DupliKate (13 page)

“I have all day,” I said. Hell, I had all night too, if that’s what it took to find the disk.

“Well, let’s get started.”

Jake and I both grabbed boxes, practically choking on the thick clouds of dust as we started going through the stuff inside. The first few boxes yielded nothing but old clothes, so we moved them against the wall and kept going.

“So much for lucking out,” Jake said.

“It’s still
possible
…” I answered hopefully.

Yeah, well.

After an hour, Jake’s dad came downstairs with trash bags and said that while we were at it, we might as well do them a favor and start chucking anything that clearly wasn’t needed anymore. After three hours, his mom came downstairs with a pizza and a six-pack of Coke. After four hours, Jake was about to pass out from having been up for a day and half straight, despite all the Cokes and the sour gummi worms he was eating by the handful. But he’d finally stumbled on a group of three boxes labeled “computer games.” We held our breath.

They contained books.

After five hours, we found actual computer games, in
a group of boxes labeled “Jake schoolwork.” The first box also had a bunch of old photos, one of which I held up.

“Wow,” I said innocently, showing Jake a picture of himself as a toddler. He was sporting a shiny black bowl cut and a pink apron over a striped shirt and corduroy pants, and he was holding a spatula.

“Wow yourself,” Jake answered, picking up an old eighth-grade class photo, in which he looked more or less the same as he did now, whereas I was wearing head-to-toe pink, with my hair frizzed out in a triangle around my head. “Besides,” he said, snatching his baby pic out of my hand, “you know you want a man who can cook.”

“I actually want a man with a bowl cut,” I said.

“Yeah, well, that can be arranged.”

We kept on looking. It very much sucked. Jake fell asleep and I had to kick him awake. Then he fell asleep again and I threw a stuffed bear at his head. And then, suddenly, halfway through my search of a giant wooden toy chest, I screamed.

“Found it!” I was holding the SimuLife disk in my hands. “FOUND IT!” I impulsively hugged Jake, who was sitting back on his heels next to a box labeled “crap.” He lost his balance and we tumbled over into a dusty pile of papers. We both sneezed, and a spider skittered out onto the floor next to my head. But I was far too happy to be particularly squicked. I just disentangled myself from Jake,
stood up, and waved my arms around while my feet did a happy dance.

“Thank you!” I said to Jake. “Thank you thank you thank you!” I twirled in a circle, dramatically brandishing the disk.

“You’re welcome,” Jake said, amused. He got up and dusted off his hands. “So are you gonna tell me why you need that?” he asked.

“Yes, at some point,” I said breathlessly, gathering my coat and my bag. “But you’ll think I’m insane and right now I gotta go thank you bye!” I raced up his basement stairs, sprinted out the door, realized that I hadn’t driven, then raced back up the sidewalk to his porch and rang the doorbell.

“Uh, can I get a ride home?” I asked sheepishly when Jake opened the door. He laughed and nodded and showed me the car keys he was already holding.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in my room in front of my computer. I took a deep breath, then stuck the SimuLife disk into the drive. The game booted up and started.

Yes.

“Welcome to SimuLife!” said the window. As annoying background music played and some rather cheap-looking graphics swirled around on-screen, I clicked on “options” and then went to “cancel account.” I clicked it and held my breath.
Please let this work. Please.

A window popped up. “Are you sure you want to cancel this account?” it asked. “Yes,” I said out loud. “Hell to the Y-E-S.” I moved the cursor over to the “yes” box. The arrow hovered over it, waiting for me to click.

But I didn’t click it.

There was something else I had to do first.

THE YALE WEBSITE LISTED ITS ADMISSIONS
office hours as nine to six. I called at nine on the dot. I stood by the window as I waited for someone to answer, gazing out into the bright, windy day. The bare tree branches in the yard were swaying, and a few leaves that our fall raking had missed skittered across the dead grass. Okay, it was more than just a few. My mom and I suck at raking.

