For Sure and Certain Read online

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  “Don’t you want to know the requirements?” her mother asked.

  Marigold was so caught up in remembering those buttery mashed potatoes and the golden turkey she forgot what this conversation was actually about.

  “Requirements for what?”

  “The job,” her mother said evenly, raising her coffee cup to her lips.

  She’d never had a job of any sort in her life. No one she knew had either, and though she realized how entitled she sounded, it was her truth. But she needed one if she was going to get away. From them, this house, this life. She was tired of apologizing for her past, she needed to move forward with her future.

  Maybe she could take a bus to a mall in the suburbs, she thought. Get a job at Jamba Juice and wear an apron. She already had lots of those. Find a manager that didn’t think she was the detriment to small business and ask for a job.

  “If you refuse to make firm plans for attending Jamestown University in the fall, which is only an option because of the strings your father and I pulled mind you, then you need to work. We aren’t letting you flail under our roof, without direction,” her mom explained. “The job will need to be full time, and you will need to pay for your own expenses. We aren’t supporting this behavior any longer.”

  “Any longer? I just graduated, and honestly, I don’t want to waste your money when I don’t know what I want.”

  Her mom snorted at that statement. “Call it what you want, Goldie, it was winter semester and you’ve been wandering the house for months like a desperate housewife. When you chose to finish school early we assumed it was to get a head start on your future plans. But it’s been four months and you’re still doing nothing.”

  “Okay. That’s fine.” Marigold shrugged, preferring this to the alternative. She knew lots of people didn’t have parents who were willing to pay for their college, so she knew how privileged her life was.

  But at the same time she couldn’t help but wonder what that privilege was worth when it confined her in a box she didn’t want to live in.

  “That’s fine?” her dad asked with disgust, looking up from the paper once more.

  Marigold was surprised to learn her words were shocking enough to engage him.

  “Fine? What is fine?” he asked. “You have all the opportunity in the world. Opportunity I would have loved to have when I was your age, and you squander it as if you’re above being a citizen. We’ve put up with quite enough from you. The reckless behavior that consumed last year is not going to start up again, not in my house!”

  Marigold bit her lip, not trusting herself to speak. The things she wanted to say served no purpose here, so she stayed silent.

  Her mom’s intensity cracked under Marigold’s nonchalance, and she held her hands to her face, crying. Marigold didn’t want to hurt her, but she also had no intention of setting her life in motion under a caste system she had no taste for. She didn’t want to go to college, it wasn’t complicated.

  And it also wasn’t criminal. She needed time to figure out what she wanted.

  “Why won’t you just go to Jamestown? You could audition for the acting conservatory or be a film major, anything that puts you in a dorm with a roommate and class schedule. Just don’t do this to us,” her mom begged. “You have so much potential, Marigold, don’t waste it.”

  Those words were a slap in the face, and everyone in the room knew it. An acting conservatory was the last thing she would set foot in. They knew the shame she carried with her, and how that girl she’d been wasn’t even the real Marigold. It was an image, an obnoxious attempt to be different. She didn’t need the attention anymore.

  “I’ll get a job. I’m not going to let someone spend fifty grand a year on something I don’t want,” Marigold said as she stood, not looking back at the people who wanted her to be all the things she wasn’t.

  Marigold decompressed with needles. After the morning she’d had with her parents, she needed to feel the familiar weight of them between her fingers, away from her family’s judging eyes. In a bookstore café, she sat in a worn leather chair with a ball of yarn in her lap, her head down. Without makeup, a disguise, and a crew of friends laughing in the background, no one knew who she was.

  She took a sip of her iced tea, realizing with a slight groan that a stack of her father’s new release was on display a few feet away, itching for someone to pass by and pick up a copy of Man of Steel: Modern American Business Men.

  Marigold’s go-to spot at the campus library was now off-limits because Lily was hanging out at Jamestown for her summer Business Intensive. She wanted to avoid that, and any run-ins with old high school classmates, at all costs.

