Page 47 of Given Our History

“I’m so jealous,” I breathed. I’d always wanted to travel, but the farthest I’d ever been was my grandmother’s house in Knoxville. And my parents certainly weren’t in a position to pay for any summers spent abroad, so I likely wouldn’t get to go anywhere until I could pay for it myself.

“I’ll bring you a souvenir,” he said, like it was my consolation prize, but I looked forward to it anyway.

We didn’t see each other for an entire year.

Because he’d finished with the homeschooling program a year ahead of schedule, Teddy didn’t attend camp that September. A part of me mourned, because it hadn’t crossed my mind that last year would be his last year, and now it was my last year and it didn’t feel the same without him.

I hadn’t told anyone about the kiss in the spring, but I ended up confessing to Izzy the first week of camp. It was an usually warm day for September, and we’d decided to lie out by the lake. “It’s like Allie and Noah in The Notebook,” she said, a lithe brown arm slung over her eyes to shield them from the sun. “Sometimes people drift apart because the timing’s not right, but if they’re meant to be together, they find their way back to each other in the end.”

I picked at a loose terry cloth fiber in the towel I was lying on. “Okay, but they were actually in a relationship. Teddy and I are just—” I broke off, because I wasn’t sure friends summed it up anymore.

That night, drowsy after a day of sunbathing and swimming, she insisted on putting The Notebook on her laptop before bed—for “educational purposes.” I’d seen it before—several times and often under duress, because it was one of my mom’s favorites—but when Izzy passed out about ten minutes in, drooling on her pillow, I had little else to occupy my thoughts. I lay awake on my side, propped up on an elbow with only the cold light of the laptop screen for company.

When the movie reached the first fumbling sex scene, my heart sped up. I was going to be eighteen by the end of the school year and I hadn’t had sex yet. I didn’t know if eighteen was late for that sort of thing, and I felt all the more naïve for not knowing. I shut the laptop and rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling in the dark. Teddy was the only boy I’d ever kissed. I never thought of myself as particularly sheltered—I’d had unrestricted access to the internet in recent years, with plenty of time to look up sex terms like Eiffel Tower on Urban Dictionary, only to X out of the window, mortified—but I also had very limited practical experience.

“Izzy,” I whispered. She didn’t respond, so I shook her shoulder. “Izzy.”

“Mmm?”

“Are you a virgin?”

She lifted her head a couple inches, disheveled hair spilling around her like a lion’s mane. “Virginity is a social construct.”

“No, but I mean—have you done anything? With anyone?”

“Yes.”

“With who?”

“Skylar. You met her, at the sleepover that one time.”

I considered this for a moment. “What sort of stuff did you guys do?”

Izzy made a noncommittal noise into her pillow. “Touching,” she said, her voice muffled. “And I sent her some pictures.”

“Pictures?” I hissed, surprised. “What kind of pictures?”

“Just me in a bikini. And underwear, one time.” She lifted up to fluff her pillow and turned her head to the other side. “Can we go back to sleep now?”

“Sorry. Good night.” I crawled out of Izzy’s bed and back to my own bunk, but I didn’t fall asleep. I lay awake for hours, thinking about pictures. And I wondered if any girls had sent pictures to Teddy.

As soon as camp ended in October, I drove to a couple local universities to meet with admissions counselors, some of whom did more discouraging than actual counseling.

“But my test scores came back really good, and my GPA is almost perfect,” I’d argued during a Skype call with an advisor at University of Pennsylvania, when she told me she just couldn’t see how to frame my application in a way that felt competitive. “The only reason it’s not a 4.0 is because I got a B in Latin, and that was an elective. I got an A in French I and II. I got As in everything.”

She gave me a paper-thin smile. “To be frank with you, dear, I’m not sure that counts for much of anything when your mother’s the one who graded you.”

“But my mom’s not the one who graded me,” I said, my face hot. “I have an independent study teacher who checks all my work. The program is accredited. It’s a public charter school, the same as any other public school, we just do the work at home.”

The counselor heaved a sigh. “Well, I can’t stop you from applying,” she conceded. “All I’m saying is, I wouldn’t get your hopes up. These homeschooling programs, they don’t look great on college applications.”

I applied anyway, to all the schools on my list. Penn rejected me with a polite but impersonal letter, as did several others, but I was accepted to both Duke and Johns Hopkins—without the sort of financial aid packages that I’d hoped for. The only school that seemed to take pity on me was University of Maryland, just a stone’s throw away on the outskirts of Washington D.C.

“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, Clare Bear,” Dad told me one day. I was moping at the dinner table, pushing my mashed potatoes around my plate with a fork so that the gravy spilled down the sides in rivulets. “Now you’ll be closer to your family.”

I suspected he felt guilty, like it was his fault for getting injured, his fault that my parents had burned through my would-be college fund when our family needed it most. I didn’t resent them for it. If it weren’t for our difficult financial circumstance, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the aid to attend UMD at all. But it seemed lackluster compared to my friends’ plans—Izzy taking a gap year to live with her cousins in Brazil, or Darvish’s parents covering his full tuition to UC Berkeley.

By the time the holidays rolled around, my schedule was just too jumbled to coordinate anything with Teddy. I’d picked up a job at a local sandwich shop to help sock away money for college. Mom suggested that I invite him for Thanksgiving, but his parents wanted him to spend Thanksgiving with them, so we came to a sort of stalemate. We tried to revive Long-Distance History Club, but it was more a series of history memes and fragmented texts than any meaningful conversation.