Page 75 of Going the Distance
I nudged him half-heartedly. “It’s the college application essay. I can’t do it. I don’t know what to write about. And what I do write sucks. I want to go to college, but I can’t do that if I don’t write this essay, and—”
“Hey, c’mon.” He squeezed his arm tighter around my shoulders. “Your whole life isn’t riding on whether you go to college or not, you know. Look at me. I’m not gonna go. I’m taking a year out to work and earn some money and try to figure out what I want to do. I’m not gonna waste four years, and rack up all that debt, for something I’m not sure about. Maybe that’s something you wanna think about.”
I picked at a chip in my nail polish. “Pretty much every time I sit down and hit a block with my essay, I think: maybe I should just do this next year.”
“But?”
“But I don’t want to get left behind.”
It took him a second. “Lee.”
Lee had been working so hard to get into Brown, and keeping his grades up, and working hard on the football team, trying to make a name for himself (and, from what I could tell, he was doing a damn good job of it; they’d even stopped calling him “Little Flynn” now).
Lee had football. Rachel had drama club. Some of the other guys did sports or band. Sure, I had track now, but I didn’t really compete or anything. I’d even given up on hearing back from any of the after-school jobs I’d sent out applications for. I felt like I was a step behind them all somehow.
“Yeah. And even if Lee didn’t factor into it—I want to go to college. I do. It’s just…Like you said, I’m not sure what I really wanna do with my life after college, and it’s terrifying to think that what I do now commits me to that for the next few years, you know?”
“Not really,” he said, sounding disturbingly upbeat for my current mood. “So you have to pick a major. You can always change it. And unless you pick something really specialized, you’re not limiting yourself that much. Hell, you could do anything. Work on the next Mars rover. Run promotion for a baseball team. Open a vineyard. Be a kindergarten teacher.”
I gave a weak smile. “The sky’s the limit?”
“Elle, we’ve all seenMean Girls.We all know that the limit doesn’t exist.”
I did laugh at that.
“Thank you for coming to my TED Talk,” he added, making me laugh again. “How about this? I’ll read your essay. We’ll work on it together. It can’t bethatbad that we can’t make it work.”
That…actually didn’t sound so bad. Although it did make me feel like an idiot for not just asking someone for help on it before. I twisted to hug him. “Thanks, Levi. You’re the best.”
He hesitated before hugging me back. “I’m always here for you, Elle.”
• • •
Levi stuck around for dinner, and by the time he left later that evening, my application was pretty much ready to go. I couldn’t believe how much better I felt, and couldn’t thank him enough.
When I thanked him again as he was putting on his shoes to go, he laughed. “If you really wanna thank me, you can come to the aquarium with me tomorrow. I promised I’d take Becca. It’d be nice to have some company.”
A day at the aquarium sounded great, so the next morning, Levi picked me up, and Becca was totally hyper with excitement the whole ride. She talked a mile a minute about how her first ballet class had gone, and her ballet teacher, and the girls at ballet, and the recital they were putting on at Christmas—which made her start talking about Christmas.
I oohed and aahed in all the right places, asking her questions to prompt her on. Levi caught my eye with a shameless smile that said,Rather you than me.
Inside the aquarium, it wasn’t very busy. There were mostly families there, with young kids. A handful of couples on dates.
Which, I had to admit, did make me feel a little awkward. I knew it wouldn’t have been awkward if I were here with Lee, but this wasn’t Lee; it was Levi. And that made it just a little bit weird.
I must’ve looked uneasy as we followed Becca, who was dashing between the tanks of manta rays and starfish and eels like they’d disappear soon, because Levi turned and grabbed my elbow gently, looking at me with concern.
“Hey,” he said, voice soft, “everything okay?”
“Huh? Yeah. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? You look a bit weird.”
“Oh, no, I’m…”
“Are you thinking about Noah?”
I wasn’t, actually, and was surprised to realize it; I wasn’t thinking about what it would be like to come here with Noah, or wishing that Noah and I were one of the couples walking around hand in hand. I was just thinking that, despite Levi’s little sister’s presence, it felt like this was kind of a date.
