Chapter 9
I looked at myself in the little mirror above my dresser—at least, I looked at the section of myself that it reflected. Then I swiveled, changed positions, backed up, and stood on my tiptoes so I could view another part.
“Ok, not bad,” I muttered out loud. I didn’t need to worry about being quiet, though, because the house was totally empty.
My mom and Morgan had gone to look at a place for rent today, one that they thought would work for us as long as Max didn’t break up with his girlfriend and suddenly need somewhere to sleep.
“When that happens—I mean, if that happens, you and Morgan can double up,” my mom had told me.
It might have seemed odd that they were suddenly able to look for a new place to live.
You might have asked yourself, “How will they put down a security deposit? How will they ever pay rent?” And those were questions that I definitely asked myself and then my mother.
She’d had the answer: the funds would come from a secret bank account into which she had been depositing money every month for quite a while.
It was money that came from the restaurant, of course, which meant that it was family money.
“And now we’ll use it for our family,” she’d explained. “We’ll use it to get a new place to live.”
We would need one, since this house was on the market.
Despite the issues with the foundation, the poor drainage, the lack of landscaping, and the hoarder situation in the garage, the real estate agent felt good about getting it sold, especially with the lowball price she’d slapped on it with my mother’s approval.
They were doing this quickly, without my father’s involvement, because he was nowhere accessible to be involved. But luckily for everyone, our previous financial problems and his gambling losses over Christmas had led him to make a big change: he and my mom had put the house into her name only.
So she could sell it, just like that. The family house was no more.
The family business was hanging on by a thread.
It was still closed and apparently there was not enough money in my mom’s secret slush fund to pay for the needed roof repairs and to cover the salary of a new cook.
I had collected all the food we could conceivably use ourselves and Mom had asked Max to clean out the rest. But besides that, no one seemed very concerned about Walter’s because they were busy looking at rental listings and running around as if my dad, our home, and our restaurant had never even existed.
I leaned in close to apply lipstick and then also checked my teeth in the mirror. There, I was totally ready and I had to get going. I had to pick up someone along the way.
“Wow,” Shane said when I got out of my car in his driveway. “Look at you! You’re beautiful.”
He had three sisters and had talked about how his parents were happily married.
With those influences, he had learned to give a good compliment.
“Thank you,” I answered. “You look nice, too.” He had put on a tie for the occasion, although the knot looked a little askew.
His cast was off but he still had the sling, so he was awkward with how he used his arm.
But he did look more than nice—“so handsome that you would drool a little” or “cute enough that you’d want to do inappropriate things in public” would have better descriptors of his appearance.
We had no time to drool or to be inappropriate.
I was driving, which I had said was because I had a student parking sticker for my car and anyway, he was nearly on the way to Emelia Schaub College.
Actually, I was doing my part to minimize his time behind the wheel but there was no need to bring that up today.
It was supposed to be a celebration, even if it didn’t feel much like one.
Shane noticed my joylessness. “Aren’t you happy?” he asked. “You worked hard to graduate and now it’s here.”
“It’s here,” I echoed.
“You had to take your exams and finish those papers and projects under a lot of stress because of your family situation, but you did it,” he told me. “You should be very proud.”
“Thank you,” I said again. “I mostly feel relieved. Also, apprehensive,” I added.
“That’s normal when you’re confronting a big change in your life. You’ve been in school for a long time.”
“Too long,” I said. “I should have already graduated and started on the next phase of my life.”
“What is it going to be?” he asked, and that was exactly what was making me so damn apprehensive. I should have had a very clear response—I should have had a signed contract for a new job and a lease on an apartment in a different city like Miami or Dallas.
“We’ll see,” I told him. My voice cracked and I gripped the steering wheel for the remainder of the ride.
When we arrived at the auditorium, he found a place in the stands and I gathered with the other graduates in an anteroom.
Then, as the audience clapped, we all processed to our designated folding chairs.
There were a lot of speeches exhorting us to follow our dreams and believe in ourselves, but I didn’t think that any of us were paying much attention until it was finally time to walk across the stage and receive our diplomas.
