An Off Year (13 page)

“Thanks,” I said, and trudged through the door.

Leah was definitely the crazy-looking lady with the frizzy hair. She was still taking off her coat when I walked into her office. Her window offered a nice view of an unusual apartment building across the street. For some reason, the architects had designed it with this funny top to it that made it look German, vaguely like a gingerbread house. I could see a little strip of blue lake on the horizon.

“Hi, Cecily. It is Cecily, right? Unless you go by any nicknames?”

“Nope,” I said, and then wished I had said something like, “Why, actually, most of my friends call me ‘Moon Unit' ” to see if she would play along.

“Have a seat,” she said, gesturing to the chair on the other side of her desk. “You don't mind if I eat, do you?” Actually, I did mind. I was starving, and her Jimmy John's sandwich looked amazing. It made me hate this all the more. Dad had woken me up at eleven-thirty for my noon appointment, which gave me exactly fifteen minutes to get up and go. I used those fifteen minutes to shower, not eat breakfast. I started to complain about how hungry I was as he drove, but he shot me a look that made me shut up.

“It's fine.” I shrugged. Her office was decorated with posters of university campuses and more letters, presumably from satisfied customers.

“Okay,” she said. “Apologies in advance if I spill all over myself and/or have onion breath.”

I gave a fake half smile.

“So, Cecily,” she said, licking some mayonnaise off her fingers and then flipping through a few pages in a file that she apparently already had on me. “What can I help you with today?”

“I don't know, really,” I said. “My dad signed me up for this and didn't really tell me.”

“Believe it or not, I hear that a lot,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. It came out as more of a statement than a question. A conversation-ender.

“Hmm.” She obviously had wanted me to ask, “Oh really?” or something, but I wasn't in the mood to chitchat. “Well, do you have any idea why you're here?”

I didn't know if she was playing some sort of psych game or if she just didn't know what was up. “You don't know yet, really? Or are you asking me, like, so I can figure out out loud what I should be thinking about?”

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever.” She opened a bag of potato chips. They smelled delicious. Krunchers! They were always great, despite their corny name. “Tell me why you think you're here. It shouldn't matter either way if I know or not, because your answer should be the same, right?” she asked. Ugh.

“Well, okay. I'm taking the year off.”

“Why?”

“It just wasn't time yet.”

“Time for what?” she said, munching. Damn her and those chips.

“Time for, you know, school. I went to start my freshman year, but I couldn't do it. I turned around and went home.”

Leah looked me straight in the eye over her long nose as she sipped from her takeout cup. She kind of looked like an owl. She put it down on the desk, hard, and made that
Aaah
noise you make after you're particularly refreshed.

“Okay. Let's try this. What do you think you want from a college?” Leah asked.

“I don't know,” I said, staring at the desk.

“You seem fairly bright,” she said, glancing at my file. “So whatever your particular issue is that compelled you not to go through with your year, I'm assuming it's not an academic thing. Or a drug problem or anything like that.”

I just stared out the window at the weird German-looking building.

“Okay, Cecily,” Leah said, leaning back in her chair. She let her head slouch to her shoulder and looked out the window at the German building, not at me. “I can respect that it maybe wasn't your choice to be here and that you're questioning the point of this. But seriously? I'm getting a little fucking sick of the attitude. Don't you think you're a little too old for this?” I blinked, hard, and I started feeling funny in my stomach. My heart began racing.

“Now,” she said. “I know you didn't come here because you don't care about wasting your dad's money. And I know you're not acting like this because you're a spoiled brat.” She looked at me expectantly, but smiling.

“Um. No.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I don't want to have to kick you out of here. I hate kicking people out of here. But I really hate it when my time is wasted. I've spent too much precious time on snotty kids, and believe me, there are a lot of them in this town.”

I snorted out a gross-sounding laugh. She laughed, too.

“It's okay,” she said. “We can both admit it. But that's all right. At least it's just you,” she said. “Sometimes I get to see these kids' parents yell at them in front of me. Or they answer for their kids like it's a ventriloquist act. Or I start questioning the kids' attitude and then their parents question
my
attitude and I have to kick them all out and then have a good cry.”

“I think my dad wants me to figure it out on my own,” I said. “I guess he thinks he can't figure this all out for me. He was a lot pushier with my sister when she was my age, and she didn't turn out much better than me. I think she's worse.”

“Helicopter parents are not always the best,” Leah said, and I imagined for a minute what it would be like if Dad
had
made me apply to more schools, tougher schools, had made me take the SATs two or three times, had rung up his colleagues for recommendations. Would I be better off? We probably wouldn't get along as well, that's for sure.

“So what's up, Cecily?” she said, looking me in the eye again and leaning forward in her chair. The way she said it made me think she knew exactly what my situation was. For a second, I wanted to cry.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know what's up.”

“So you picked Kenyon, huh?” she said, flipping some more through my file. “It's a good school. I have a lot of friends from there. You can talk to some of them if you want. They all loved it there. I can't say that for everybody I know who went to other schools.”

Kenyon. I liked it because the name sounded like “canyon.” And because they sent me a cool-looking brochure that featured a leaf-strewn path with friends enjoying soon-to-be precious college memories together. And also because I got in there. As I told Leah, Dad had pushed Germaine pretty hard when it came to picking out colleges. Josh was a goody-goody who graduated in the top quarter of the class, so he pushed himself. I didn't know if Dad was tired from pushing Germaine, hoped I'd be like Josh, or what, but while he checked in to make sure that I was actually remembering to look at schools and apply to them, and recommended some he thought I might like (all small liberal arts schools), he seemed satisfied as long as I was applying to places that had a semidecent reputation and weren't too far away and didn't cost an arm and a leg to go to. I received the brochure for Kenyon, applied, and got in. I didn't have a big plan for what would happen once I got there, what I'd major in or join or whatever. I was okay at everything. Probably less capable at math and science. I liked Spanish. I just figured I'd start college and by the end figure out what I was going to do.

