The Roommate Situation (28 page)

My dad leans forward, clasping his hands on the table. “Shane, you can play music all you want. And maybe someday you can make money with your music. But if you expect to go from college to a recording contract, you’re in for a big surprise. With a degree in music performance, you’ll find yourself working at McDonald’s while you try to make it in your free time. Why not get a degree in something you can make a living on and not have to scrape by while you do your music in your off hours?”

“I don’t expect to go from college to a recording contract. And that’s not the only way to make money in this business. I could be a session musician, a recording engineer. I could go on to get a music education degree and teach—”

“And make about as much money as you’d make at McDonald’s,” my mom says, half under her breath.

“And you don’t have to wait for a recording contract anymore,” I say. “You can put your own music out. You can record, mix, and master your own stuff and release it on the—”

“You need to look at the financial reality of this,” Dad says. “You can’t afford rent on what McDonald’s pays. You can’t afford car insurance, car payments, groceries—never mind strings for your guitar, recording software and equipment, CD duplication, everything you’re going to need to do this yourself. Think about this intelligently. Putting in forty hours a week flipping burgers or forty hours a week doing research leaves you the same amount of free time, but there’s an enormous difference between scraping by on sixteen K a year or living reasonably well on sixty.”

“When’s the last time you worked just forty hours?” I tilt my chin at him. “Your phone’s always ringing; you’re always sneaking off to the den to deal with e-mails.”

“If I weren’t willing to work so hard, I would make less money, but I’d still make a whole lot more than a McDonald’s cashier.”

His phone buzzes again. Mom shoots him a sharp look. The phone stays facedown, ignored.

Mom puts a hand on my arm. “You need to get your grades up, honey. If you decide you want to go to grad school, you can’t have an academic record like this.”

“I can do better,” I say.

“We know you can, honey.”

“If I’m not taking freaking astronomy and microeconomics and…calculus.” My head aches just saying the word.

“Would you rather go for a business degree?” she asks, and my father mutters, “Worthless. Businesses are hiring economics majors and engineers.”

“I am so not doing engineering.”

“Let’s look over the undergraduate majors again,” she says. “After Christmas, all right? We’ll find something you think you might like to take that would get you a decent job after you graduate. Though I really wish you’d reconsider economics. I think you’re just fighting it because it’s your father’s field, and you’re struggling to forge an identity for yourself.”

“I’m fighting that one because bores the f—crap out of me. Sorry, Dad.”

He lifts his hand and lets it drop.

“Your father and I will look over what’s offered, and then we can discuss this on the weekend.”

“My vote’s still for music performance.” I set my hands on the table and scrape my chair back. “But I’ll sit and listen to what you’ve chosen for me.”

“Shane.”

I slide my laptop off the table and tuck it under my arm. “Night.”

“Shane.”

I toss a wave over my shoulder as I leave the room.

* * * *

I hadn’t realized how exhausting spending an entire day dreading having to give my parents bad news was. When I shut myself in my room with the lights out and lie down with my laptop on my stomach, I close my eyes and throw an arm over my face instead of opening my computer. I don’t want to see my grades, not even long enough to close the browser window.

When I open my eyes and drop my arm, I don’t know if I’ve slept for an hour or ten minutes.

My parents are in their bedroom, down at the end of the hall. The noise that roused me was a raised voice. My mother says something—high in pitch but too much of a burst to make out the words. My dad’s “Keep your voice down, Margaret” comes through more clearly. Mom says something back, but it’s just unintelligible noise.

As I roll over, the laptop slides off me. I pat the nightstand until I find my earbuds. I plug them into the computer and pull myself up to a slouch before popping them in my ears and flipping the screen up. I’m awake—I might as well watch something. Let my parents fight about my future in peace.

Chapter Twenty-Five

We spend Christmas Eve at Aunt Brigit’s house, with Uncle Steven and their two kids, the older of whom, Jessica, just started high school and wanted to know everything there is to know about how college works. Once she got all the pertinent info, she disappeared into her room.

My mother’s been like a roller coaster all day, swooping through the house as she commented on Brigit’s decorations and asked the kids questions, but her voice is like a tightened thread, and her face is strained, especially in the moments when someone else is speaking and she can slip into her thoughts.

