The Scammer(7)

“How are you?” I ask, remaining cheerful.

“I’m well. Thanks.”

I wait for her to ask some questions, Like, how’s it going, how’s my room, how are my roommates . . . but nothing.

“Um, so I was just calling because today is my first day of classes. Intro to Ethics.”

“Okay.”

“And . . . I guess that’s it.”

“Okay.”

The “okays” were in the same inflection. Dad must be standing by, listening. The silence stretches.

“Well, we got a letter from Yale yesterday,” Mom states. “Confirming your deferral.”

I swallow. “Oh. I . . .”

“Guess you’ll see if this year will all be worth it.”

It’s as if she etched the underlying meaning of her words on the walls of my dorm.

“Okay. Talk to you later then. Bye.” I hang up quick so I won’t hear her hang up on me first. I’m too tender for that.

According to the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, there are five stages of grief: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I read about it in her book On Death and Dying. Right now, I can’t tell if my parents are in the anger phase or the depression phase with my decision to go to Frazier U.

I held a proverbial gun to their heads in order for them to agree to pay for college. If they didn’t, all of Westport would have known. It would make them look bad. And after Kevin . . . that’s the last thing they would want: more attention. Outside of tuition, room, board, and a small stipend, they made it clear that I wouldn’t get a single dime from them otherwise.

I take a deep breath and scroll down my meager address book, daring myself to call him. It’s selfish, but I just want to hear a familiar voice. Everything is so new, exciting yet nerve-racking.

“Yeah what?” he snaps, answering on almost the last possible ring.

“Hi! How’s it going?”

He scoffs. “Do you really wanna know?”

“Jack, I just thought we could—”

“Jordyn, did you expect me to be happy to hear from you? You pull this last-minute stunt to go to that ghetto school when we’ve been planning for YEARS to go to Yale. I worked my ass off to get into the school. You barely broke a sweat. And now we’re . . . well, I don’t even know what we are anymore.”

“Friends?” I offer.

“Friends?” he spits. “Right. Well, FRIEND. I have to go.”

Click.

Clearly Jack is still in the anger phase.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my boyfriend of the last four years doesn’t want to hear from me. Not after just telling him two weeks ago that no, I wasn’t going to college with him. I shouldn’t have even been surprised that he immediately dumped me. I wasn’t even surprised when he showed up the night before my train, begging, pleading with me to change my mind.

There’s not a single person back home that is happy that I chose Frazier. Shock and disgust was the typical response, the question always being why? Why would I give up Yale for some “‘Black school”?

And I don’t have an answer for them. Or at least an answer that I can tell them right now.



* * *




I’ve always loved the balance beam. It requires flexibility, grace, poise, strength, and, of course, balance. Mom said when I was younger, I would find anything to tight rope across—curbs, benches, logs, walls, random lines of chalk. By the time I was seven, she enrolled me in gymnastics, hoping it would help me wean off the habit, with hard work and a few hard falls. Instead, just made me hungry for more.

That’s how I feel, walking through Frazier’s campus. Hoping that if I just go for it . . . it would put an end to my curiosity. This plan of mine was going to call for a delicate dance on a beam. The issue becomes when I eventually fall in front of a crowd, how hard it might hurt.

Frazier’s main campus is a quadrangle, known as the Quad. It’s a rhombus-shaped yard, flanked by vine-choked academic halls, with a flat grassy expanse and network of paved walkways painted a dull gold. Students follow the yellow brick road to classes.

I rush toward the stairs in Baker Hall, taking two steps at a time. First day, and I’m already going to be late to class. The trek to campus from our dorm up steep hills was a bit more intense than I thought.

My schedule says it’s in room 2012 but these room numbers are not in order. Soon as I round the corner, I bump right into him.

“Ooff!” Nick grunts, stepping back. “Bambi?”

I straighten my hair. He’s the last person I want to see right now. “That’s not my name. It’s Jordyn.”

He grins with a bored sigh. “Same thing. You lost?”

“No,” I shoot back defiantly.

He rolls his eyes and snatches my phone, scanning my schedule. “Oh. You have Hammond. I had his class last year.”

“You’re prelaw?”

“Ummm yeah.” He scans my schedule. “Huh. Looks like we have Ethics together. How’d you get in that without the prerequisite?”

I snatch my phone back, slipping it into my pocket. “I took pre-college courses over the summer.”

“Figures you’d be an overachiever. Come on, walk this way or we’ll both be late.”