Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [25]
The ceiling was pushing down on her. The pressure beneath her eyes was pushing up. She felt like her eyeballs were in a vise. She got out of bed and turned on the light. She wiggled her mouse to wake her sleeping computer. She went online, and without really planning to, she brought up the Web site for the University of Maryland. Slowly she clicked around inside the site. It was the usual higher-education propaganda. She found herself clicking on the admissions link, and from there to the online application. The university offered rolling admissions. She wondered if they were still rolling. Her hand caused her to click on the Print icon.
Her eyes lighted ever so briefly on the stack of booklets and papers from Williams College. Health forms, dorm info, a course guide, a map showing the leafy spot in western Massachusetts where the campus lay, more than seven hours north of home.
She listened to the buzz and spit of her printer and wondered. What if she didn’t go away after all? What if she didn’t disappear?
Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.
—Mary Kay Ash
“I took on an extra shift at work,” Lena told her father at dinner when he asked about her day. “I’m going to do the first dinner shift, from four to seven.” She looked down at her pasta as she said it.
“Excellent,” her father said.
“How is little Katherine doing?” her mother wanted to know. “Did you get to stop by there today?”
“Yeah.” Lena smiled at the thought of Katherine’s excited retelling. The tragedy had become the single most thrilling incident in Katherine’s short life. “She’s great. Only she has to wear a hockey helmet till the end of the summer.”
“I wore a hockey helmet,” Effie recalled, scraping her salad fork annoyingly across her plate. “Didn’t I, Mom?”
“For a week,” Ari answered. “You had a concussion, not a fracture, thank God.”
Lena chewed a piece of bread. What was it about little sisters smashing their heads? Lena had never had so much as one stitch.
“Vhat kind of sauce do you call this?” Valia asked in an overloud voice.
“Pesto,” Lena’s mother said with finality.
“It does not taste good.” Valia inspected it with her fork.
They were all quiet and waited for the moment to pass. Even Effie had been ground down into acquiescence.
A while later, Lena stood at the sink doing the dishes. She stiffened when she heard her grandmother pad into the kitchen behind her.
“I did IMs vith Rena today.”
“Oh?” Lena did not turn around. She did not like these conversations.
“She tells me Kostos and that voman are not living together now.”
Lena closed her eyes and stood with her hands in the warm suds. She was glad Valia could not see her face.
Valia had many things to be bitter about, and Kostos was one of them. Her greatest dream was to have her handsome, beloved surrogate grandson, Kostos, marry her beautiful granddaughter Lena. She didn’t seem to realize that her own hurt and disappointment were magnified a thousand times in Lena herself. If she had, maybe she wouldn’t have brought up the news from Oia as often as she did.
The baby expected by Kostos and Mariana, the reason for their hasty marriage and Lena’s heartbreak at the end of the previous summer, did not materialize. That was the first thunderclap to arrive, sometime in December. Valia kept Lena roiling on this news for weeks. No one knew exactly why or what happened, but there was endless speculation. Valia was so biased, Lena doubted that any of her information was reliable. For all she knew, there was a bouncing baby Kostos, beloved by all.
Then, as now, Lena both wanted these rumors to be true and she didn’t. The better part of her didn’t. It was all she could do to get over Kostos and keep moving on with her life. She couldn’t open her mind to any what ifs or she would be hobbled by them. She didn’t want