?” Like, I know this random girl has the right to apply for whatever scholarship she wants. But this makes me angrier than it should.
“The rich get richer. What else is new?”
She tries to smile, but the left corner of her mouth quivers, and then droops like it gave up on propping itself skyward.
God. I lean across the gearshift and envelope her into a hug.
As she cries, I think about Michael, who also grew up in this town.
Mrs. Lombardi mentioned him. I’ve seen a photo of him at age seventeen, smiling at graduation.
He has this awful mullet that looks like a roadkill squirrel, but otherwise, he could be any classmate of mine.
Who would that seventeen-year-old have become if he hadn’t shipped off to Iraq?
If he hadn’t watched his friends die in combat, if he hadn’t lost his leg in a convoy ambush?
Even now, he has nightmares, nightmares that he tries to drown with liquor. He has rage and shame and loss, all these different hues of pain. The war never left him, not really. It leaks out of my stepdad and the rest of us become collateral damage.
I don’t want Lola to return haunted, but I don’t know how to save her.
A few minutes later, she breaks away, leaving my shirt damp in the spot where her face pressed against my shoulder.
“Char, look at me.” Her voice is watery.
I meet her glistening eyes.
“You have to take this opportunity. You have to. You don’t get how lucky you are that somebody decided to give you a chance.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
She sniffles. “And you better not squander it the way Zach did. If you screw up, I’ll come back from boot camp just to kick your ass, I really will.”