Lee sulked through the rest of our main course—and, to my astonishment, so did Noah. They both pulled faces and scowled and grumbled under their breath, stabbed at their food, and cast the occasional glare at their parents.
They looked so alike in that moment that it was almost funny.
Almost.
Rachel, for her part, tried to keep the mood up. She tried to talk to Lee a few times, and when that didn’t work, she talked to his parents with an enthusiasm that bordered on manic as she tried to beat past the silence that had settled.
I was still trying to get my head around it all.
Selling the beach house? I never thought that would ever be an option. It wasthe beach house.It was where we’d spent pretty much every summer of our lives. Some of my best memories had happened there. It was where Lee and I first swam without floaties! Where I got stung by a jellyfish when I was nine and made Noah give me a piggyback ride all the way back to the house. Where Lee got his first kiss, with a Latina lifeguard from upstate whose namenoneof us could remember now.
I glanced over at Noah, whose jaw was clenched. When we were growing up and Noah suddenly got too cool to hang out with us anymore, the beach house had been the one place where everything felt like it used to when we were still kids, where he’d hang out with us.
It was where we’d first drunk beer, snuck from a cooler one Fourth of July when we were thirteen—when Noah was starting to become a cool guy at school, breaking all the rules, but not so cool he couldn’t include us in his little heist. (Although he had drawn the line at having us tag along to any parties he went to later that same summer.)
They couldn’t justsell.That wasn’t how it worked. Not for a place like the beach house.
It was so much more than just a piece of land, a bungalow with peeling paint and a dodgy pool filter.
My phone rang. A flash of guilt shot through me for not putting it on silent, but instead of apologizing and shoving the phone back into my purse, I took the excuse to leave the table. “I’m just gonna take this. I’ll be right back.”
I tried not to run away from the sour mood hanging over our table.
It was an unknown number, but I answered anyway. “Hello?”
“Hi. Is this Miss Evans?” a lady’s voice asked curtly.
“Er, yes. Speaking.”
“Miss Evans, this is Donna Washington from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Berkeley.”
Oh crap.Crap, crap, crap!
“Uh…”
I gritted my teeth, my other hand coming up to clutch my cell phone. I cast a quick glance over my shoulder. Everyone was still sitting at the table, well out of earshot.
“I’ve tried to get ahold of you several times in the last few weeks.”
My stomach clenched. I wondered if I was about to puke my overpriced, fancy meal all over the wall in front of me. Gulping, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve…I’ve just been, like, insanely busy. You know, graduation and…and stuff.”
Wow, Elle, great answer. It’s easy to see how you got into places like Berkeley and Harvard with excuses like that.
“I’m sure you’re already aware, if you’ve received my voice mails and our emails, that this call is to follow up on your decision regarding your attendance at Berkeley, starting in the fall.”
“Well, I…I was wondering if maybe…maybe it’s possible to have a little extension?”
Donna Washington sounded like she was not taking any of my petty, indecisive BS today. Her already-curt tone became even more clipped. “We’ve already granted you an extension beyond the usual deliberation period, Ms. Evans.”
My hands began to sweat. “I…I know, and I really appreciate that, but please, I’m just…I just got off the wait-list somewhere else today, and I need theteensiestbit more time. Please—”
“Ms. Evans,” Donna Washington interrupted, striking absoluteterrorin me for a second, “I need to inform you that you have until Monday to accept your offer. If we do not hear from you by then, we will have no choice but to offer your spot to a wait-listed student.”
She waited for my answer. I was a little surprised; I half expected her to hang up the phone after that last piece.
“I understand,” I told her in a small voice. “Thank you.”
I stayed there for another minute after hanging up. My breathing was uneven and my palms were sweating. I wiped them on my jeans.