  She turned up the volume of her iPod and glanced around. A guy wearing a straw hat had his back to her. She watched as he picked up her dad’s book, turning it around to read the jacket copy. She knew what it said, Maximillian Archer, NYT Bestselling Author, spent his earlier life as a steel industry innovator and is now taking his business savvy to the people. Man of Steel explores the pursuit of being your own Industry Superhero.

  The guy put down the book and she swore she heard him give a small chuckle before walking away. Marigold smiled to herself, knowing her father believed his book blurb was irresistible. She thought that theory was presumptuous at best, pompous at worst. The fact that the broad-shouldered guy in hipster-suspenders somehow agreed, pleased her.

  Looking back at her tiny knitting needles, she realized she had missed a row and unraveled a bit of yarn to get back on track. She purled a new row with swift movements, and then another, satisfied with the way the soft camel-colored scarf finished up.

  She glanced at her watch, realizing she needed to head over to Tabitha’s. Her oldest friend, Tabby, was spending the day packing before she left for her summer abroad. Marigold tied off the end of the row, finally finished with the project. Packing up her things, she tossed her empty cup in the trash.

  It was a quick walk to Tabitha’s house and she had promised to meet up with her before she left for her summer adventure. It was the least she could do, considering she’d distanced herself from everyone over the last few months. She needed closure. She wanted to move on.

  The housekeeper let Marigold in, and Tabby ran to the door in her perpetual state of drama. “I’m so glad you’re here. You’re never where you need to be. I wish you would answer your texts like a normal person,” Tabby whined, walking into the foyer, throwing her arms around Marigold.

  Marigold didn’t say anything, she just hugged her friend back. Sometimes words will only come out wrong. Growing apart from someone you’ve known forever is complicated.

  When Tabby pulled away, she took in Marigold’s ensemble. “What are you wearing today?” Her face scrunched up in disapproval.

  “Just some more stuff I found in my granny’s old trunk of clothes, and I kind of reassembled them. I swear you’ve seen this before.”

  “I would’ve remembered this.”

  Marigold twirled, her creamy petticoat skirt making a circle below a lacy camisole layered with a hand-crocheted shawl. Half a dozen necklaces hung to her belly, jingling. Marigold felt like the wind when she moved. She liked being a breeze, ready to shift at any moment.

  “I mean I guess it’s better than that time you decided to be French mime.”

  “That was in fourth grade.” Marigold shook her head, knowing Tabby was teasing, but it all felt a bit too raw for her, everything did that reminded her of before, when she tried so hard to be seen.

  Now her clothes stood out in a pretty, romantic way, but no one else saw it like that. They assumed this was another fad Marigold was starting. They didn’t see the truth underneath the petticoats and ruffled socks she wore. They assumed the worst.

  The girls walked up the staircase and down the hall. Entering Tabby’s bedroom, they were assaulted by an absolute disaster.

  “What happened?” Marigold asked, lifting a pile of clothes heaped by the door and depositing them on the canopied bed.

>   “Everything. You would know if you’d come to graduation like a normal person.”

  “What does graduation have to do with a messy room?”

  “Oh it was, like, totally crazy here yesterday. All the girls came over to get ready for the after party, which was awesome, but the next thing I know, everyone was trying on all those new pieces from my mom’s line and it just got kind of out of hand. You would have loved it. Or at least the old you would have.”

  Marigold took in the amazing couture pieces from Tabby’s mom’s clothing line. Her stomach twisted remembering how many times Tabby dressed her up in outrageous ensembles last year when their world revolved around finishing her costumes with an over-the-top hat or rhinestone vest or platform boots.

  “I mean, you would have died.” Tabby talked with her hands, emphasizing every other word as though it was the most important thing ever. None of it was. Not to Marigold at least. She stood listening, not knowing if she even wanted to stay. This was the reason she created distance, she no longer wanted to be a part of a life that revolved around parties and performances. She wanted a life that had more meaning … some substance. She was looking for depth but kept drowning. Treading water alone was exhausting.