It seems a bit much, all this melodrama about my grades.

My father’s sitting back in a chair with a gin and tonic, watching Samuel drive a Tonka truck around the living room rug.

He hasn’t had much to say all day. Probably worn out from the night before. The house had been quiet when the crappy horror movie I’d watched was over. Quiet and dark.

Uncle Steven leans toward me. “So, meet anyone special at school?”

My face heats a little. I push a hand through my hair. “Uh. I’ve been seeing someone, kinda, I guess.”

He elbows me in the ribs. “That’s my boy. Don’t get too caught up with one, though. You’re young. Enjoy it. Before you know it, you’ll be shackled down with a wife, rugrats, and a second mortgage.”

“Steven!” Brigit says from across the room. Her eyes gleam, possibly from the eggnog, but there’s some humor in there too. “As if you weren’t in your thirties when we met. You had plenty of time to sow your oats.”

“I’m not saying I didn’t. I’m just telling the boy here he should do the same. Look how it worked out for me!”

“Uh-huh.”

He leans over and elbows me again. “Seriously. Have your fun while you can. I love your aunt and these troublemakers to death, but have your fun while you can.”

“Okay, Uncle Steven.”

“Do they have coed dorms where you’re at?”

“Uh, the hall I’m in, some of the floors are men and some women. I think there are some halls where they’re coed on the same floor. We’re not one of those schools that does actual coed rooms, though.”

“Wait—there are schools that do that? You could have a cheerleader for a roommate?”

“Yeah, some schools are doing that.”

“Honey, I’m going back to college!” he yells to Aunt Brigit.

“I’m sure the cute young things will just love having a geriatric move in.”

Turning to me again, Steven says, “I bet Margaret crossed those schools off your list first thing, didn’t she?” He gives me a grin and another jab in the ribs.

“I don’t think they were on my list to begin with. So…yeah, she might have filtered them before I saw the list.” She also filtered out all the schools in cool places I wanted to go: California, Chicago, New Orleans. I’m just thankful I didn’t end up at the private college in the next town over. That one
was
on the list, but my grades kept me out.

He shakes his head as if a great tragedy has transpired. “Shoot. I wish they’d had that when I was in school.”

Aunt Brigit says, “You would have hated it. How would you get her to go home in the morning if she lived five feet away?”

“Good point! Good point! I knew I married that woman for her brains.”

“Uh-huh,” she says again.

My mother, reanimating suddenly, straightens in her seat. “I don’t think it’s right at all, putting eighteen-year-old boys full of hormones in the same rooms as young girls. I’d like to see the pregnancy and STD statistics for those schools. And the rape reports! Even if your roommate respects you enough to keep his hands off, what about his friends? Whom he’ll surely have over. And I know they’re drinking on campus, legal age or not. It’s a toxic combination—coed rooms, alcohol, and even drugs.”

“Surely there’s an age cutoff for that,” Brigit says. “They must not allow it in the freshman dorms, at least.”

“I should hope not.” Mom rubs a damp spot on her slacks with her thumb, holding her ginger ale in the air with her other hand.

“After freshman year,” Steven says, “he can live wherever he wants anyway. Ain’t that right, Shane?”

“Yeah. Some friends and I were talking about renting a house, actually. Chuck wants to go into business putting on DIY concerts—”

“DI what?” my mother says, squinting a little.

“Concerts. You know, with bands. So he needs the space—”

“Concerts in the house? What landlord is going to allow that?” She looks toward Brigit for backup, but Brigit is busy unjamming a Matchbox car that’s gotten stuck in the Tonka truck’s wheel.

“—and split four ways,” I continue, “the rent would probably be cheaper than living in the dorms, and I wouldn’t have to buy a meal plan—”

“That meal plan makes sure you eat properly,” my mother says, even though I’m not talking to her.

“I think I’m capable of that without being forced to buy overpriced burritos from the dining hall.”

