Текст книги "The Girl Of Tokens and Tears"
Автор книги: Susan Ward
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The Girl of Tokens and Tears
Book 2
The Half Shell Series
Susan Ward
Copyright © 2015 Susan Ward
All rights reserved.
ISBN-10: 1497494893
ISBN-13: 978-1497494893
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
DEDICATION
For my beautiful daughter Shelby, a.k.a. Shell-bell, who believes in love, the impossible, enchantment, and magic the way all young college girls still should. I’m so proud of you. I should say it more. I love you, baby girl!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PREVIEW: THE GIRL OF DIAMONDS AND RUST
PREVIEW: BROKEN CROWN
SNEAK PEEKS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
New York City, Spring Break 1989…
You can’t hold the minutes back, no matter how hard you try to. The minutes go only faster when you do not want to let them go. I want to stay here in this perfect quiet with Alan, but Sunday morning is here and I can’t do a damn thing about it.
I roll over in Alan’s arms. I look at the clock. 9 a.m. Jack and I settled on 10 a.m. after heated negations for the ritual of packing up Lena’s things and finally saying goodbye to Mom. I have a little time. Not much. I really should get moving. I can shower after the packing. It will save me a little time now, but not enough. No amount of time will ever be enough, and I still don’t know what I’m going to do after saying goodbye to Lena.
I turn my face into my pillow to hide my tears. I’m going to lose him. Alan won’t want to be with me if I go back to Santa Barbara. Oh, he’ll try. He’ll do all those be-kind-type of things. There will be the phone calls and maybe a letter or a present. But that won’t last long because the real world exists whether we want it to or not, and the real world made us over from the start.
The bed shifts under his weight as Alan turns me slowly in his arms so I can face him. My head is nestled on his arm. His eyes are black and searching.
I gaze at his beautiful face. It is emotionless, compassionately so, and I hate that he can give nothing away if he wants to. His eyes stare into mine, hardly blinking, calm and smiling, merely because he wants them to. Reaching up, I caress his cheek and run the tip of my fingers across the perfect structure of his jaw. I want to remember each line on his face exactly how he looks at this moment.
Time moves in, hovers and slips away. I can’t stop it.
I rummage on the floor for Alan’s shirt and pull it over my head. I climb from the bed. “I’ve got to go, Alan.”
I start to gather my clothes, and carelessly I shove them into my duffel, carefully avoiding Alan’s eyes. I can feel him watching and I wish he’d just say something, because the faster I get through this the sooner the pain will go away.
“Do you want me to go with you?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No. I’m meeting Jack at the apartment. We’re packing up my mother’s things today.”
Alan sits up. A torturous and heavy pause in the room hits me like a punch. “And then?”
“I catch a plane and go home to Santa Barbara.”
More heavy silence. The lump in my throat is strangling and I can’t look at him because if I do I don’t know what I will do.
“You can’t be serious, Chrissie. You’re not leaving.”
The room is filled with Alan’s panic and his need. It moves across my flesh like a chilled nightwalker.
“I have to go, Alan. I’m not ready to be everything you want me to be.”
“I don’t want you to be anything other than you are,” he whispers, his voice raw. He crosses the room and stops my hands in their frantic efforts of packing. “You’re not leaving, Chrissie.” His thumb traces my lower lip. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I whisper, almost unable to push the words out of me. “But I have to go home.”
I step away from him and gather my clothes to wear. I lift his shirt to my face and breathe it in deeply. “Can I keep this shirt?”
“Why?”
“I love the smell of you. I want to smell you until I can’t anymore. In a perfect movie lovers would never end they would slowly fade away. I want to smell you until I can’t smell you anymore.”
He closes his eyes. Oh shit, that was a really shitty thing to say, but I didn’t mean it and I wish I didn’t said it.
“You can keep the fucking shirt, Chrissie.”
My scalp prickles as every nerve in my body is suddenly blasted by a chill. The earth falls away beneath me. Oh no, this is not how I want this to go between us. What have I done? I don’t want us to part angry.
Alan pulls on his jeans and crosses the room to light a cigarette. Finally, he runs a hand through his hair and doesn’t look at me. “I’m sorry. You may have the shirt, Chrissie. My reaction to the shirt thing has nothing to do with you. It is an enormous irritant. The shirt thing. But I shouldn’t be rude to you. Sorry.”
