“Mitchell, I’m not going to Vanderbilt.” The words rang in the silence following them.
A dark storm brewed in his eyes, but he made no reply at all—just stared at me. While I couldn’t blame him for being stunned, his unrelenting muteness unnerved me.
“I’m not breaking up with you,” I continued. “I’m just choosing a different graduate studies route. We can make this work—lots of couples maintain long-distance relationships successfully. We should both be able to choose to do what we want with our lives and careers, you at Vanderbilt and me—”
“This is all or nothing.” The words seemed to come from some unseen source. The muscles in his face had hardened into a mask of anger. His lips hadn’t moved. “All or nothing, Pearl.”
I’d expected frustration—resentment even, that I was canceling our plans, but I hadn’t anticipated an ultimatum. His threat made no sense. Success in medical school required a solid commitment. We both knew this. And I knew I didn’t feel it. “Then I guess it’s nothing,” I said, throat clogged with unshed tears.
“You bitch!”
I flinched, mouth falling open, certain everyone in the sorority house had heard him—and bonus, since it was one a.m., nearly everyone was home.
He jumped up, roaring, “You selfish bitch!”
I wanted to yell back, to tell him to get out, get out now, but I was immobilized except for the tremors hurtling down my arms and legs. I’d never been genuinely afraid of Mitchell before. Right then, I was terrified.
He twisted, lurching a step back.
Foolishly, I thought he was leaving and recognized his intention too late. “Mitchell, no!” I cried as he grabbed my foot-long lightning whelk shell and slammed it against my bedroom wall, cracking it at the base of the spire.
He was reaching for the pieces as my sorority president and her boyfriend burst into the room. D.J., wearing nothing but boxers, wrenched Mitchell’s arms up behind his back and escorted him out of the house forcibly, repeating, “Chill the fuck out, Upstone, or I’ll do it for you.”
As my sisters gathered in the hallway, wide-eyed and murmuring, Katie handed me the shell halves. “You okay?”
I nodded, fitting the two halves together like puzzle pieces. I’d brought that whelk to school in tenth grade, during a marine-science unit in biology. While classmates admired the treasure in my hands, stretching fingers to trace the pale stripes on its surface as I walked around the room with it, Mr. Quinn told us that its previous sea snail inhabitant must have lived at least twenty years to grow a home that size. Longer than I’d been alive.
“Pearl, he didn’t—hit you or anything, right?”
I shook my head, a tear trailing down my cheek. Mitchell’s choice of the one item in my room most representing home to me hadn’t been an accident. Despite my useless exclamation, I’d known the minute he’d stretched toward the top of my bookcase that I was too late to prevent his retaliation, too late to wish I’d initiated the conversation somewhere else. His tantrum had dispelled any remorse I’d felt for abandoning our plans.
When he texted an apology, I didn’t reply. His calls went to voice mail, and I deleted them without listening. My sisters wouldn’t let him through the door of our house, and rumor had it that his fraternity president had threatened to revoke his membership if he didn’t leave me alone. There’d been an incident the previous fall with a sophomore in their frat who’d stalked one girl and raped another—a freshman in my sorority who transferred away at the end of the semester. After a damage control meeting with their chapter advisor and an alumni mentor, the frat leaders weren’t taking any chances.
“D.J. says he and Dean are going zero tolerance until they graduate in May.” Katie squeezed my shoulder. “Four months and we’re outta here, girl. God knows I don’t want another drop of drama, but I’d swear on a stack of Bibles autographed by Jesus himself—I’ll kick Mitchell’s ass all the way down the street if he so much as steps on the goddamned lawn.”
Mitchell and I avoided each other for the remainder of our last semester—including ninety-minute lectures in animal virology every Tuesday and Thursday, and eight awkward hours of experimental physiology lab every Wednesday. Graduation, three days ago, had been a relief—though I spent two guilt-ridden days trying and failing to ignore Mama’s bliss about my impending ascension to med school. I couldn’t ruin graduation weekend for either of us by dumping the truth on her, but my time had run out.
College was done. Mitchell and I had gone our separate ways. I’d informed Vanderbilt that I wouldn’t be attending, hopefully making some waitlisted applicant’s dream come true. Now there was only one thing left to do.
Tell my mother.
Chapter Two
Boyce
I’m not a hero.
That description fit my brother, Brent, all his life, but not me. As a kid, I wanted to be like him—thought I could be, even, if I aped everything he did. By the time he was fourteen, he was close to earning his Eagle Scout rank, so I joined Cub Scouts. Dad wouldn’t pay for the fees and uniform, so Brent let me bag grass on the lawns he mowed so I could earn the money for it myself. Years later, I worked out that he’d removed the grass catcher from the mower so he could pay me out of his own earnings to rake and bag that grass.
In second grade, I got damned intense about earning merit badges, but Mom was done sewing the patches on. When I brought home the first one, she lifted her water-crinkled hands from a sink of soapy dishes and told me, “I’ve got a crap-ton of stretch marks and a bigger ass thanks to you boys. I’m not scarring my fingers up just to sew all those freakin’ patches on. Do it yourself like your brother does.”