Josey shakes her head. “Every time.”
“Yuuup.”
She pushes her tray aside and leans over the table to me. “Want to hear something shitty?”
I close the book. “Always.”
“I got deferred from UPenn.”
“Aw, what? That sucks.”
“Yeah. I mean, it's not a rejection, but everyone knows that if you apply early and get deferred, your odds of getting in are worse than if you'd just applied regular admission in the first place.” She picks up her fork and pokes at her mashed potatoes.
I say, “At least it's not Cambridge, though.”
“Yeah, still waiting on them.” She shrugs. “I don't know. Penn is supposed to be my second choice. I don't know why I'm so sad about it.”
“I guess because it's kind of all or nothing on Cambridge now.”
“Yeah,” she says, “But it's not even that, it's like...I'd been picturing myself at Penn for months. Maybe just because I thought it was more likely. But the more I thought about it...I don't know.”
“Yeah?”
“It would be nice to not be ten million miles away,” she says.
“Roughly.”
“Uh-huh. And with Penn you've got a bigger city environment, and more people, and just...I don't know.”
“Ivy League cache doesn't hurt, either,” I say.
She says, “Yeah, but Cambridge looks just as good on a resume. It's not really that.”
“It's just a feeling,” I say.
She nods.
“Well, you didn't get rejected,” I say. “Don't let the hope die out.”
“I think it's more that I don't know what to do with the fact that I have a feeling,” she says. “I've been thinking about Cambridge since I was a kid. That's the dream. I don't want to let baby-Josey down falling in love with some school that I haven't been dreaming about forever.”
“Baby Josey's not the one who has to spend four years at a place,” I say.
“It just sucks that I had more ambition when I was eight than I do now.”
“I don't know if that's true...”
“Eh.”
“But if it is, yeah, that seriously sucks.”
“I'm sayin'.”
“So what happens now?” I say.
“Gotta knuckle down, better grades, more extra-curriculars, prove that I'm better this spring than I am right now, because clearly I wasn't enough right now. So I have to figure out what they didn't like and...fix it.”
Theo's back. He forgot his cup lid, but I'm not going to say anything about it. “What'd I miss?”
“Just talking about Penn,” I say.
He scrunches his straw wrapper all the way at one end before he takes it off, like always. “What about Penn?”
“I got deferred,” she says.
“What?,” he says. “Nooo, are they crazy?”
He didn't know. She told me first? But they had classes together all morning.
Huh. She wanted to tell me first.
“It's okay,” she says. “Still Cambridge.”
“You'll get in,” he says. “Your grades are perfect, your essay was great. You'll get in.”
She shrugs.
I say, “And you guys are going on your big college tour starting tomorrow, right?”
Theo groans. “Don't remind me. We're leaving at like six AM.”
“So I guess worst case scenario you could see if you like any of them and apply to a bunch of those this month,” I say. I am trying to be very classy about this. I'm not thinking about how they're going to be gone for a week, having fun and being seniors and talking about the future, while I'm here doing bridesmaid and flower girl fittings with Alexis. I am being a big person. I am the hugest of all people. I am the Sahara desert of polyamorous humans.
Josey makes a face. “Ugh. Florida. So hot.”
“You'll have fun on the trip, at least,” I say.
Theo drums his fingers on my back. “It would be better if you could come too.”
“Uh-uh,” I say. “None of that. It's a senior thing, I'm not a senior, there's no subtext to me not coming, we're not going to turn it into a Taylor pity party. You guys will have fun, you'll come back with lots of good stories about the horrible other people in your class, and then you'll go to your families and do Christmas and by the time that's over you will have missed me so much that you'll both forget all about each other and be all about me and shower me in love and affection and just give me all of your Christmas presents to make up for leaving me for so long.”
“So the Taylor pity party comes after our trip,” Theo says.
“Yes.”
“Sounds way better than Christmas with my great aunt,” Josey says.
Theo says, “Josey, what the hell is in your hair?”
She frowns, reaches up to her bun, and finds the bit of tinsel that's almost worked its way out. “How long has that been in there?”
“No idea,” I say.
17
My efforts to be a bigger person start to fail about four hours after Josey and Theo leave. Even I'm pretty surprised by my total ineptitude.
I thought I'd made these enormous strides in this jealousy thing, I really did. Sure, it crept in once in a while when I found out they'd seen a movie I'd been wanting to see or whenever I thought about them having sex, but for the most part I've been doing great. And when it does start to rear its head, I steer into the skid like I'm supposed to. Acknowledge it, analyze it, then take a bubble bath. That's how I steer into skids, I've discovered.
Today it's not helping.
I mope around the house with a chocolate bar and let Dominic see me, for the first time, in all my moody glory. I think I've been half-consciously trying to stay reasonably on my best behavior around him, since I'm still living in the unspecified space between my house/not my house, guest/not a guest, daughter/not daughter. So
