She slid the clipping back into her wallet and blew on her hands, rubbing the insides of her knees together. She reached up and yanked on the graduation tassel, trying to rip out some of the silky threads. They were firmly knotted, though, so she just slapped at it in frustration. She understood that McFadden wasn’t completely to blame for everyone’s problems; she wasn’t the only one who’d created this town-wide hallucination about the magical power of college. It was the moms and the dads and the grans, worn to a nub by years of warehouse and prison work, blinded by the shine coming off those glossy brochures and the heavy, manila-colored promise of the acceptance letter. The ice-cream cake was long gone by the time they got the next letter, the one about tuition, and by that time, no one could bear to turn back.
Ivy was sick of it, and she didn’t mind saying so. She’d said it just that morning in the guidance office. But McFadden just kept feeding her the same old line about how she did her best to help kids rise above their circumstances, but she couldn’t control what they chose to do with their opportunities.
“You mean the opportunity to pay back eighty grand while making nine bucks an hour?” Ivy’d laughed. And McFadden had muttered something about kids growing up without role models in the home. Which caused a pellet of rage to burst behind Ivy’s eyes. She’d had to grip the armrests of her chair to keep herself from leaping across the desk and clawing McFadden’s lips off her face.
Really, the only thing that kept her in her chair was the promise she’d made to Colin a few weeks ago, to stop getting into fights. He’d told her she was going to wind up on the wrong side of the prison bars one of these days, and even though Ivy wasn’t sure there was a right side to those bars, she didn’t want to give him the chance to say “I told you so.”
So she hadn’t jumped McFadden, but the minute McFadden walked out to make a copy of something, Ivy had found the counselor’s purse under her desk, plunged her hand inside, and grabbed the keys. And as she roared out of the parking lot and flew toward the Pennsylvania border, she’d been filled with a soaring, laugh-out-loud kind of joy that she never, ever got from punching somebody.
It was fully dark now. Ivy tried not to think about what might be lurking in the woods, watching her. She tried to keep her mind from imagining a cold hand slipping around her ankle, or a hook scraping across the roof of the car. Colin had always made fun of her for being afraid of the dark; he’d mocked her Little Mermaid night-light until Ivy finally ripped off the cover and just used the bare bulb. But on the nights when she couldn’t sleep—when a nightmare jolted her awake, or strange shadows moved across her window shade—Ivy knew she could climb into Colin’s bed, where her fears would be muffled by his deep, rumbling snores.
She could barely make out the guard booth a few feet away. It looked like something a little kid would draw: peaked roof, window, door. She wondered what it would be like to have that job—sitting on a stool in a tiny house for hours, ass aching, just dying for someone to drive up and ask a really interesting question. She imagined a young kid all excited about joining the Park Service, so proud of his cop-like uniform, his brass name tag, all ready to tromp around in the woods counting owls and whatnot, only to be shipped off to fuck-all Pennsylvania to sit in a four-foot-square little house handing out trail maps. “You have to pay your dues,” they’d tell him. “Put in your time, and eventually you’ll graduate to sitting at the front desk at the nature center.”
Ivy imagined the kid sitting in the booth, seething with disappointment. Then one too many tourists would ask him one too many questions about where to buy beer or where to go to the bathroom, and he’d just snap. He’d grab his Park Service–issued rifle and march into the woods and start shooting owls out of the trees… Blammo! Blammo! Blammo!
Ivy chuckled half-heartedly. She wondered if the little house was heated. She got out of the car and ran stiffly through the darkness, the cold air like a steel door slamming on her body. She got to the little house and tried the door. Locked, of course, but it was just a push-button lock. She ran back to the car and got her driver’s license, then returned and slid the card down the crack between the door and the jamb, angling it slightly, feeling for the click.
Inside, she flicked on a light switch and looked around. There was a padded stool, a ledge with a rack of maps and brochures, a small radio, and at the bottom of the wall, a miniature baseboard heater with a dial on it. Ivy set her license on the ledge,
