Coop ran a hand through his hair, and it went wild again. It stayed upright even after he dropped his hand to the floor and leaned back to brace himself.
“I’m fucked,” I said. “I’m going to get sued.”
He studied his legs, stretched over the floor, then took a deep breath. “I’ll give you the money.”
“That’s absurd. How would you get ten thousand dollars?”
“Come on, like you don’t know.”
“I really don’t.”
Coop’s voice rose a notch. “I sell things. I thought you knew.”
Did he mean drugs? Like an actual drug dealer? Somewhere in the back of my mind, the pieces fit—Coop always had drugs, he went mysterious places at mysterious times—but it didn’t lessen the shock.
“Say something.”
“Does Mint buy his molly from you?”
“Everyone does. Pot. Molly. A few other things.”
“That’s bad, Coop. It’s dangerous. People get killed over drugs.”
“Yeah, well, my scholarship only goes so far. And there’s no way I’m adding to my mom’s plate when she can barely make rent. I told myself if I went to college, I’d make sure she never had to worry.”
I eyed him sharply. “You got a scholarship? What were your SAT scores?” I hadn’t made the cut for a scholarship to Duquette, but Coop had?
He leaned closer, dark hair falling over his forehead. “Seriously, that’s your takeaway? You know I’m prelaw, right?”
I laughed, even though a small voice said it was mean. “A drug-dealing lawyer sounds like a pretty big conflict of interest. What if you get caught?”
“The law is nuanced and complicated, and I like nuanced and complicated. Plus, knowing the law helps me break it better. Didn’t you get a scholarship, too? I assumed, you know…”
And just like that, the old wound opened. The ruined remains of my relationship with my mother, dug up from the grave. “No,” I admitted. “I’m paying for it all myself.”
He looked at me with wide eyes. “Why the fuck would you come here, then? No one who isn’t rich as sin could afford this tuition.”
I thought back to the night I’d gotten my acceptance from Duquette. The thick envelope, the slice of scissors across the top, the way I went too far, the sharp metal sliding against my finger, the bright spark of pain, but it didn’t matter. Because the paper, pressed red with my blood, said Congratulations, and then there was the look on my father’s face, the one I’d been waiting for my whole life.
“It was the best school I got into.”
“No school’s worth that…” Coop’s voice trailed off.
No school’s worth saddling yourself with this kind of debt, Jessica. You don’t understand what you’re doing. You’re burying yourself alive. My mother’s words, sharp with anger. But it didn’t matter what she said, or how many times she said it, because none of her warnings compelled me. None of her criticisms compared to what Duquette gave me with my dad.
The day my father crashed our car and nearly shattered the windshield, my mother screamed for hours. I’d never heard her yell so much. Even though I locked myself in my bedroom and stuffed sheets in the crack under my door, I could still hear her intermittently, the words serious problem and kill yourself and has to end. I couldn’t believe she was finally speaking up. For as long as I could remember, my dad’s problem was something she and I had borne silently, addressed only obliquely, even when it was just us.
Although the truth was unspoken, I knew it was the pills my dad swallowed, day and night—such small, innocuous things—that made him the living dead. Gone from the world for hours, or awake but high, so disoriented, walking into walls. Stretches of days where he couldn’t take off his bathrobe. Those days used to be occasional, but they’d grown more frequent. Someone from work had called, left a message on our answering machine. He was in danger of losing his accounting job at the steel company, which he hated, which was beneath him, which we needed.
In the days after the crash, he seemed lucid more often, but that only made me terrified to be in the same room with him. What if he looked up from his cereal bowl and noticed me—really took me in for the first time in years—and hated what he found? I tiptoed through the house, trying to be invisible.
Until it was time for college applications. One day I passed him at the kitchen table, wearing his Harvard University alumni shirt, and paused. Heart hammering, I told him I was filling out an application to Harvard.