We decide to take the scenic route, though it’s twice as long, and for most of the trip the car is silent. Teddy doesn’t mention his late-night visit to my room and neither do I. Even the memory feels pulsing and dim this morning; there was an idea, and there was a discussion, and now all we’re left with is this:
Teddy, afraid he might have gotten my hopes up.
And me, worried I might’ve put too much pressure on him.
This isn’t our usual dance; we’re not normally so delicate with each other. Nevertheless, awkwardness fills the car, and after a few miles I open the windows to let it stream out, watching the ocean scroll past, bottle-blue and flecked with white.
When we see the first sign for Palo Alto, my heart picks up speed, and as if he can sense it, Teddy glances over at me. “You okay?”
I nod, not quite trusting myself to speak, and without a word he reaches out and takes my hand. I give him a grateful smile, and just like that the tension from last night disappears. Just like that we’re a team again.
When we pull into the parking lot, Teddy steps out of the car and raises his arms in a stretch and I put on my sunglasses, surveying the campus—this thin slice of my past, this possible piece of my future—through the amber-tinted lenses.
“No tours,” I say, thinking of all those even sets of parentsand kids I saw marching across the quad at Northwestern.
“Just wandering,” he promises.
As we start to explore, I realize I don’t remember very much of my last trip here, and what I do might just as easily have come from all my many visits to the website. It’s so perfect it’s almost hard to focus: the red-capped buildings and impeccably cut grass, the leafy trees and California sunshine.
“Does being here change your mind at all?” I ask, and to his credit Teddy doesn’t even bother to pretend he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“Not really,” he says, looking around. “I mean, it seems like a perfectly nice place to spend four years. But it’s not for me.”
“Well, that’s good,” I say, amused. “Because I doubt even 141.3 million dollars would be enough to make up foryourtranscript.”
He jabs me with his elbow. “I meant college in general.”
“I know,” I say, and it takes a great deal of effort to leave it at that.
The paths are crowded with students, bags slung over their shoulders and books in hand. I try to imagine myself here next year. It doesn’t seem like such a leap. But then it also doesn’t seem so wildly different from Northwestern or any of the other colleges I’ve seen along the way. The backdrop changes from one place to another—red brick or white stone; parkas or flip-flops—but they’re all pretty similar underneath.
It’s not a lot to go on when you’re choosing where to spend four years of your life, where you’re meant to learn and make friends and figure out who you’re going to be once you’ve been spit back out into the world.
If you pick one place, your life might go one way.
If you pick another, it will be completely different.
It’s better not to think about it too hard or else the uncertainty will wreck you.
As we weave through the sun-soaked buildings, my head begins to pound, a tiny metronome just behind my temples.
“You’re probably just tired,” Teddy says. “I shouldn’t have…” He trails off.I shouldn’t have come to your room last night.This is what he says without saying it.
We come to a stop before an enormous bell tower, and I tip my head back, deep in thought. There’s a fountain in front, low and wide and empty, the blue tiles baking in the sun. When I walk over to it a memory rushes up: sitting here when I was little, eating a half-melted candy bar while my parents talked nearby.
Only they weren’t talking. They were arguing.
I sink down onto the edge of the fountain, and Teddy sits beside me. “Al?”
“I’m fine,” I mumble, dropping my head into my hands as the world buzzes around me. I don’t know what it is about this spot, this memory. But it’s different from all the others that have climbed up and out of the past on this trip: flying kites at the beach or watching the sailboats on the bay, wandering the farmers market or taking evening walks up and down the steep hills of our old neighborhood.
Those happened, all of them.
But so did this: my parents standing just a few yards away, both of them upset, their voices lowered so I wouldn’t be able to tell they were arguing.
I close my eyes. Is it that I have so few memories of them fighting, or that I never let myself think about them?
This one snaps into focus all at once.
