They had made one for each of us, to commemorate our time at the university. I was supposed to be looking at Wally, who was holding his camera in the front row to get a shot of each of us as it was our turn, but I couldn’t stop staring at my pen. It was glazed deep red, one side bearing the University of Wisconsin’s insignia in white and the other carved with my name and degree in gold cursive:
Eve Catherine Moore
Doctorate of Philosophy in Cartography and Geography
“When is breakfast?” Daniel asked suddenly, waking up for just a moment and then falling right back into sleep before any of us could answer. Tam and I laughed, and he smiled faintly at the sound, already snoring again.
He’d been a lot more grounded about the whole event, as always. When his name was called, he gamely shook the dean’s hand, took his pen, and looked right at Wally with a big, obedient grin as Wally clicked the shutter and Tam gave him a pleased thumbs-up for actually doing what he was supposed to do, instead of staring awestruck at the gift.
To me, and the rest of us, those pens felt like the entire world. But to Daniel, it was no different than something to scribble with. By the next day his was already lost and forgotten. He probably would have accidentally thrown away his and Tam’s marriage license five minutes after the ceremony if Wally hadn’t snatched it away and placed it safely in its cardboard folder for them as they kissed outside the courthouse.
“You won’t miss it, even a little?” Wally asked Tam, after Daniel’s snoring had quieted. “After twelve years there?”
“Of course I’ll miss it,” Tam said. “But Bear was right. Our best hope of finishing our Dreamer’s Atlas is to get away from the university, where there will be no distractions. No temptations to pop into the graduate lounge to catch up with friends, no guilt that we’re not adjuncting some of the Geography 101 classes for a little bit of extra money, no spending way too much time that we could be working at the quad . . .”
“We can completely immerse ourselves,” I added. “The Dreamer’s Atlas is too important for anything less.”
This made Wally smile. It had taken the longest to get him on board, but once Tam had convinced him, Wally had become the most excited about our project of us all. He’d drafted the entire proposal within a month, given out copies for each of us to review, and hadn’t rested until he’d coached Daniel through his speech to Professor Johansson to win his support. When we received word that the university was going to approve us, he was so happy, I was sure I’d seen a few tears glimmering in his eyes as we’d all cheered and danced.
“You’re right,” Wally agreed then, looking determined anew. I tried not to smile as the car accidentally sped up just 1 mph. He’d never let himself speed outright—you were in the car, and he was even more protective of you than of Tam, if you can believe it, the most cautious, devoted uncle I have ever seen—but the look on his face was of pure exhilaration.
We could not let anything get in our way. Not teaching, not parties, not jobs. We would stop at nothing to make our Dreamer’s Atlas succeed.
“I’m always right,” Tam said, laughing. I glanced to the back seat to jokingly agree with her and saw that she had her graduation fountain pen out—and was carving up its glossy crimson shaft with the point of a pocketknife.
“What are you doing?” I gasped.
Tam held it out to me and smiled, before you saw that she had finished and laughed excitedly, reaching for it. On the side of its smooth, lacquered body, over her name, she’d etched our little compass rose with a C in its center.
“Nelly wants to be a Cartographer, too,” she teased as she gave it to you.
“She’ll be the best one of us,” Wally replied, grinning through the rearview mirror.
The drive took sixteen hours total, including a lunch break and four stops for gas, and by the time Daniel, at the end of our car’s third driving shift, pulled the car up the long driveway, the tires crunching over gravel, to the house we would be living in for the summer, it was already growing dark.