Someone picked up the phone. “Admissions.” It was a young-sounding, pleasant female voice.

“Hi,” I said, then paused. Was I really going to do this? It felt like just a split second, but it was enough for the voice to go, “Hello? Hello?”

“Hi,” I said again quickly. “My name is Katerina Larson, and I want to withdraw my application.” There. I’d said it. And it felt surprisingly normal.

“What?” the voice asked.

“I just sent in my application and I was wondering if I could withdraw it,” I repeated.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t give refunds.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t need a refund. I just need to cancel my application.”

There was a long pause. “Can you hold, please?”

“Yep,” I said, but she’d already left. I listened to some weird hybrid of classical and electronic Muzak for a few seconds, and then another voice came on the phone. Equally female, equally pleasant, but much older-sounding.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” I answered. I repeated my request, spelled my name when she asked me to, and gave her my address, phone number, and e-mail.

A keyboard clacked. “Are you sure?” asked the woman. “Have you talked to your parents about this?”

“Yes, I’m sure, and no, I haven’t talked to them,” I said. This was taking longer than I’d thought it would.

“But don’t you want to wait and see if you’re accepted first, and make your decision then?” she asked.

“Well, the thing is, I don’t really know that I even want to go to college this fall, so…” That was the other wrinkle I’d figured out overnight. No Yale next year had turned into no anything (well, no college, at any rate). I’d been on the same path for too long, and it was time to get off of it. Way off.

“You know, you can always defer,” said the woman. “If you get in you can just defer for a year. That way you’ll still have the option.”

“Yeah, I thought of that,” I said patiently, “but I decided on this instead.” I
had
thought about it, and my conclusion was that putting an official one-year limit on the freedom I was about to give myself was basically the same as not giving myself that freedom at all. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the option to reapply…and in a year, I probably would. But I also wanted the option not to. “So could you please just withdraw me?”

“All right,” the woman said after a pause. “Let me just go into your file here.” I waited for the Muzak, but she appeared to have just put the phone down. There was a sort of bonking noise, and then her keyboard clicked away in the background.

“Oh,” she said, picking the phone back up. “It says here that you’ve checked in for your campus visit already. Did you not enjoy it?”

“Oh, no, it was great,” I said, making my voice sound casual even as my stomach knotted. Rina was no doubt bopping all over New Haven right this second, checking out what she assumed would be her hometown for the next four years. “It has more to do with my issues right now, not the school.”

“Ah, the old ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ excuse,” the woman
said, sounding almost amused. “Okay, it’s almost done.” And a few more clacks of the keys later, it was.

Goodbye, Yale.

I hung up, took a deep breath and texted Paul. Starbucks run? I was on a roll of accomplishing big things today—if one thing counted as a roll—and I wanted to keep it going.

Sure, came his reply almost instantly.

A little while later, he met me in the parking lot. I’d beaten him by several minutes and gotten us both coffees already. “Wanna take a walk?” I asked, offering him a cup.

“It’s freezing,” he said, taking it from my hands and bending to give me a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Hence the coffee,” I said. “Come on, nature trail behind the school?”

He raised an eyebrow, but followed me toward the soccer fields anyway. My steps were quick. I was glad to be on my feet and moving. I wanted space and distance all around. Paul had been right though. It was indeed freezing out. The sun was brighter than it had been earlier, but the wind had picked up and we were both shivering. Neither of us was wearing a hat, and I could see Paul’s ears already reddening.

“What’s wrong?” asked Paul, as we crunched through the dead leaves on the trail. I couldn’t decide whether to
warm my hands on my coffee cup or keep them inside my coat sleeves and cradle the cup precariously. The wind was whipping my hair around my face, sticking it to my lip balm, and I couldn’t reach up and unstick it. Bleh.

“I called Yale this morning,” I said. “And withdrew my application.”

Paul stopped walking. “What?” he asked.

