Page 15 of Meant to Be

“About what?” I couldn’t resist asking.

She turned, gave me the most disdainful look, then said, “You’re your own worst enemy. Youronlyenemy.”

“What’sthatsupposed to mean?” Nicole shouted at her.

“It means—he makes shitty choices.”

“Like what?” Nicole said.

“Like getting drunk. Like fighting with photographers. Like datingyou,” Berry said. She then turned back to me and said, “This is going to be bad, Joe. This is going to bereallybad.”

In that moment, I sobered up just enough to know she was right.

—

The drunken ruckushappened so late—or, as it were,early—that the story didn’t make it into the morning paper. Instead of viewing the delay as a reprieve, I felt worse with every passing hour, dreading the moment when my mother heard about it.

The moment finally came with the evening edition of theNew York Post. She walked into my bedroom, where I was still nursing a hangover, and deposited a copy of the paper on my bed. I braced myself for the worst, then looked down. On the front page was a huge picture of me. In it, I was bleary-eyed and disheveled, with my shirttail out and my tie dangling loose. My middle finger was up, a giantfuck youto all of New York City, my mother included.

“How could you do this?” she asked in a low, steely voice.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, feeling a wave of intense shame.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said.

“Why are you sorry?” I asked with a dash of irrational hope that maybe she had seen me as the victim, for once.

Instead, she looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I’m sorry for having so much faith in you. Clearly, I was wrong. You aren’t up to the challenge.”

I wanted to ask what she meant by “the challenge.” The challenge of not getting into trouble? Or the challenge of being my father’s son? Somehow, I knew she meant both things—and probably a whole lot more—so I just said again how sorry I was.

She stared at me a long time, looking so sad and disappointed that it broke my heart. “I know you are,” she finally said. “But being sorry isn’t going to fix this.”

I nodded, feeling my throat tighten and a huge pit open in my stomach. “I promise I’ll do better,” I said. “This will never happen again.”

She took a deep breath, like she was going to say something else. But she didn’t. She just shook her head and walked out of my room, leaving the newspaper on my bed.

—

My mother neverexplicitly forgave me for what happened on the night of my eighteenth birthday, but she eventually moved on from it, probably because the press did first. They enthusiastically covered my graduation from high school a few months later, followed by my backpacking trip through Europe and my post-Nicole fling with a hot Danish au pair.

By the time I enrolled at Harvard that fall (with Berry still by my side, thank goodness), the nightclub incident seemed all but forgotten. I had a clean slate and was determined to make my mother proud. Following in my father’s footsteps, I joined all the right clubs and societies—from the Spee Club to the Hasty Pudding to theCrimson. Deep down, though, I felt like a fraud and an impostor, knowing that I had only gained admission to those organizations, along with Harvard itself, because of my name. It was something I brought up to Berry often.

“You need to get over this impostor syndrome nonsense,” she said after I bombed a biology exam at the end of our freshman year and confided that it felt like confirmation of my theory. It was a rare sunny day in Cambridge, and we were strolling in Harvard Yard, where kids were lounging and reading and playing Frisbee. “I mean, look around. Half the kids here are blowhards who got in through connections.”

“That isn’t exactly comforting,” I said.

“It’s not supposed to be,” she said.

“Jeez. I was telling you about my insecurities—and you come back with that?”

“Yes. Because you’re doing your best to make those insecurities a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your ‘aw shucks’ self-deprecating schtick.”

“It’s not a schtick.”

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