I mostly liked the school because it didn't look too much like anything. Josh's school definitely had a frat and party atmosphere. It was a good university, but it wasn't like kids were going to museums with their free time or anything. Germaine went to a small college that was 89 percent women, and I was convinced that the smallness and womanliness of it were partially what made her crazy. We fought before she left for college, but I thought that we'd get along better after she came back. I was wrong, though: I think she got so used to fighting with girls for four years that she was just going to keep going. Also, I think that was why she was boy crazy and lazy. After four years of being told the importance of being a strong woman, a leading woman, Germaine just didn't want to do anything.

Kate's college was prestigious but hippie-ish, the kind where most of the kids were filthy and stunk like incense and shopped at co-ops, but were also all really rich. Everyone at Mike's former school seemed like assholes. I had no real basis for this stereotype, but I was going to go with it. I had no idea what the University of Kansas was like, other than the fact that it was located in Kansas.

I liked Kenyon because it seemed like I didn't have to join a club, be an asshole, or be too smart or too independent or too womanly or too girly or live in Kansas. And now I liked it because I could go there without having to send in an application.

As I talked to Leah, I figured out what it was about her that seemed odd. She was about my dad's age, maybe ten years younger, but the way she listened to me and said “Uh-huh,” or “Oh really?” or “like” instead of “said” and really looked at me while I talked, it was more like a friend, or someone my age. I didn't know what to think. Germaine and I never had conversations on purpose, and my mother never seemed to listen to me that closely when I talked. I wasn't sure if I liked Leah, but I liked talking to her. It felt like one of the few normal conversations I'd had all year. I wondered if she was a mom. I didn't see a wedding band on, but I saw some picture frames on her desk, though I couldn't see what was in them. They could have contained babies, or a sailboat, or dogs. I wondered what it would be like to have a mom like her. She seemed cool with her own dorkiness.

“Okay,” she said when I was done talking about where I might have gone to school. “Let's start from the beginning, though, and get a few other options in there. What size student body were you looking for?”

“Seriously?” I said. “In all seriousness, I don't think it's the school. I was ready to go to Kenyon. And then it went to shit.”

“Well, you know it's also my job to help kids figure out if college just isn't right for them,” she said. “I've had plenty of kids go into the army, or they went right to work, or they traveled first.”

“I don't want to join the army,” I said. “I would suck at being in the army.”

“Do you think there's something about a university setting that just isn't right for you?” she asked. “You could always take classes online.”

I made a face, and she snorted. She took a huge plate-size cookie out of her fast-food bag, unwrapped it, and held it out for me to break off a piece. I declined. I didn't believe in sharing desserts. When I went in, I went in all the way.

“No,” I said. “That sounds superboring.”

“That's good,” she said, some cookie bits falling onto her chunky gray sweater. “We're establishing that you're not totally socially inept.”

“I am, kind of.”

“That's okay. Me too. I mean,
obviously
,” she said, looking down at the crumbs on her sweater. We sat in silence for a few moments. The room was quiet except for a few whooshes from cars down the street below.

“You know what,” I said, “I know I shouldn't take it for granted, but I always just assumed I'd go to college. I know there are kids in the world who would love to but they can't afford it, but I just assumed I'd go anyway. I didn't worry about going. My dad always talked about me going the way he had talked about my brother and sister going, and they went. I took it for granted that it would happen.”

“You're lucky.”

“Yeah.”

“So you're thinking that assumption was wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Because I think not going, ever, would feel weirder than going. Despite all the issues I apparently have with it.”

“What are the issues?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Like, everyone ends up the same when they go to college. It's all about partying and awesome-ness and getting drunk and going to class.” Based on my conversations with Kate, anyway.

“Well,” she said, “that's not entirely inaccurate.”

“And,” I said, “I don't even know if I would have any friends anyway. I'm hardly friends anymore with the people I went to high school with, and I've known them for years. And everyone's going to think I'm a freak when they find out I'm older than them.”

“Well, they won't. But you're obviously afraid of blending in too much, losing your identity.”

“Right.”

“But I also get the feeling that you're afraid of not having any friends at all.”

“I guess that's right.”

“Well, Cecily, I gotta tell you,” Leah said, wadding up the cellophane from the cookie into a ball. “I know it's my job to help you find which schools would make you happiest and be best for you, and then try to help you get in there. But, like you said, it doesn't sound like it's the school that's the issue. I mean, yes, I think you actually would be better off at Kenyon than, say, University of Arizona. But all that other stuff—that's up to you. I actually think it's pretty cool that you're doing your own thing, even if you don't know why you're doing it. All these parents
shove
their kids into the system, and nobody really seems to know why. They have an idea that it's going to be helpful down the road somehow. That if they don't power through and go-go-go, then they're going to be fucked for life. You
should
question it. I question it and it's my job, for Christ's sake.”

“Well, I don't know if I'm questioning
it
or
me
or what,” I said. I liked the idea that I was actually a rebel, fighting The Man and not letting myself be led through the cattle chute of my late teens. But I didn't mind The Man. I was probably afraid of The Man more than anything else. I didn't want to fight him.