“I withdrew my application from Yale,” I repeated, stopping a few feet away from him. He stared at me some more, his eyes puzzled, and my stomach knotted a little, hoping he wouldn’t start yelling.

But his face registered only shock and confusion, and after a long moment, he asked simply, “Why?”

I sighed and leaned back against a tree. “I just…I just don’t think I would be happy there,” I said, my voice shaking a tiny bit. “At least not now. Not this fall.”

“But I’m gonna be there,” Paul said.

“I know.” I waited a moment. “But I won’t.”

From the look on his face, he knew exactly where this was going.

And that’s exactly where it went.

I didn’t have a speech prepared. I didn’t know what I was going to say until the words were coming out of my mouth. All I knew was that I was telling the truth: that I hadn’t felt like myself lately around him; that I didn’t quite know what I wanted right now, but it wasn’t the same thing
I’d been doing for the past three years; that I was somehow confused and sure at the same time, and that it all added up to me not going to Yale, to us not going there together, to us not being together anymore. Paul listened and occasionally nodded, and as I talked, I could see the resignation growing on his face. Resignation and acceptance. No anger, though. No defensiveness.

“Yeah,” he repeated, as I rambled on. “Yeah. Yeah.”

He looked sad. I felt sad. He didn’t look heartbroken though, and that was all I needed to know that I’d done the right thing.

We were still standing on the nature trail, barely twenty feet from where it started. So much for taking a walk.

“So…what’s gonna happen for the rest of the year?” Paul asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was true. I suddenly realized that now neither of us had a guaranteed prom date. It was months away, but that was the first thought that sprang to mind. Silly, but there it was—a reminder that what I’d just done had the huge consequences I’d thought about, and also little ones I hadn’t. Everything I had planned, everything I’d thought was going to happen as I rode out the end of high school, was different now.

But that’s the way I wanted it.

I stared into the trees in the distance for a while, hugging myself for warmth, and then glanced back at Paul. He
looked thoughtful, and, for the first time in the entire time I’d known him, very, very tired.

“Do you want a ride home?” he asked.

“No, I’ll take the bus,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

I was lying. I was going to walk.

My footsteps scratched on the cold, empty sidewalk as I bypassed the bus stop and started the long trudge home. I knew that Paul and I would talk again. After all, we ran in the same group of friends, and neither of us was the type to make things awkward. But still, it felt like an ending. We weren’t getting back together—that I knew.

My phone beeped, and I stopped walking to dig it out of my bag. It was a text from Anne, which read, I have it on good authority that u and jake hooked up. Just want 2 let u know im gonna tell paul.

What?

My eyes widened and I slammed my phone shut, wondering how the hell she’d found out about Jake and Rina. Had someone overheard me and Jake talking in the hallway that day? Had she asked Jake himself, and he didn’t bother to lie? I covered my eyes with my hand for a moment, then started walking again, briskly and blindly moving forward.

And suddenly it dawned on me that it didn’t mat
ter. None of it mattered. Whatever she said, whatever she thought she knew, it wasn’t the truth. And if Paul listened to her, and believed her over me, well…that wasn’t my problem anymore.

I texted her back, Do whatever u want. We broke up.

The phone didn’t beep again.

It took me until late afternoon to get home, and I was surprised to see my mom sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in. My fingers and toes were well on their way to numb, and my cheeks and ears were bright red. But if I was surprised to see her, she was
stunned
to see me. She’d been drinking tea and going through the mail, and she choked on the former and dropped a bunch of the latter. Papers drifted to the floor as she sputtered and finally managed to say hi.

“Hi Mom,” I answered.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, taking off her glasses and setting them on the table. “Why aren’t you in New Haven?”

“Why aren’t you in Kansas City?” I countered, taking off my coat and chucking it over the back of a chair. Her being home totally threw off my plan for the evening, which was to wallow in misery in front of the TV with as many sugary foodstuffs as I could find.