My eyes open to their roundest and it takes everything I have not to cry. That was unkind, Alan. Why do you have to be such a shit at times? A shit who lets me know that girls taking souvenirs after climbing from your bed is a frequent event; a shit who on purpose reduces me to meaningless, when my words were only an accident; a shit because…
“You can stay, Chrissie. You can stay with me in New York. We can get married. Whatever you want. I’ll quit now before the tour starts. I don’t want you to leave.”
I have to get out of the room quickly. Anymore and I’m going to crumble and stay. “I can’t stay, Alan. And you don’t really want to marry me.”
That spikes his anger. “Don’t tell me what I want.”
Oh jeez, another stupid blunder. I’m going to ruin us if I don’t get out of here quickly. I sink my teeth into my lower lip and continue to dress. The words clog in my throat and they are too painful to speak. I hear them in my head: Oh Alan, I’ve got my own shit to fix!
“I can’t stay,” I repeat.
“If you leave we are over.”
Oh god, I see it and I don’t want to. Alan loves me, but right now Alan loving me is more a thing about him than me. He doesn’t want me to leave because he’s afraid to be alone. That’s the fear and desperation I see in his eyes and it is the wrong reason to stay.
We both have so much messed up shit we need to work through. It would be wrong for us both if I stayed. But I don’t remember me before Alan and I don’t know if I really want to.
I reach for my purse. He flinches as though I hit him.
“At least let me take you home,” he says in despair.
“No. I think I want to walk today. Can you have Colin deliver my things to the apartment?”
“You can’t walk home, Chrissie. There are at least two dozen photographers at the curb waiting to pounce on you. Don’t be unreasonable about this.”
How could I have forgotten about the tabloids?
“Then I’ll go with Colin alone. Can you call him for me? I want to go to the garage alone.”
I rush quickly from the bedroom. I head for the foyer. I listen. I’m so relieved that Alan doesn’t follow me. I press the elevator button and the doors open. I couldn’t leave if he followed me, but that he didn’t really hurts me.
I lean back into the icy metal wall and stare at the square mirror images of myself. Oh, please doors close! Close quickly! Then I realize I haven’t pushed the garage button. I hit it and I’m numb. The metal moves, taking me away.
Oh god—I’ve left him. Alan Manzone asked me to marry him and I’ve walked away. The only guy I’ve ever loved. The only guy who will ever understand me. The second the door slammed closed I knew it with certainty: Alan is the love of my life. Crippling pain slices through me and I’m not at all sure I’ve made the right decision.
The love of my life…and I walked away. What have I done? The pain is indescribable, but I can’t surrender to my grief. I’ve got to pack up my mother’s things with Jack, catch a plane, and somehow return to Santa Barbara and fix my perfectly fucked up life.
Deep down I know I’m doing the right thing. The right thing for Alan. The right thing for me. It just doesn’t feel that way today. Alan is right: I never know what I want, but I always know how I feel.
~~~
Everything seems longer and slower and harder. Usually any return home feels faster and easier because it’s familiar. There is nothing familiar today. It is just long and slow and hard.
I have survived the first day without Alan and the trip to the airport with Jack. Internally I’m still messy, but a different kind of messy. Parts of me have been quieted, new parts of me stirred awake, parts of me I leave behind, and parts of me I take.
I repeat that last part in my head. I want to put it in my journal once we are aboard the plane. There should be something in my journal about Alan.
We’re ushered into the VIP wait lounge in the airport terminal, and for today that is more about me than Jack. The tabloids have been our crushing shadow all day. I don’t care. They don’t know what the last three weeks have been about, and they never will. Let them write what they want. No one other than Alan and I will ever know or understand it.
It is too honest. Too human. Too real. I love Alan and he loves me. That’s it. End of story. And I leave New York for the simple reason that that is what girls like me do. We say goodbye. We board the plane. We go home and fix our own shit.
Jack hasn’t said a word since we finished clearing out Mom’s personal things from the apartment. It never occurred to me until I came to New York that Mom’s things were exactly where she left them and Sammy’s room remains exactly the same as it was that day. Jack has lockboxes too. I’m like him that way: keeping things in little boxes, hurting privately and slow to share my pain.
Jack’s silence today is more about him than about me, and I’m OK with that. I understand it because I said goodbye to Alan today.
More airport security comes when it is time for us to board the plane, and by how everyone on the plane stares at us I can tell we are the last ones on the plane even though our seats are first class.
