Worth the Trouble ✓

34 | old wounds

GRADUATION IS IN LESS THAN a month.

Less than a month till I get to leave behind the Carsonville Academy and all the drama leached into its hallowed halls. Everyone else in my grade has received an offer from a private university, with a sprinkling of Ivy acceptances and even one UK success (Benjamin Wilks, the math nerd) that the teachers will not stop fawning about in assemblies.

I did not apply to any school. Intentionally. It's been my plan for over a year. As soon as I passed the SATs, I realized I never want to take another standardized assessment in my life. In junior year, Ms. Bowen, the career advisor, quoted me as wanting to pursue Psychology or Sociology in university. But in those scheduled academic planning meetings, everyone had to express some tertiary education plan before they permitted you to return to class. Told her what she wanted to hear.

This year in academic meetings, I've been progressively vague. I went from listing the most local universities as favorites to dragging my heels on filing applications to finally outright admitting I don't want to go.

"I don't understand your avolition," Ms. Bowen said in January, "your grades have been more than fine in the last two years. When you apply yourself, you can achieve anything you like, Terrence. But this year, you've given up. Why? I don't understand."

"I haven't given up," I retorted. "In fact, my life's dream is to avoid college and I'm trying to achieve that goal."

Without me, the Academy doesn't get to publish its prospectus with the line 100% of our graduates are accepted into private universities and entice the parents of the next generation of conformers.

Whether everyone goes to or completes college is irrelevant; the acceptance letter is what this school cares about. A tertiary degree is an overpriced scam meant to uphold an elitist workforce, which is something Brittany told me drunk at a party, and I think it makes sense despite the irony of her, Georgetown daughter of nepotism, being the one to say it.

Of course, Sophie has been accepted into Halston, the nearest private university on the western fringe of the Boston Metropolitan Area. She's been raining her anger down on me and the other Monarchs the whole year. I'm kind of curious to see if she stays that righteous in college or if her fire dies. Even though we probably won't talk again after graduation. I feel weird about that. I regret staying the forever villain in this chapter of her life.

Sophie is pointing those beseeching brown eyes at me again. Two minutes ago we were in Home Ec., when she walked over to my workbench and stopped by blood cold in my veins. "I know about Cassie," she said, and that one sentence sucked my brain out of my skull and dropped it back in the past.

Suddenly I'm watching an ultrasound screen, being swallowed by the four sterile walls of the clinic. I slip and fall from a frozen roof, being thrown away from my dad and the world. Suddenly Brittany's harsh, accusatory words tighten around my neck, comforting like a noose.

I breathed through the panic, shoved her hand off my shoulder, and walked out of the class. Naturally, she won't leave it alone. She never does.

"I don't get it," her hushed voice calls after me in the hallway. "I don't get how you can be a parent and enable the things you've enabled."

She means the bullying. The lockers I trashed, the things I stole, the friends of hers that Reece and Derek beat up in the first week of school. The money and print machines Brittany got confiscated, the incident at the Homecoming Fair.

When I realize she'll tail me home in her pursuit for answers, I stop and lean against a row of lockers. "Firstly, I don't owe you an explanation."

She, of white picket fences and hero complexes, can't fathom how I can do something so adult as spawn another human being and still behave so recklessly.