Page 21 of It Started with a Sunset
“That’s a thing?”
She nodded. “Every single time. This morning, I dreamt that I was trying to talk about the schedule in the session with the parents and prospective students, but I was wearing the Aquamoose mascot costume, and no one could hear me through the giant moose headpiece. I wanted to take it off, but I kept tripping over my scaled feet every time I tried.”
Brock laughed his amused chuckle, and it suddenly made everything feel peaceful and right. “Last night, for me, I kept forgetting where I set the schedule down and I couldn’t remember what was on it, but I didn’t want anyone to know I misplaced it. So I kept making up things and sending students and ambassadors in all the wrong places and doing all the wrong things and then the place was like a circus. Two nights ago, I dreamed that we got hit by a tsunami right in the middle of our presentations, causing a massive flood. And the tsunami came from Lake Baldwin.”
Summer laughed out loud. “Well, it seems the worst-case scenarios have already happened, so all that’s left is for the event to go well, right?”
“Yes. Let’s go with that plan.”
Their waiter came and set each of their entrees down in front of them, the scent of chicken coconut korma wafting up from Summer’s plate. She breathed in deeply, then took a bite, unable to wait any longer to get the taste in her mouth.
“Did you know that brains burn more calories when thinking hard than when they’re doing less cognitive-intense things?”
“Huh,” Brock said. “That explains why I’m so hungry. I spent hours working with Johanna in Financial Aid, figuring out whether the academic scholarship budget is going to stretch far enough to cover all of our applicants this year. How about your day? Was it extra mentally taxing?”
She loaded up another bite on her fork. “It was long, but nope—I justreallylike Indian food.” And then she stuck the forkful of curry goodness in her mouth as Brock chuckled.
As she watched him use his fork and knife to perfectly cut up each piece of meat and every vegetable on his plate, she couldn’t help but imagine what he had been like when he was younger, before they started working together. Especially when he was in high school, since they both worked with so many students who were that age. “What was high school like for you?”
He stopped and thought for a minute, then said, “My hobbies in high school included striving for straight A’s, playing basketball with friends, and worrying too much. What about you?”
That sounded about right. “Mine...Let’s see.” She tried to encapsulate high school with three things. “I guess my hobbies included hanging out with friends, trying to experience all of life at once, and rebelling against things my dad thought were important.”
Brock’s eyebrow rose. “You rebelled against your dad? Not your mom?”
“Yeah,” Summer said with a shrug. “I don’t know what psychiatrists would have to say about that, but what my mom wanted me to do or not do was irrelevant. It was all about my dad.
“I never rebelled big, though. It wasn’t like I started using drugs or alcohol or decided to become a vagabond and forget college or anything like that. It was little things. Like my dad said it was important to eat a healthy breakfast, so I’d eat a donut. He said posture was important and got me a nice desk with an ergonomic chair for doing homework, so I did it on my bed. He said I had to do homework before I went out with friends in the evening, so I just pretended that I did it but really watched YouTube videos, then did my homework at eleven p.m. when I got home.”
“Ahh. A rebel who still gets her homework done.”
“Well, good grades were important tome.” She paused for a moment. “And now that I look back on my rebelling, I realize that all the things that were important to him were things that were good for me. So I guess one of my hobbies in high school was making stupid choices. Because there was more than one time that I woke up in the morning with a page of my math textbook stuck to my face or the metal coil of a notebook imprinted on my cheek.”
Brock laughed, and she soaked in the way he laughed when they were in public. It was a mix between a boisterous laugh and a restrained laugh that she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen another person pull off.
Summer took another bite of her korma, savored it as she chewed, then swallowed and motioned to Brock with her fork. “Okay, so I shared something embarrassing from my childhood last week. I think that means you have to share something from yours.”
“Something that scarred me for life, preferably?”
Summer laughed. “Preferably.”
He looked upward, thinking for a minute, then said, “Okay, okay, I’ve got one. I’ll go with a story from when I was the same age as you were in your story. I’m the oldest. My siblings are all close together in age, but there’s a four year gap between me and them. So my mom relied on me a lot to help, especially because I had a lot of younger siblings. So this one time, I was six, my twin sisters were two, my brother was one, and my mom was in the house getting my baby brother down for a nap.
“We were all in the backyard, and I was pushing one sister in the swing. My other sister and my brother were digging with sticks in the dirt. But what none of us knew was that what they were digging at was a mud wasp hole, and they made them super angry.”
Summer’s hand flew over her mouth. “Oh no!”
“Yeah, so they came out and started stinging my brother and sister and they were screaming, so my other sister and I started screaming, too. I pulled my sister out of the swing, picked up my little brother, grabbed my other sister’s hand, and we all ran in the house screaming, angry wasps following us most of the way, stinging us as we went. We burst into the house, and my littlest brother woke up—of course—and started screaming, too.”
“Anyway, everything was chaotic as my mom took care of our stings, butIwas the one who got into trouble because I should’ve been watching my brother and sister better and not let that happen.” He turned his palms up and shrugged. “And thus goes the curse of the oldest child.”
Summer leaned back in her chair. “Ahh. This explains so much.”
“It does? Oh, no. Did I give you too much material to analyze me with?”
Summer tried to hide a smile.
“Let me guess—you’re going to say that I learned that others can mess up, but I can’t.Ineed to be perfect.”