  “Anyways, we all got super slutty and the guys were seriously hard just from seeing us. It was nuts. Jay’s mom got us all a suite at their hotel and it was, like, perfection. You should have been there. It was better than junior homecoming.”

  “That’s a hard night to top.” Marigold remembered how that night she wore a dress that was little more than lingerie. Blue silk wrapped loose around her body and when she moved, it looked like she was swimming, like she was a mermaid.

  When the limo drove them all to Chesapeake Bay, they skinny dipped, champagne bottles in hand, crashing their smiles into the waves as if life couldn’t get any better. But it did get better, at least she had thought it did. Everything became bigger and better, each week seeming to top the week before. One hundred thousand YouTube followers will do that to a girl.

  “Yeah, homecoming was good, I mean except for the fact your date was Gerald.” Tabby made a retching noise, and Marigold couldn’t hold back a smile at that.

  Gerald was the epitome of a douchebag, yet had somehow managed to date Marigold for a few months too long.

  “True.” Marigold stepped farther into the bedroom and sat crossed-legged in the center of the thick white-carpeted floor and began folding clothes. “I’m glad you guys had a good time, you’ve looked forward to this night forever.”

  “Yeah,” Tabby said, plopping down next to her. “But it wasn’t the same without you. You totally should have been there, Goldie. It was like the one person who used to be center stage wasn’t there, but we all kept looking around for you, for the one who knew how to hold court. You just disappeared on us.”

  “I don’t want to rehash this anymore,” she told Tabby. “We’ve been over it.” Marigold never expected to leave the scene she created. But she did, it got out of hand, people got hurt.

  “I know, but you could have tried again, to come back.” Tabby’s voice was soft, and Marigold felt bad for the one millionth time for not being the person everyone wanted her to be.

  “No, Tabby, I couldn’t. To everyone at school, I was more than life itself, I can’t live up to those sorts of expectations. I don’t want to.” Her voice was raw, these jagged edges of their friendship too sharp. Tabby didn’t want to accept Marigold as anything besides the girl she used to know.

  The room fell silent, and Marigold matched a pair of socks, adding them to the pile on the floor, thankful to have something to do with her hands.

  “When do you leave?” Marigold asked gently.

  “In the morning, at like four.”

  “I can’t believe you’re going to Peru.”

  “You could have come too.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t even come to prom.” Tabby’s voice was weak, and Marigold didn’t have the nerve to meet her eyes.

  “It’s not my thing.”

  “So you’ve said, but what’s so strange is that it always was. Prom would have been the most ‘Goldie’ thing ever.”

  Tabby’s knees touched Marigold’s, but more space hovered between them than had ever before. It would be so easy to go back to where things had been. A few simple moves on Marigold’s part – send in the paperwork to Jamestown, ask where her old crew was hanging out tonight, beg her mother to buy a last minute ticket to Peru, who would acquiesce because this was exactly what her mother wanted her to be. She and Tabby could meet cute European boys on the mountain trails and spend the summer reveling in their privilege before heading off to an Ivy League school.

  Marigold didn’t do any of these things because that would be the old Marigold. The Marigold who was satisfied with non-stop action, but after she quit making the videos, she realized they never made her feel alive, not really. They were a way to be seen, but she wanted to be known.

  She took Tabby’s hands and looked in her eyes, wanting to remember the girl she might have become.

  “I made you a scarf.”

  “It’s like eighty degrees at the top of Machu Picchu.”

  “I know, I thought you could wear it when you move to Boston this fall.”

  “I’ll see you before the fall, weirdo.”

  “Okay,” Marigold said, but she didn’t believe the word even as she said it. She knew this was good-bye.

  Abel

  The first morning of classes, Abel made his way across campus toward the dean’s office. They had a meeting, and because of that, he woke early, much earlier than Lacey and had eaten warm oatmeal alone at a table in the dining hall.

