Page 23
I don’t need to go to Oxford. I don’t even need to leave the state. But I’m beginning to sort of wish that I had a few more choices than the ones I have.
I spend the weekend scrubbing the baseboards and cleaning the bathrooms and helping with the ironing...while dreaming of the Cotswolds, which I looked up online. I’m dreaming of being a girl who resents going there because she wanted to shop in London, being a girl who must decide between a quick trip to Greece and skiing in France.
My father spends the weekend as he spends all of them—quietly sequestered away in his home office. In theory, he’s dealing with important church matters in there, but all I hear is the occasional chuckle and the squeak of his ergonomic leather chair reclining.
Is this really the life I want?
During church tomorrow, the pastor will tell us that there’s no higher calling than to be a wife and mother, no position more revered. But once the service concludes, my mother will return to her cooking and cleaning, and my father will return to his office and his comfy leather chair, the door firmly shut.
A person who dared ask questions might point out that what the church calls reverence looks an awful lot like servitude.
“I was thinking I might want to take the SAT,” I say casually over dinner on Sunday. “There’s one the first weekend of November.”
My father frowns. “Why? College is years from now, if you choose to go.”
I can’t tell him the truth, which is that the more I hear kids talking about college as if it’s their due, the more I consider the possibility that it could be my due as well.
That I shouldn’t have to wait two years to discover it.
“Well, if I take it now, it’ll be out of the way, and if I do poorly, I’ll know I need to prepare more,” I tell him.
My father dismisses the entire conversation with a shake of his head, already focusing on the paper again. “You’ll be fine. Your score doesn’t matter anyway. Anyone from the mission who applies to Gulf Pines gets in.”
I want my score to matter.
I want more.
I want more than the church can give me.
I want more than what my mother has now.
If I said any of this aloud, my parents would accuse me of being changed by Penhallow, but I’m pretty sure I thought most of this long before we arrived here.
I just didn’t know, until now, that it was okay to think it.
“I’ve made a few small changes to the syllabus,” Mrs. Onorato says on Monday, handing a stack of papers to the girl in front of her. “It’s going to look like a lot, but one of these is only thirty-five hundred words—you can read it in a matter of minutes, and another is, essentially, a very brief play. We’ll read that one aloud in class.”
The Crucible, The Lottery, and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Two of these—The Crucible and The Handmaid’s Tale—were on Bright Covenant’s banned books list. And I’ve read about The Lottery. All of them are about repressive societies and people forced to conform. It seems a little pointed after my conversation with Mrs. O last week.
“Consider yourselves lucky there’s just three,” she says, “I thought about adding The Hunger Games, but I figured most of you had read it.”
JJ mumbles something about how he’d rather reread it than read any of the new books. Kappy glances over at me and I give her the tiniest shake no.
Of course I’ve never read The Hunger Games.
She gives me a thumbs-up. I’ll make sure you get it.
On Friday, the school’s home game takes center stage. All the football players get to wear their jerseys to class, and the cheerleaders get to replace their tiny rolled-up uniform skirts with even shorter cheer ones.
The sight of Ford walking down the hall in those skin-tight leggings and his jersey makes my throat dry.
“Got a little something there,” teases Kappy, pointing at the corner of her mouth as if I’m drooling.
I actually check to make sure I’m not.
There’s some big party afterward that everyone’s excited about. I listen in silence as Kappy, Zoe, and Lauren discuss what they’ll wear. They invited me, too, but there isn’t a chance my dad will allow me to go, so I didn’t even ask.