“The deal fell through,” my mom said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Very annoying, but this company’s
notorious for last-minute stuff like this. Back to you—why aren’t you still at Yale?”

I sat down at the table across from her as she leaned over to pick up the mail she’d dropped. “I withdrew my application,” I said. My voice was way calmer than it had been a few hours ago with Paul. Maybe practice made perfect.

My mom’s eyes widened. “What? Why? Oh my God, is something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Seriously. I’m fine. I just…I just decided that I want to take a year off before starting college. You know? I’ve sort of spent the last four years doing exactly the same thing, I want to see if…I just want to do something different for a little bit.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Like…I don’t know,” I said. Not uncertainly, just matter-of-factly. “That’s the whole thing. I just spent all of high school turning myself into some sort of getting-into-college machine. And if I go straight to college, I’m going to turn into some getting-into-grad-school machine. And I mean, is that it? Is that all I do? That’s lame. And it’s extra lame because I don’t even enjoy it.” I took a deep breath. “So now I want to do something else. Something that’s actually me. And I don’t know what it is yet, but I will. Because I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a
lot
lately.”

My mom looked at me, ever so slightly amused at my rambling, but also like she was truly paying attention.
“Hmm,” she said, swirling her tea around in her mug. She took a slow sip, keeping her eyes on my face.

“Are you mad?” I asked. She didn’t look mad, but maybe it was because she was so incredibly mad she’d gone full circle into looking normal again.

“No,” she said. “I’m not mad. I just—are you sure this is what you want?”

“Yes.” I nodded a quick, sharp nod.

“Are you sure you don’t want to just defer for a year?”

“Mom, I had this exact conversation this morning with the woman in the admissions office. Yes. I’m sure.” I stared right at her.

“What if you still go to Yale but then just skip class and party a lot?”

I burst out laughing. “Mom!”

“Okay,” she said. “Just checking.” She smiled a small smile and got up from the table.

Good lord, was that it? That was all the reaction my mom was going to have? I watched to see if she was hiding some sort of soon-to-be-explosive anger, but her face was serene. This was too good to be true; maybe she was in shock right now and the real wrath would rain down on me later?

“Does Paul know?” my mom asked.
Aha, here we go.

“Paul and I broke up,” I said. My voice, again, was surprisingly calm.

“Paul and you
what
?” My mom’s mouth fell open, and suddenly all the astonishment from when I had first walked in was back in her face. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay,” I said.

My mom sat back down at the table and stared at me. “Wait, did you guys break up and that’s why you don’t want to go to Yale? Because, honey, that’s not—”

“No, no, it happened the other way around,” I said hastily. I suddenly realized what it sounded like from her point of view and wanted to set her straight as quickly as possible. “The two things are totally unrelated. I mean, they are related, but they’re not related. Not like that.”

“Okay.” My mom nodded, then got up to make me some tea. She was trying her best to look supportive and encouraging, but I could see tiny threads of concern beginning to creep into her face as she started thinking about all the implications of what I’d decided to do.

“And by the way,” I added quickly, not wanting her to start panicking, “I’m not just going to, like, sit around the house all year or anything. I thought I would travel…or maybe get a job…but whatever I do, I’ll have a whole itinerary and financial plan, okay? I’ll map the whole thing out. So don’t worry.” I gave her my very best “everything’s gonna be fine” face.

My mom smiled. “Oh, I’ll worry, but I’m glad you’ve thought that far ahead, at least. My über-smart daughter.”
She shook her head, then dunked a tea bag into a mug of hot water and handed it to me, along with a little squeeze-bottle of honey.

“Mostly book-smart,” I said wryly. “Kind of another reason I need to skip out on school for a year. You know. So I can become hardened and streetwise and beat down by the system.”

“Ha. Very funny, missy.” My mom sat back down and passed me a spoon.

“Okay, well, maybe not the beat-down part. Or hardened. Streetwise I could probably use.” I stirred honey into my tea and took a sip, then stirred in a bunch more.