  He was used to rising early, growing up on a farm will ingrain that in a guy, and clearly his summer classmates had less restrictive upbringings. Though it had been stiff competition to get into the program, no one took it as seriously as he did. That was obvious when so many students in the cohort messed around on their phones during orientation.

  For him, this was everything, his only real shot at doing something besides managing his parents’ farm. Everyone else seemed to have grown up with an advantage he couldn’t really understand. They didn’t realize the power of an education, how it wasn’t readily available to him, and how this wasn’t something to take for granted.

  As he walked to the office, he wasn’t nervous or jittery, that was never Abel’s style. It was excitement that pulsed through him. Finally he was here, earning the first college credit of his life … credit a year ago he would never even have dared to imagine.

  “Welcome, Abel.” Dean Larsen led him into his large office. Larsen was his father’s age, with a thin face and long limbs, wearing a suit that appeared a size or two larger than necessary, as if he feared his arms and legs would continue to grow even though he was in his fifties.

  “Thank you for having me here as a student.” Abel shook Dean Larsen’s outstretched hand before taking a seat in a leatherback chair. “I realize this is all really out of the ordinary.”

  “It is, it is quite unusual,” Larsen said rubbing his hands together, as if massaging in lotion. He rested his elbows on the large wooden desk and looked Abel straight on. “Unusual, but exciting. Thrilling, even. It is the intention of this institution to raise learners, to mold minds, to shape the future.” He paused, giving Abel a serious nod. “You’ll do well here if your test scores are any indication.”

  “I hope to, sir.” Abel smiled as Dean Larsen went over most of what had been covered during orientation the day before. He would be taking four courses this summer with twenty other students who were all admitted into the Business Intensive. Regular summer courses would be held as usual, of course, but for the most part Abel would remain in this pack of twenty.

  “What do you think, Abel, are you eager to begin?”

  “Eager, yes. And ready. This opportunity is such a privilege.”

  “Of course, of course, but you are very bright, and
this is well deserved.” Larsen smiled as he stood, indicating the end of the meet and greet. “Welcome to college, Abel Miller.”

  The first week was filled with awkward conversations, people squinting their eyes at him in his unusual clothing, and then quickly turning away. He ate lonely lunches in the dining hall, usually next to Lacey, who was friendly enough, but Abel couldn’t keep up with the way the kids here spoke.

  It was easier to stay out of everyone’s way. He sat in classes where professors questioned his ability to comprehend the information. He stopped by Tara’s room after getting lost on his way to the campus bookstore and she sweetly drew a map for him with little arrows pointing out close-by cafes and bookstores. Abel found himself memorizing it as he fell asleep each night, not wanting to get lost again and look even more out of place than he already felt.

  Abel could handle the content, and the professors quickly learned that besides his thick accent, he asked relevant questions during class discussions and seemed engaged in all the assignments. It was the downtime Abel wasn’t familiar with.

  There were no lazy afternoons at the farm. Every day of his life had been spent working hard. When not helping a member of the community raise a barn or fix a roof or lend a hand harvesting a bumper crop, he spent hours on accounting, reviewing ways to make the sheep farm more efficient, and streamline the workload.

  Here, in D.C., living in the heart of a city with public parks holding the largest stretch of green and no farm animals in sight, the learning curve was sharp. Even for a student who earned a twenty-three seventy on his SAT. Nothing prepared Abel for this new pace of life.

  Classmates in the Honors Intensive walked with thumbs moving fast against a phone, never looking up as they crossed intersections. In class they took notes on small tablets, swiping at screens holding their textbooks, reading the news. Snapping pictures to post on interfaces Abel had heard of but never used. Since he didn’t spend his free time plugged in to a screen, there were empty hours to fill.

  He had two classes in the morning, a short lunch break, and two more classes in the early afternoon. He kept busy on campus. One day he stopped to see his favorite Professor Trape during visiting hours to ask about a random Wall Street journal article, but he was careful not to appear needy.