I laugh. No proletarian seats today.
We’re in the air before Jack speaks.
“It’s going to be OK, Chrissie. It will all blow over. It always does.”
But I don’t want it to blow over. I’m in love with Alan.
I smile. “Why did Rene leave yesterday?”
I was so consumed with Alan I didn’t stop yesterday to wonder why Rene left me.
“The school is graduating you early, Chrissie. They remarked that they would prefer you clear out your things on Sunday so as not to disturb the returning students. Rene and Patty are packing up your things from your dorm room today.”
Oh shit.
“Are the Thompsons angry we’ve been kicked out of school? I know how Rene’s mom feels about never having the crap be public.”
Jack gives me a small smile. “They didn’t kick out Rene. She left in solidarity and the Thompsons are cool with it.”
It’s awful, but I start to laugh anyway. I can’t help it. I was kicked out of school before Rene. What were the odds of that? I laugh harder and Jack laughs, and suddenly we are laughing in a crazed way that doesn’t match any of this.
When the laughter quiets, it is a comfortable thing. A comfortable thing, for the first time, in a very long time, between Jack and me.
“I think tomorrow we should go buy you a new car,” Jack says somewhere over Colorado. “A Volvo. The safest car on the road, but not flashy. Hopefully, it won’t be something anyone wants to steal.”
OK, what’s up with that? I expected to be dragged to an in-care lockdown therapy center. What’s with the car shopping, Jack? Things might be better between us, but it doesn’t make Jack’s parenting any less confusing.
“Why are we buying me a Volvo?”
“You’re out of school early, Chrissie. You were planning a road trip across country this summer with Rene. Leave early. Get lost for a while. Let it all go. Sometimes it’s the only way you can find yourself.”
I smile and think of Alan. Jack is right, but I also think I might have already found myself, and that returning to Santa Barbara is a very big mistake.
When Jack falls asleep, I pull out my journal and make my Alan entry. I stare at the newspaper photo I have tucked there. I love this photo of Alan and me. Us on the terrace, curled around each other, waiting for the sunrise. How did they get it? Telephoto lens? I wonder if you can ever get a real photo from a newspaper. It just seems to capture us, and everything that was us, through these unexpected weeks. I start to cry. The caption is cruel and wrong, those fuckers in the press never get anything right, but the photo is totally us.
I wish I could see the future. I wish I knew with complete certainty if my decision were right. I wish I were older, looking back after having gotten through this.
What if I had stayed?
I turn to stare out the window. I can’t see the earth and I can’t see the sun and I can’t see the journey ahead of me.
~~~
Chrissie’s Journal September 1989
It’s funny how something can consume your life and then just disappear. After spring break in New York, I never burned myself again. I try to make sense of it all, but I can’t. If anything should have fueled my self-burning addiction, it should have been leaving Alan and realizing I’ve lost him for good.
I read the self-help books that Rene’s mother gave to me when I returned to Santa Barbara. They all confirm the same thing: that my illness is not something that should just end. It would require long-term counseling to resolve my issues that created such a destructive disorder. But I skipped the counseling and just went across country with Rene in the Volvo my dad purchased for us, started UC Berkeley in the fall as planned, and when I arrived at school it was gone, and the impulse to burn my flesh hasn’t come again.
I think of Alan every day and yet the impulse, the whispering sadness, the need to hurt myself stays away.
I’m grateful that the burning thing is over, but I still can’t help wondering why it ended. Maybe it’s as simple as having the fragments of memory form into a clear picture of that horrid night Sammy OD’d, so that I can now deal honestly with my brother’s death. Maybe it’s as simple as having confronted Jack and starting the process of working through my issues with my father. Maybe it’s as simple as Alan asking me never to do it again for him. I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure how I got beyond the obsession to burn myself, but I did, and it ended.
If the authors of the self-help books were to ask me, I would probably tell them it ended because of Alan. He asked me not to burn myself and it’s as simple as that.
The answers are always simple if you let them be.
CHAPTER ONE
UC Berkeley, Fall Semester 1989
I hurry across campus, up the unavoidable hills I’m really starting to hate after only two months at Cal, and I wish I had time to stop to remove my sweater.