The announcer asked the audience to hold their applause until the end of the ceremony, but there was a loud cheer for Jessie Abraham and for every student that came after her.
Slowly, we worked through the alphabet. There was one guy with a Q and a lot of R’s before we got to Salter, Sanchez, Sandler, and Saylor.
I mounted the two steps behind Marc Anthony Sbrocco.
He must have had a big family because there was an explosion of clapping and yelling when he bounced across the stage.
I saw the dean frown as Marc Anthony pumped his fist in triumph and grinned at the bleachers.
It was finally my turn. I was going to do it.
I made myself smile, in spite of the fact that I was standing in front of hundreds of people who had watched and shared the video of me puking and saying that no, I hadn’t yet had sex but I wanted to in the future.
I had also explained that one time in high school, I given a blow job to a guy but had thought it was a little weird and not very fun.
After he’d finished, he had opened the spit valve from his trumpet over my head so I had bitten him and it had ended badly.
“Molly Antonia Scheffler,” the dean read aloud. I started to walk across the stage to the sound of some polite claps, which was nice. But all of sudden, ear-splitting whistles rained down—like, they could have shattered crystal.
“Let’s go! Let’s go, Molly!” I heard Shane shout.
The fake smile I had put on turned into a real one. “Congratulations,” the dean told me.
“Thank you.” I looked into the crowd but it was all a blur and I couldn’t see the guy yelling for me. But he was there.
He waited for me afterwards, too, and when I walked into the meet-and-greet area, I hugged him. “Thank you for coming,” I said. I was careful not to crowd too close to him, even though I wanted to.
“You’re not crying, are you? I didn’t bring my T-shirt. You can use my tie,” he offered. He didn’t push me away, either. He hugged back with his one arm and just for a moment, he rested his cheek on my hair.
“No, I’m ok. I heard you whistling.” I stepped back, pretty much forcing myself.
“You could hear me all the way down there?”
“They probably heard you in Canada,” I said, and he laughed. I wiped my index fingers under my eyes.
“Your makeup looks fine,” he assured me. It was a lucky thing for him to have grown up with sisters. “Who’s this?”
He was looking at someone behind me, and I turned to see Corbin standing there. “Hi, Molly,” the little louse said. His eyes flicked to Shane and back to me. “Congratulations.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I was sorry to see that he wore an impeccable suit and was still cute.
“Some of my brothers, my fraternity brothers—”
“I mean, what are you doing here, talking to me? I hate you,” I informed him. “I don’t want your congratulations.”
“Who the heck is this?” Shane wondered.
“This is Corbin. He made the video to humiliate me,” I explained.
“Wait a minute, I—”
“Move on,” Shane ordered. He glared down at the shorter guy. “Move on or I’ll make you sorry that you didn’t.”
“Wait! I’m here to apologize,” Corbin said, the words fast and stuttered. “I didn’t make that video—ok, I did participate—it wasn’t my idea and I’m sorry. I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t forgive you,” I told him. “You purposefully invited me to your party so you could humiliate me.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I asked you to come because I used to watch you in class and I thought you were cute and spunky.”
“Spunky?” I asked doubtfully, and he nodded.
“There was that girl who sat in the front row who raised her hand all the time. She’d say, ‘In my opinion,’ and then she’d make some stupid comment that didn’t relate to the discussion at all. One time, you told her that no one was interested in her opinions.”
“That wasn’t very nice of me,” I said. I remembered it well. That morning we’d found out how much my dad really owed, meaning what we owed, as a family. It had staggered me.
“She deserved it and I liked how you were tough like that,” Corbin said. “When you came to the party at my fraternity house, I thought we would get together. But you pushed me away.”
“I did?” I didn’t remember that part. There were chunks of the night that existed only as video clips for me.
“You said that we didn’t even know each other so you weren’t going upstairs with me,” he explained. “I looked like an idiot in front of my friends and I was mad about it. That was how it started but I didn’t mean for it to end—”
“Grow up, little boy,” Shane told him. He put his uninjured arm around me and we walked off. As we did, he nudged Corbin out of the way. He nudged hard enough that the dumb baby guy stumbled and almost fell.