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“Are you sure, Zara? I’ll come with you if you want me to.”
“No, it’s fine.” I give her a heartfelt hug.
“I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“Thanks, roomie. You’re a true friend.”
She grins at me. “Besties for life.”
I get to the door and show my ID to security. They immediately let me through.
My dad is sitting at his desk, talking on the phone. I close the door behind me. When he sees me come in, his expression is stormier than I’ve ever seen it. I’ve seen sadness and I’ve seen a whole lot of grief, but this is different. He’s livid. Even worse, he’s disappointed. It’s a weird thing, to face your dad when you both know he’s thinking about the fact that you’re probably no longer a virgin.
But that’s life. Most people get to do things like that without their dad knowing about it. And it almost pisses me off that the two of us have to be this in tune. I can make my own choices, and I have. I don’t regret anything except that my dad has to know every freaking detail.
“Clayton is with the coaching staff now,” he says into the phone. “I need to call you back. Something urgent’s come up.” I know the name Jared Clayton. He’s the second string quarterback.
My dad ends the call.
I launch straight into it. “I need you to put him back on the team. Right now. It’s not his fault. It’s mine.”
“I asked one thing of you, Zara. One thing.” He hardly ever calls me Zara. It’s always “punkin” or honey or sweetheart. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad this furious. He gets up out of his chair and he starts pacing. His face is red. “It had to be one of my players? Out of the thirty-five thousand students at Hawthorne, you had to pick that one?”
“When you know, you know.”
He stops pacing to glare at me. It’s cruel of me, maybe, to reference his own connection to my beautiful lost mother, the love of his life. But then I realize that I’m entitled to one of those too.
“Daddy, I love you. I always have and I always will. But my personal life doesn’t have to involve you.”
“It does when it’s one of my players, Zara, damn it! You know that.” He’s pacing again. “Of all the people you could have chosen, you had to go for my starting quarterback? Do you know where this puts our team? Did you think about that before you—” He can’t bring himself to say what he’s thinking. He doesn’t have to.
“I didn’t ‘go’ for your starting quarterback, Dad. I met him and we…” How to say this? “We have a connection.”
“How much of a connection can you have with someone you’ve known for a goddamn week?”
I hate that I’m crying. I’m mad too. All Elias ever did was care about me. “You said you met mom and you knew instantly. You’ve been telling me that my whole life. What if I knew? What if I know? You should be glad he’s the starting quarterback! At least I chose the best of the best. You shouldn’t hold that against me. And you definitely shouldn’t hold it against him! I want you to put him back on the team right now. You have to. You have to call him up and tell him that as soon as he gets back from dealing with what he’s dealing with—which happens to be losing his own dad—that he’s back on the team.”
“He knows the rules and so do you. I don’t make exceptions.”
“God, Dad! Why are you being so stubborn? He’s good to me. He’s not seeing anyone else. He’s—”
“Of course you’d believe that. They all do. I’ve seen it a hundred times and he’s no different. Zara, you are not to see him again. I mean that. You’re to stay away from him and that’s final!”
It’s the first argument I’ve ever had with my dad. Ever. We’ve always gotten along amazingly well. But his old rule doesn’t make sense anymore. And I refuse to be shackled to it. “You’re wrong. This is different. And if it isn’t, then I’ll make my own mistakes.” I take a deep breath and try to calm myself. “I want you to think for a second about how much you loved her, from that very first day. How much would you have risked for her? How far would you have gone to keep her?”
He’s breathing sort of heavily as he glowers at me, but he doesn’t answer me.
“The rules don’t apply anymore, Dad. I get to make my own now. If you can’t forgive him for me, do it for her.”
My heart feels like it’s breaking, but I turn from him and walk out the door.
22
I place the last of the boxes in Bo’s huge attic, brushing the dust off my hands. I’m covered in dirt and drenched in sweat from lugging thirty years’ worth of boxed-up shit from my dad’s house over to Bo’s. “That’s everything.”
“You could rent the house out for a while, Elias. That would give you time to adjust and think about what you want to do.”
“I know what I want to do.”