I’m starting to believe that UC Berkeley isn’t going to be any better for me than high school had been. In fact, I feel pretty much the same here: lost, a little sad, and as if I don’t fit in anywhere. I never expected to miss Eliza and her mob of pretty mean-girls from high school, but as I cut my way through the herd of students all going somewhere, I find that I do.
I never did fit in with the popular-girl clique, but having them antagonizing me and me suffering in return somehow made me connected with them. And by extension, connected to the high school experience. I don’t feel connected to anything here.
Here I just walk to class alone since I’m in the Music College and Rene is in the Science College, and for the most part, no one ever interferes with me beyond a sudden fixed stare.
I shake my head, realizing that in the two months I’ve been here I haven’t done myself any favors. I can’t seem to find a comfortable routine, I haven’t made any new friends, and how much I still hurt over Alan makes me do stupid things.
In my freshman composition class the first assignment was to write a fifteen hundred word essay introducing myself. I stared at the prompt and thought really, convinced that this exercise had been created by my professor just to add to the emotional heap already burying me.
After procrastinating over the assignment for days, I opted for concise, since there’s pretty much nothing left to share after those months of horrible tabloid press following my weeks with Alan: My father, Jack, is a music icon from the 60s who is still on an FBI watch list. My mother, a celebrated violinist, died of cancer when I was seven. I was practically raised by an illegal Nicaraguan refugee. At the age of eight, I watched my brother die in his bedroom of a heroin overdose. I hid in bathrooms from thirteen until eighteen burning my body with the infinity clasp of a Tiffany bracelet. I’m a technically proficient cellist who bombed an audition at Juilliard, deliberately. During my senior year spring break I had a three week whirlwind affair with a deeply troubled yet brilliant British Rock Superstar. Oh, and UC Berkeley is just my fallback plan and I don’t really know why I’m here.
One-hundred twenty-seven words. Concise: that’s what my professor wrote above the numerical grade equaling ‘F’. When I asked him why he failed me, he didn’t even respond to me verbally. Beneath the ‘F’ he rapidly scribbled: Sorry, Miss Parker, at Cal we start with following the prompt. Maybe by next Friday you can submit fifteen hundred words on why you’re here.
Why am I here?
Of all the prompts he could have given me, that’s the prompt I can’t answer even after two months in college. Somehow, I managed to turn out something. Fifteen hundred words as required, thankfully canceling my prior ‘F’ grade with a low ‘C’, but it didn’t help clarify a single thing for me.
Why am I here?
As I pull back the heavy door to the lecture room, that familiar question turns into another familiar question: why am I always late?
There is absolutely no way to make a subtle entrance in a lecture hall wearing flip-flops. I cringe as I hear the slap, slap, slap against the floor, and for some reason I always manage to arrive during a moment of quiet and there’s never a seat in the back of the room left for me. Nope, there’s only one in the front, that’s it, within range of Professor Lambert.
Slap, slap, slap. Stare, stare, stare. Glare from Professor Lambert. I sink into my seat. I set my tote on the floor beside me and tuck a stray lock of golden blond hair behind my ear.
The stare doesn’t lift. The silence doesn’t break. Professor Lambert doesn’t like me. I look up and smile at him.
“Good of you to join us, Miss Parker,” he says. “May I continue?”
I smile. I attended high school at a private Catholic boarding school. Like I’m going to fall for that one and answer a sarcastically put rhetorical question. And that’s what it is. If I were stupid enough to answer, the whole thing would just go downhill from here.
I focus on pulling my spiral notebook from my pack. I grab a pen, open to a fresh page, scribble the date, and begin to make little geometric shapes. I tune out the voices in the classroom and focus on the little city I’m inexpertly drawing on the paper where my notes for this class should be.
I wonder where Alan is today…
“Miss Parker!” a voice above me snaps loudly.
I look up to find Professor Lambert hovering over me and all the seats around me vacant. Oh God, what did I miss?
“May I continue, Miss Parker?”
Two ‘may I continues’ in a single day. A new record. I nod and quickly drop my eyes.
“Well?” Harsh. Imperative.
I look back up. Like a flight attendant he holds out his arms pointing at each side of the room. “There are two lines, Miss Parker. You’d know that if you paid attention in class. A little boy line. A little girl line. Please join the appropriate line.”
My cheeks burning, I snap my notebook closed and hurry across the room. Slap, slap, slap. Damn, flip-flops in a silent room again. I take my place at the end of the line.
