The Geography of You and Me

Dad tilted his head to one side, clearly confused. The conversation had started with Owen needing money, and now here he was refusing it. “Why not?”


“Because I’m not graduating.” Owen shook his head. “I mean—I am, technically. But I’m not going to the ceremony.”

“Why not?” he asked. “It’s such a big deal.”

“Not to me,” Owen told him. “Not anymore.”

Dad’s eyes went soft behind his glasses as he finally understood. “Ah,” he said, blinking a few times. Outside, the sun emerged from behind the clouds, filling the room with an orangey light, and they sat there as the pancakes went cold on their plates and the clock on the wall—the one from their kitchen back home—marched ahead.

Eventually, Dad shrugged. “Well, who cares about a stupid cap and gown, anyway?”

“Thanks,” Owen said gratefully.

“Besides, she would have hated it,” he said. “All that pomp and ceremony.”

“Circumstance. Pomp and circumstance.”

“Whatever,” he said. “It’s the pomp that’s the real problem.”

Owen laughed. “She would have loved it.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “She would have. But she’d have been proud of you either way. Just like I am.”

To Owen’s surprise, Dad scraped back his chair then and walked over to one of the drawers beneath the toaster. He paused there for a moment, his shoulders rising and falling, before turning around and holding out a pale blue box.

“Sorry it’s not wrapped,” he said. “I was going to wait till graduation, but now…”

Owen reached for it, turning it around to where a plastic window showed a jumble of glow-in-the-dark stars. He stared at it, gripping the edges of the box so hard that the edges bent under his fingers.

“I tried to pry the old ones off the ceiling back home,” Dad said, returning to his seat. “But they were stuck on pretty tight. I guess whoever lives there next is going to fall asleep under them, too.”

There was a lump in Owen’s throat. “That’s kind of cool.”

“Anyway, I’m sure no self-respecting astronomy major goes to sleep under fake stars,” Dad said, gesturing at the box, “but you can always put them up here, for whenever you come home.”

“Thank you,” he said, the words a little wobbly. “I love them.”

They were both quiet for a moment, lost in their own separate memories, but then Owen remembered where this had all started, and he cleared his throat.

“Dad?”

His father looked up. “Yeah?”

“This is great,” he said, rattling the box. “Really. And I don’t want to sound greedy, but the thing is… I could still use that money. Or at least some of it.”

“For what?” he asked with a frown, and Owen coughed into his hand.

“It’s just…”

“What?”

He sighed. “There’s this girl.…”

To his astonishment, Dad began to laugh. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, his shoulders shaking.

“What?” Owen asked, confused. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve just been wondering when you’d get around to telling me about her.”

He stared at him, unable to hide his surprise. “You knew?”

“Of course I knew.”

“I thought you were too busy.…”

“Being sad?”

Owen gave him a rueful grin. “Well… yeah.”

“You know what made me less sad?”

“What?”

“Seeing you happy,” he told him. “And for a while there, it seemed like those postcards were the only things that did the trick.”

Owen wasn’t sure what to say, but before he could find the words, Dad leaned forward in his seat, reaching into his back pocket for his cracked leather wallet, which he tossed onto the table. It landed heavily beside the bottle of syrup and they both stared at it for a moment. Then Dad raised his glass of orange juice in a toast.

“Happy Graduation,” he said. “Now go get her.”





42


Lucy woke in the last hour of the flight, blinking into the gray haze of the quiet airplane. Beside her, the window shade was open a few inches, and she yawned as she looked out at the steep banks of clouds moving past like dreamy mountain ranges. On the screen in front of her, a timer ticked down the minutes until they reached New York. It wouldn’t be long.

For sixteen years, Lucy had hardly ventured off the island of Manhattan, and now, eight months and five countries later, she was finally returning. She reached for the bag at her feet, pulling out her old copy of The Catcher in the Rye—her security blanket, her teddy bear—but instead of opening it, she just held it in her lap, gripping the edges.

Soon, she would be seeing the apartment where she grew up, the building she’d lived in her whole life, and the neighborhood she’d known so well, but it didn’t feel the way she thought it would. It didn’t feel like going home.