On the Road to Find Out (13 page)

I waited for him to tell me how good it was and maybe to point out a typo or a missing word.

He seemed uncomfortable. He said, “This essay is bland and typical. I don't see enough of the Alice I know—and sometimes like—in it. It's called a personal statement, but there's nothing really and truly personal in it.”

I sat for another minute, said, “Thank you for your opinion,” grabbed the paper back, and went up to my room.

 

10

Walter-the-Man acted like he had the inside scoop and was an expert on admissions. He tended to
mansplain
. That should be an SAT word. It means “to explain something with complete and utter confidence even if you don't know what you're talking about.” In fairness, it's not only men who do this. I think sometimes I may be guilty of mansplaining.

I don't know why Walter-the-Man was so interested in the whole admissions thing—he didn't have any kids and the only non-middle-aged person he knew was me. When I was younger, Mom kept saying we were going to need him “in a couple of years” and she'd tilt her head in my direction. I only half listened to the stories because they seemed so crazy.

According to Deborah as channeled by Walter-the-Man, the numbers were stacked against the applicants and no one could count on getting in. She said although 80 percent of the kids could do the work if they were admitted, they accepted more like 20 percent. She said you could take the entire first-year class, wipe it out, and select one just as good from the pool of those who'd been rejected for the same class.

She said all the kids looked alike. They all took the same courses, got the same grades and test scores. They were all at the top of their class, all National Merit Scholars; they all excelled and exhibited leadership in the same extracurricular activities, and they even wrote their essays on similar topics. The dead-grandma essay. The baseball = life riff.

One of the things Deborah said, according to Walter-the-Man, was that top schools weren't looking for well-rounded kids; they wanted a well-rounded class. This meant they were more inclined to take applicants who were “angular” or “well lopsided,” people who had gotten interested in something and pursued it to the nth degree.

My application to Yale—and the applications I had submitted at the last minute to the other colleges that would no doubt
REJECT
me in April—probably made me look as typical as you could get. Except I was worse than typical. I lacked the expected laundry list of extracurricular activities. I had shown no leadership. I had founded no organizations. I had not written a novel or discovered a protein. I had not tried to broker a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine.

And I wrote my essay about how much I hated
The Catcher in the Rye
. I thought it was ironic that Holden goes around calling everyone a phony when he's the biggest phony of them all. He's nice and polite to people but all he does is pass judgment on them. He's a pissed-off little asshole. No one wants to hang out with someone who's crabby all the time.

I should know. These days I can't even stand to be with myself.

 

11

It had been three weeks since the Red Dress Run, with no Miles/Potato sightings. So I decided to run along Quarrier toward downtown.

Maybe it was the change in route, or maybe the wind was at my back, or maybe—could it be?—I was getting better, but OMG it felt effortless. My legs didn't hurt and my breathing was normal and I was covering ground like I never had before. I was able to keep it up for a long time without slowing down, not like my short sprints where I'd run fast for a block and then have to pant bent over with my hands on my knees. I could keep up this pace for a while. It was amazing.

After getting chased by a golden retriever for about two blocks—I didn't feel threatened, since he was wagging his tail and carrying a rawhide bone—and having an old couple out walking tell me that I was a good girl for getting exercise, I ended up at Joan's store. I figured I might take a look to see what kind of running equipment was available. It was after school, around 4:30 on Wednesday, and there weren't many people around. When I walked in, the store was completely empty. The bell on the door jingled, but still, nothing.

I waited for a few minutes and thought I'd open the door again, but then Joan popped out from behind a curtain carrying four boxes of shoes that rose above her head.

I coughed, not wanting to scare her, and she dropped the boxes.

“Sorry,” I said, and went to help her restack.

“Alice! Great to see you! I didn't hear you come in. I've been dealing with inventory that's backing up because I lost—” And she stopped and looked at me.

“You lost?” I let my question trail off, thinking about the conversation I'd overheard at the race and wondering what she was going to say next.

“Hey,” she said, standing up straight and putting her hands on her tiny waist. I could see her thinking. “You got any spare time?”

I lowered my head in a slow nod.

“I lost one of my part-time employees—he decided to go live at altitude and train in Flagstaff, Arizona. He was only working a few hours a few days a week and I thought I'd be fine without him, but”—she swept an arm toward the boxes on the floor—“it turns out I was wrong. Interested in coming in Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings for a couple hours?”

A job? In the summer I sometimes stopped in at my dad's law office and helped out by filing papers and making copies and scanning materials. I hadn't ever had a real job.

“It's not glamorous. Mostly unpacking merchandise, logging inventory, pricing things, restocking, and tidying up the store.” She looked at me apologetically and said, “Plus some vacuuming and taking out the trash.”

I said, “Trash is something I can do.”

“You'll be able to pick up a lot of useful information. And you'll get to know the local running community because, sooner or later, everyone comes into the store.”

She stepped around the boxes, shoved the curtain aside, and showed me into the stockroom, which was stuffed with more boxes and clothes in plastic wrappers. “It's a bit of a mess right now,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and then I caught myself. “I mean, not yes it's a mess,” though of course, it was. “Yes, I'd love to work here. I mean, I'll have to ask my parents, but I'm sure it will be fine.”