“There are five solos in the ensemble,” Profession Lambert continues as he slowly walks the room. “They will be handed out based on class participation and exercises, so make sure you’ve all signed up for a lab with Jared and attend. And of course, ability.”
He sinks into a seat in the middle of the lecture hall. “Based on the selection you will sing today—and I do hope you’ve all come to class prepared—I will assign you to groups of four. These will be your permanent group assignment until the end of the semester. No changes will be made. And you will endeavor to master the extremely difficult contrapuntal harmony I will assign, due at the semester end.”
The girl beside me gives me a gentle nudge. “Why does Lambert have such a hard-on for you?” she whispers.
I shrug. If the girl didn’t know the answer to that, then it means she doesn’t know who I’m and doesn’t read the papers. Far be it from me to fill her in.
“I’m Teri,” she says.
“Chrissie.”
“Why don’t you ever talk to anyone?” she inquiries in an overly bright way that tells me this girl is both chatty and friendly. “I never see you talk to anyone.”
I shrug again, and this time Teri frowns. “I’m nervous as hell about this. Lambert can be so rude. What did you prepare?”
Prepare? Oh crap, I must learn to read the syllabi more carefully. I stare at the sheet music Teri is holding: a choral selection. This project requires a choral selection.
I shake my head.
Teri’s brows jerk upward. “You mean you didn’t prepare anything?”
I shake my head, praying Teri will let up on this. Hasn’t she figured out if I answer her verbally, Lambert will take it as an excuse to pounce on me again?
“Do you want to grab something to eat after class?” she continues.
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
I let out a ragged exhale of breath. “I can’t. OK?”
I do an exaggerated shift of my eyes to Professor Lambert and give Teri a heavy, meaningful stare. I can tell by her expression she doesn’t get the warning I’m trying to silently convey, and she sinks against the wall slightly pouty.
Now I feel bad.
“It’s not you, OK?” I whisper.
Teri shrugs.
“I’m almost failing this class. I can’t give Lambert another reason to fail me.”
Teri nods, still awash with sulkiness, and I give up.
I move along the wall, leaning and waiting for my turn to sing. There are penalties for not paying attention in class. If I’d listened the last two months I would have known I’d be required to have something prepared for today. And if I’d paid attention earlier, I could have gotten in line first and been out the door like the other students already finished performing. Now I have to listen to all of my classmates sing.
At the front of the line I smile at Jared, Professor Lambert’s graduate teaching assistant, waiting on the piano bench for the next victim. Jared has been sort of nice to me this semester and probably would be much nicer if Lambert’s dislike of me wasn’t so obvious.
Jared looks at the sheet Teri holds out, opens the music book and then hits the metronome, allowing Teri a few ticks before he begins to play. I listen patiently, chiding myself to smile at her, even though her singing is only average and not very good. She’s a nice girl though, she did try to befriend me, and I’m sure I came off snotty and weird.
She waits looking very nervous now that the performance has ended. I nod to assure Teri it went well as we wait for Professor Lambert’s critique.
Lambert looks over his glasses at her, pauses, and then announces, “Well done.”
Teri beams and rushes off toward her chair as I approach the piano. Jared looks at me expectantly, raising a brow. “Did you forget your music?” he asks a hint of dread in his voice as if he’s already anticipating how badly this will go for me.
I nod.
“Is there a problem, Miss Parker? Why does that not surprise me?” Professor Lambert asks heavily exasperated.
The classroom is nearly empty, there’s just Lambert, Jared, and Teri in the large hall, but my cheeks color hotly with the same burning intensity they would if it were a full class here.
Jared starts to rummage through loose sheets. “I’m assuming you can read music.”
I nod. Of course, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to enter a music program and not be able to read music. I’m a complete failure at the college thing, but I’m not stupid.
I take the sheet to the music stand, and I’m relieved to discover Jared picked a simple choral piece not from the book. Jared hits the metronome, but there’s something in that tick, tick, tick that just isn’t working for me. I look out at Lambert. “Must I have the metronome? It’s distracting.”
Lambert makes an exaggerated wave of his arm. “Stop the metronome, Jared. We don’t want Miss Parker distracted here!”
He says that with just the right amount of criticism and, as I wait for Jared to stop the ticking and prepare to play, I admit that at least that one was fair. I have been, if nothing else, distracted my first semester here. It’s not easy to carry on with your life in focus when you’re trying to recover from a broken heart.
