Her mother’s face puckered, the way it did whenever someone didn’t share her excitement or enthusiasm. “I thought you’d be happier. We’ve all been so worried about your scholarship, the implications of the injury. If you can’t…well, then you can’t. College Park said they’d hold the spot for you, at least for the first year, but they can’t offer any financial aid if you can’t participate in the program. This solves everything. You should be happy.”
“I am happy,” Josie said, bursting into tears.
“Oh, Josie baby.” Her mother started to sit on the sofa, but she didn’t want to crowd Josie’s foot, so she knelt on the carpet, looking for a way to put her arms around her, only Josie wouldn’t quite yield. Instead she allowed her mother to pat her all over, smoothing her hair away from her face, rubbing her shoulders.
“I wasn’t thinking. Of course it’s bittersweet. Maybe just bitter. I shouldn’t expect you to be jumping for joy.”
“I can’t jump for anything,” Josie muttered, knowing that the halfhearted joke would calm her mother.
“It is a relief. I can tell you now, honey, your father and I weren’t sure what we were going to do. I mean, we would have found a way-a second mortgage maybe, although we already have a second mortgage-something. But this is truly a godsend.”
“You don’t think I’m going to get better, do you? If it was just this year, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But you think I’m never going to be able to join the cheerleading squad at College Park.”
“No. No. I’m sure you’ll be fine. But this way you don’t have to even consider deferring your acceptance. Assuming,” she added, “it’s even that bad. I didn’t think you’d enjoy delaying a year, with all your friends gone.”
They’re already gone, Josie wanted to say, but her tears were slowing. She would get to go to college, no matter what. Even if her foot were permanently damaged, she would still get to leave. Her mother was right: She wouldn’t want to stay in Glendale one more day than necessary. She had to get out, go somewhere, anywhere.
“Now, remember, it’s a secret,” her mother said, rising from the floor, her hose generating a little electric shock that raised the hairs on Josie’s arm. “We mustn’t tell anyone until it’s announced at graduation.”
Josie knew that her mother was not much good at keeping secrets, not happy ones. She would probably call Grammy and Grampa in Janesville tonight, and the news would be all over Janesville, Wisconsin, before it was announced at graduation.
Then again, only family members could appreciate the story, for only the family knew that Josie’s college education had been saved for the second time. Her mother, gregarious and talkative as she was, had told very few people just how bleak Josie’s college prospects were. For it was her mother who had squandered Josie’s college savings in a desperate game of catch-up, trying to save in three years what she should have been saving since Josie was born, only to end up with a paltry few thousand.
The Patels had started a small fund when Josie was in third grade, but it had stayed small, in part because her mother had a bad habit of mentally assigning the fund various abstract savings without actually putting them there. “All the money we save by not sending Josie to private school can go to the fund,” she had said when they had moved to Glendale. But she had allocated those same savings to the kitchen renovation, and her Honda Accord, and the trip the family had taken to India when Josie was twelve, and the fees paid for Josie’s gymnastics lessons, not to mention Josie’s orthodontia. Meanwhile her brothers had come along, and they needed college funds, too, so the nonexistent savings were now divided by three. One didn’t need to be a math genius to know that zero divided by three kept ending up zero.
When Josie was thirteen, a stock adviser had done the math for her mom, explained the mysteries of compound interest, and said the boys still had a chance but only a high-risk strategy would work for Josie. He recommended that Mrs. Patel take out a second mortgage and invest that money. He pushed Josie’s mom toward telecommunication stocks, including WorldCom. For a brief, giddy period, it looked as if they would be okay. But it was very brief.
Josie still remembered the shock of finding out that all those headlines about people somewhere in Alabama actually affected her, that a corporation’s accounting fraud had dovetailed with her mother’s incompetence to deprive her of the funds for a college education. By junior year her fund had dwindled to three thousand dollars, barely enough to pay tuition for a single semester at the University of Maryland -and Josie did not have the grades to get into College Park. The chances for a National Merit Scholarship were long gone, not that Josie would have had much of a shot, even with a tutor, and the Patels earned too much for Josie to qualify for a needs-based scholarship. “On paper,” her father said, his voice despairing, looking at how much they still owed on the second mortgage. “On paper, we’re very well-off.”
Forced to confront for the first time the financial sacrifices her parents had made over the years, Josie felt guilty and resentful. She had not asked to move to Glendale. It wasn’t her fault her teeth came in crooked. She had never wanted gymnastics lessons. Well, no, she had wanted those.
Even as Josie stewed, her mother schemed. Nothing motivated Susie Patel as much as Vik Patel’s disappointment. After researching Title IX scholarships and deciding that Josie was too late for lacrosse and too small for rowing, she had found out that College Park was offering athletic scholarships to cheerleaders. It was an odd kind of cheerleading, to be sure, in that the qualified students spent all their time competing while a different group of young men and women cheered for the UM Terrapins. (“Fear the turtle!” was the school’s well-known slogan.) The program was, in short, what Josie had always wanted-a chance to fly and soar on her own, no longer a sideshow to the main event but the event itself. Josie wasn’t crazy about staying in-state, but at least College Park was prestigious now, taking only the top Maryland graduates. No one had to know how close she had come to attending a truly crappy school.
She called to her mother, who was now puttering in the kitchen, “Do I have to, like, make a speech when they give it to me?”
“I don’t think so. Is that what’s bothering you? You’ve never minded being the center of attention.”
Josie thought of herself at the top of the pyramid, airborne in the night sky at football games, flying as Michael in Peter Pan. Yes, she had enjoyed the attention, but what she had really liked was the feeling that she had complete mastery over her body. It was the one thing she could always control.
“Not talking, though. I don’t like to talk in front of people.”
“Well, I’ll make sure you won’t have to talk. Just say thank you and get off.” Her mother returned to the sofa to rumple Josie’s curls. “You have the prettiest hair. I would have killed for hair like this when I was your age. I think I fell in love with your father because of this hair.”
“Mom.” It was far from the first time her mother had shared this anecdote, but it never ceased to embarrass Josie, this vision of her father not as her father but as a boy, someone with hair that a girl could love. And not just any girl, but her mother. She did not like to think of her parents that way. These images had made her adamant in her rejection of Grinnell College, although her double-legacy status might have secured her a place in a school that would otherwise be a huge reach for her. She did not want to walk where her parents had walked, sleep in the dorms where they had slept, much less daydream in the classrooms where her father had impressed teachers with his budding genius and her mother had beamed at him, happy just to bask in his glow.