“Fabulous!” Joan said in her exclamation-pointed voice. “It will only be until June when my regulars come back from college. I promised the kids who've worked for me during high school they'll always have a summer job here if they want it. But still, nothing will make you feel more like a runner than hanging around with other runners. That's one of the things that separates us from the joggers. It's not speed. It's that—” and she pointed to the back wall of the store, which had all the pieces of paper with big block numbers on them.

Then she looked at me with an impish smile and said, “Did you have fun with Miles at the Red Dress Run?”

“Sure,” I said, and quickly pointed to the back wall to distract her from this sensitive territory. “So what's up with that?”

It worked. She turned and left the subject of Miles.

“That's my favorite part of the store. After we'd been open for a while, and people would come in and tell us about their races, I decided to create a place for them to share their achievements. I ask folks to bring in the bibs from their first race—or the race that made them start to think of themselves as runners, or the race where they ran their PR.”

She must have seen my confusion because she said, “A PR is a personal record—the fastest time you've run in a given event. These are all from races customers have run. I encourage them to write their name on the number, to show everyone they've done it, they made it to the starting line. That's what it's all about as far as I'm concerned. Getting to the start. Once the gun goes off, experienced racers know anything can happen. You could have stomach problems. It can be crazy hot. Or start pouring rain. You might be getting a cold. Or getting over one. You could just have a bad day. Someone else could be having a great one. But if you can get yourself to the start line, you've made it. After that, there is no failure.”

We had moved over to the wall, blanketed thick with these numbers. She said, “Some folks write down the words or phrases that helped get them through the race.”

I saw lots of them:

My sport is what yours does for punishment

I did it!

Do or Do Not. There is No Try

Failure is not an option

Tall and strong

What doesn't kill me makes me stronger

Stay focused

Kick butt

Running is my happy hour

Pain is temporary but pride is forever

Never give up

Hills are my friend

Pain is what I have for breakfast

Pain is weakness leaving the body

Pain feels so much better than regret

Pain now beer later

Unbreakable

This is exactly where I want to be

Mitochondria, not hypochondria

I'll rest when I'm dead

If it was easy everyone would do it

A hero holds on one minute longer

The body achieves what the mind believes

When your legs give out, run with your heart

Today is my day

I think I can I think I can I think I can

I will survive

Dig deeper

One mile at a time

Fast feet

Run like a girl

Never back down

I could do this all day long

I run for chocolate

I am a runner

Believe

Endure

Flow

Breathe

Run

Some of the numbers said,
In memory of
or
In honor of
and there were names.
Mom. Dad. My uncle Tim. Aunt Mary. Grandma. Grandpa. Rusty. Jean. David. William. Michelle. Ricardo
. There were lots and lots of numbers that said
Ricardo
.

Joan saw me looking at them.

“Ricardo, my late husband,” she said. “I'll tell you about him sometime.”

 

12

Because I had run to the store, I had to run back home, and even though I was excited about my new job—we decided my first day would be Saturday morning—it was hard to start running again after standing around inside for so long. After my
exultant
(“triumphantly happy”) dash through downtown on the way there, I ended up having to switch off walking and running to get back and it took a long time.

When I got home my father and Jenni were skittering around the kitchen. They had a zillion pots on the stove and Jenni wore cake batter on her cheek.

Dad said, “Finally.”

Jenni said, “Did you forget?”

“Forget what?”

“She forgot,” Jenni said to Dad, and he gave me a look that made me feel small. Dad doesn't have to say much for me to know when I've disappointed him.

“Your mom's birthday? We're making her favorite foods? You were supposed to pick up some bacon chocolate bars. That was your idea—what you thought you could contribute.”

Crap. Double-triple-cherry-on-top crap. There had been a lot of discussion about what to do for my mother's birthday. Jenni had a ton of ideas and she and Dad had been planning it for weeks. While they were having these conversations I wouldn't really listen but would frequently point out that I had nothing to contribute.

Jenni finally said I was being a pill and could I please at least pretend to be interested. Eventually I said since Mom liked bacon and chocolate, I would get her some of these fancy candy bars that combined them. And now I'd totally forgotten.

I'd also forgotten to get her a gift.

“Oops,” I said.

Dad looked at me again for a minute, shook his head, and went back to his root vegetables. My mom loves this thing he makes that's potatoes with parsnips and rutabagas mixed in. He bakes it with a crust of Parmesan cheese and bread crumbs on top. A mush of white vegetables with white cheese.

Yummy.

Not.

“It's okay,” said Jenni. “You can help me with the cake.”

When Jenni and I first started watching the TV show
Cake Boss
, she was all about learning how to make fondant, the moldable icing the cake boss used like clay. We got the ingredients and she spent a lot of time messing around with them. You make it into a big sheet, and you can cut, roll, or shape it into whatever you want.

For my birthday last year, she made a cake that looked like the bottom of Walter's cage. It had a fondant replica of his sleeping hut, his food bowl, chunks of his pellets (made from ground nuts and honey, which he preferred to his real food), and a perfect likeness of the little dude himself. I brought him downstairs and allowed him to eat part of his fondant tail, which was:

  1.  Cleaner than the real thing.

  2.  Kind of gross to watch him eating something that looked so real.

  3.  Delicious.

“Gotta get Walter,” I said, and before Dad could turn around to look at me again, I ran upstairs. I heard Jenni calling after me but I pretended I didn't.

When I got to my room, I stripped off my running clothes, opened Walter's cage, and hopped into the shower. I couldn't believe I had forgotten about my mother's birthday because it was a big deal for her.