I shake my head, trying to push Alan from my thoughts. He didn’t mean to break my heart. I broke it for him. I’m the one who walked away. It doesn’t matter that a part of me didn’t believe that we would really be over, even though he said we would be. It doesn’t matter that a part of me never expected him to marry someone else so quickly. None of that matters now. Alan is married, and I’m at Berkeley.
I struggle through the selection, not from a lack of ability to wing it, but because the rising emotion inside of me caused by the thought of Alan just won’t calm.
When I finish I’m grateful it’s over and I lean clutching the music stand. At least it wasn’t awful. It was in tune, the pitch was good, and the timing was perfect. It definitely wasn’t glaringly more terrible than any of the other performances I’ve heard today.
I wait in the silent hall as Lambert jots down more notes on his paperwork. “You need to sing more from your diaphragm,” he says finally. “Make sure you do breathing exercises during your lab with Jared.”
That’s it? Not bad, not good, just something I already know. When I’m tense I never sing well from my diaphragm.
I hurry back to my seat and start to collect my belongings. Teri rushes across the room to my chair. “Crap, you were really good,” she exclaims enthusiastically. “Where did you study voice?”
That question confirms she doesn’t know anything about my personal history. I continue to collect my things, pulling out my midterm paper from my backpack. “I’ve never studied voice. I’m a cellist. I wouldn’t be in this class if I didn’t need it to fill out my graduation requirements.”
Teri’s eyes round. “But you’re good. Really good. You have an awesome voice. Do you want to go grab something to eat?”
“I can’t,” I say, a little more friendly. “I want to talk to Professor Lambert.”
“I can wait,” she assures, eager and hopeful.
“I’m meeting someone after class, but maybe tomorrow. OK?” I take out a pen and hold out my hand for her notebook. “I can give you my number. Maybe we can have coffee, study, or something?”
Teri smiles. “OK. Tomorrow. Cool.”
I wait until Teri and Jared are gone from the hall. I approach Professor Lambert’s desk. He doesn’t look up and I wait quietly, patiently for him to acknowledge me.
With irritatingly slow movements of pen, he finishes whatever it is he’s writing, and then leans back in his chair, causing it to squeak as he stares up at me. “Is there something you wanted, Miss Parker?”
I swallow hard, hugging my books more closely to me as I meet his cold stare. I lay my midterm on his desk. “Yes. I want to know why you failed my paper.”
He lifts the paper. He gives it a short scan. “Were my comments not specific enough?”
I flush. “Yes, they were very clear. I followed the prompt. Why did you give me an F?”
“Did you understand the assignment?”
I feel a rush of cold across my skin followed by heat. “I think so. You wanted a paper on contemporary music influences that will have lasting impact on music theory and composition. Ten thousand words. Provide two examples. Explain how their influence will change music. The examples you provided were Bach and Bob Dylan.”
I watch the smile slowly claim his lips. Its affect is the opposite.
“Yes. You did understand,” he says in a tired, exasperated way. “You provided me ten thousand words on a little known band from Seattle and the British hard rock band Blackpoll.” A long pause. The silence in the room is suddenly smothering. At last, “Interesting choice. You would have at least gotten a C if you had taken the predictable way out and written about your father.”
That was said just plain mean and insulting. I fight back tears. “I thought the purpose of this assignment was to defend my premise. Not to have you like it.”
Lambert looks down. “It would have been encouraging if you had taken this assignment seriously.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I thought I did. “Can I submit another paper?”
“There are no do-overs, Miss Parker. You’re in college now.”
I stare at him. Finally he looks up. I fight to meet his gaze. “Why do you dislike me so much?” I say in an embarrassingly thin voice.
His gaze falls away; he slouches over his desk and starts writing again. “It’s not you. It’s the idea of you,” he says with harsh indifference.
My cheeks burn. “What does that mean?”
He leans back in his chair again. “Every year I see a dozen incoming freshman exactly like you. Rich, privileged, taking up seats they don’t really want that could go to students who have worked hard and want to be here. You’re at University California, Berkeley and you act like it is an inconvenience to be here! You take up space and by the end of the year…” his eyes round harshly beneath his thick brows. “…you will be gone.”
The emotion shoots through my veins all at once. My insides are shaking. “I’m here to get a degree in music. I want to teach music to children in the inner cities.”
