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“So you’re telling me that you would eat failure after failure, without end, until you were old and gray?” I asked. “You wouldn’t, say, go back to school? Get your degree and a nice safe job? Take a gap year and travel? I’m sure your parents would support you in any of those options.”
“Of course I wouldn’t do any of those things,” he said, clearly insulted. “I’m on my own in the world. There’s no going back to my former life.”
This time the metal lie balloon was so big it would have killed a small flock of birds had it been solid. I watched it pulse and throb before returning to the conversation at hand.
“See, that’s the difference, Ax,” I said. “People like you have the luxury of failing more than once. The world will pick you up, dust you off, and send you on your way, nothing lost and nothing gained. You get to keep going, and going, until you get the result you want. And if you do decide to give up, there’s a nice cushion for you to land on. That’s why you have mottoes like ‘fail fast,’ and ‘failure is the best teacher.’
“People like me don’t get to fail,” I continued. “Not ever. When people like me fail, we don’t bounce off a soft surface. We hit the ground hard. We lose so very much. We don’t survive long enough to learn anything.”
I peered as far down my nose I could at my own mouth. It was clear. Maybe the detection didn’t work on me to begin with.
Ax got up and dusted his hands off. He didn’t have to waste his time listening to this.
“I get it,” he said. “The answer is no. Frankly, I’m disappointed you’ve made this into some kind of bizarre class resentment thing. We don’t discriminate by socioeconomic background.”
You might not care about your advantages, my dude, I thought to myself. But the Universe we share sure as hell does.
In one small irony, a mote on the scales of life, Ax stumbled a bit in his hurry to leave. Not a lot. The more spectacular finale would have been if he’d tumbled back into the fountain and gotten soaking wet. It would have been the finale to the kind of kids’ movies I used to watch, where the jerk villain got messy as a comeuppance.
His little pitch forward, however, did take him far enough that he ran into the steadying hand of Quentin, who he’d done his best to pretend wasn’t there. Quentin dusted him off and grinned at him like an anglerfish.
“Easy there, chief,” he said to Ax. “You almost had a bit of bad luck. Can’t have that now, can we?”
Only Quentin could scare someone that bad by being that friendly. My hundred thousand dollars fled the scene. We watched him go.
“Are you sure about this?” Quentin said. “Maybe it was a risk worth taking after all.”
“I’m sure it’ll keep me up at night,” I said, completely serious.
30
I was planning to take the train home. That was what we’d agreed upon. Instead I got a call with an unpleasant surprise.
Both my parents had come to pick me up at the college. In the same car no less. Mom must have been dying.
In the parking lot, I saw my dad standing outside his car. I could make out my mom’s silhouette in the passenger’s seat. I walked over to them. Most of the other people around were students coming in the other direction, returning to school after their weekend trips off-campus. They carried empty picnic coolers and bags of car trash. One guy struggled to take his surfboard off his roof rack.
I got into the back seat of Dad’s car. It took me a moment. I hadn’t ridden like this in years, Dad driving and Mom in the front. It regressed me to my younger years like a sledgehammer. The hairs on my neck stood on end. We were silent for a minute, until Dad got past the local town traffic and merged with the highway traffic.
“How was your trip?” Mom said.
“How’s your heart?” I snapped.
“Genie!” Mom shrieked.
“Dears,” Dad pleaded.
We hadn’t lost our touch. The reunited band was playing its greatest hits right off the bat.
And then Mom did something weird. She calmed herself and de-escalated. “Genie, I want to know how your trip was,” she said. “That’s all.”
Jesus, she really was dying. I was being stupid, provoking her to anger. What was I trying to do, push her blood pressure over the edge?
I fought back against the suffocating grip of childhood this car had me in, and rattled off banalities. “The trip was great,” I said. “I learned a lot. Ji-Hyun was a wonderful host. Don’t let me forget to send her a thank-you gift.”
“I won’t,” Mom said. “And how was the party? Did you have fun? Did you drink a lot?”
I nearly kicked the car door open so I could jump out while it was still moving. That’s why they’d both come. My parents had found out that I’d lied by omission about a party with alcohol and leering college boys. They were going to drive me out to the desert, and burying my body was a two-person job.