“We’ll talk about your living arrangements for next year when the time comes. There are a lot of advantages to living on campus—transportation, access to the library and other facilities, a resident assistant to address any problems you might have…”

Honest to God, I was not originally talking to her. “Anyway,” I say to Uncle Steve, “that’s what we were talking about just before break—finding a house near the school for the four of us to rent next year.”

“Which four would that be?” my mother asks.

Oh, here we go. “Chuck and Pete and maybe Derek, though Derek kind of likes the dorms. He says it’s easier.”

“Well, I’m with him on that.”

“You’re with him on something, then,” I say.

“Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

“Unless it’s digital,” Jessica says, her bare heels pounding the floor as she crosses the room. She plops herself between me and Uncle Steven, never mind that there’s not enough room between us. At least my ribs will be spared Steven’s elbow.

“Derek,” my mother says, “is clearly analog.” As if that makes any sense whatsoever.

“Could you please stop putting him down?” I say. “I like Derek.”

“Yes, we know.”

“You mean,
like
him like him?” Jessica teases with a grin.

I knuckle her in the ribs—ribs that are probably conditioned to it, considering Steven’s elbow-jutting. “Shush, you.”

“Shay-ayne’s got a boyfriend,” she sings. “Who tops?”

Oh God.

“Jessica!” Brigit says. Her head is facing Jess, but her eyes point—pointedly—over at my mother.

“That would be all we’d need,” my mom says with a long sigh. She looks at me then. “He does like girls, doesn’t he?”

“He had a girlfriend in high school who taught him how to burn designs into leather. They were going to open a shop together.”

“Is that what he sells online?” she asks.

“Yeah, belts and wallets and stuff.”

“How crafty,” Jessica says, grinding her knuckles into my thigh. I jump and grab her wrist away.

“He rides a motorcycle and smokes,” my mother tells Brigit. “Looks like a thug right out of an old picture.”

“I’m liking him better and better,” Jessica says, “now that he’s not just a fairy doodling butterflies on belts.”

“His mother isn’t in the picture,” my mother says to Brigit, with a meaningful look under her raised eyebrows.

“When’s Santa coming?” Samuel asks, flopping onto his back on the rug, the truck forgotten.

“I thought you didn’t believe in Santa anymore,” Jessica says.

“If he’s going to bring me presents, I can believe a while longer.”

Jess leans against me, her breath like strawberry candy as she whispers, “Shay-ayne’s got a boyfriend,” in my ear.

I hitch my shoulder up to push her away before putting my mouth next to her ear. “Jess-sick-a only wishes she did.”

“Rat turd,” she says and sticks her tongue out at me.

* * * *

Christmas morning, my mom is still “off”—trying too hard to force a cheerful attitude. She’s as bright and brittle as the ribbon candy my grandfather used to like to get at Christmas.

My dad’s still quiet. There’s a stiff politeness when they speak to each other, and they do it only in perfunctory phrases. Maybe Dad stuck up for me about music. Or maybe—and this would be a surprise—it had been my mom. I’m content to let them fight it out between themselves and see what comes of it when we pick up the conversation again on Saturday.

In the meantime: Christmas service at church, then a sedate opening of gifts. My parents got me some sweaters, a new pair of jeans, a stocking full of toiletries, and an expensive pair of noise-canceling headphones.

“I thought they would block out distractions better than those little things you put in your ears,” my mom says.

“Yeah. Wow. These are great.”

“The gentleman at the store said these were the best sounding on the market, and comfortable too, so you can wear them for long study sessions and not worry about being disturbed. I was going to get you a few CDs of nice instrumental music to go with them, but I wasn’t sure if you had anything to play CDs on anymore?”

Not as long as I can’t take my stereo to school. Instead I say, “No, my Mac doesn’t have a CD drive.”

“That’s what I thought. For what that cost, I still can’t believe they left that out. There’s an iTunes card in your stocking. Go on and pick yourself out something—something instrumental, so it’s not distracting. I know if I’m playing music while I do something, I wind up singing along!” She laughs, touching her fingers to her hair.

“Thanks, Mom. And Dad.”

Dad nods.

“I didn’t get you much,” I say.

“I would have liked a few more As,” she says. “That would have been a nice Christmas present. Excelling in the history of rock music won’t get you far in life, I’m afraid.”