4.

By the end of March of my junior year, I had a life-ruining B average. I’d finished the first semester in December with a B-plus, not great compared to everyone else but good enough for me and, more importantly, good enough for Dad.

Dad was forever dreaming up ways in which I could be improved. That was the secret to our relationship. It’s what kept him interested.

I went to a “specialized high school” for math and science geeks, but I hated math and was terrible at it. If Dad hadn’t quizzed me for a year with those little flash cards held up to his chin, I never would have gotten in. Even though I always majorly screwed up in math, I was usually able to offset it with As or A-pluses in English and history and dumb, extraneous classes like metal shop. But by the end of March of my junior year, I had a B-plus in biochemistry, a C-plus in geometry, a measly B in English and a B-plus in history. I was screwed.

The problem was, I’d stopped doing homework. Will was a second-semester senior and had none, so it became too hard to face mine. I didn’t want to do homework. I wanted to be with him. We took long walks after school to the East Village for French fries, or to a café between our place and Dad’s, where we drank hot chocolate and lounged for hours on the black velvet couch in the back. The homework was always there, the obscure stress of not doing it getting louder and louder as the afternoons wore on.

When the March grades came in, Mom called Dad and he cornered me at one of our Wednesday-night dinners.

“Look, Thea, you need to try harder,” he said, yanking his tie loose. “You’re a junior. This is your most important year, for Christ’s sake. The grades at the end of this semester are crucial. This is it, kiddo, you know that. You’ve got to get it back up to at least a B-plus. At least! I don’t know what’s going on—Mom says you’ve got some new boyfriend. Maybe you’re going through something, but you’ve got to try harder.”

“I am trying,” I squealed, pissed that Mom had told him about Will.

“What’s the situation with the tutors?” he asked, curling his hands into problem-solving fists.

“I’m going to Binder for biochem and geometry.”

“He does both?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“How often do you go?”

“Once a week. We do an hour on each.”

“That’s it?” he demanded, shoving his glasses up the bridge of his thin, narrow nose.

“That’s enough.” I thought of Mr. Binder sitting at his dining room table in his boiling hot apartment, waiting for me in his yellow undershirt. How my elbows would get sore from leaning on his lace tablecloth. If Will, science-fair-finalist Will, found out I had a tutor, I thought, he would realize what a dumbass I truly was and that would be it. Game over. I had a fantasy of going to some progressive private school where my homework would be to read Madame Bovary and to create and perform an interpretive dance based on it. But Dad believed in public education. “If you don’t go, who will?” he said. He actually believed that if he sent his daughter to public school, other investment bankers would follow.

“Well, I’ll say it once again, this semester is crucial, Thea,” he said, pausing with his hands in the air.

“I know, I know,” I said, watching him chew. He always looked like he was grinding his teeth rather than eating.

“So what’s your first choice these days?” Dad asked, taking a roll from the basket in front of us.

“I don’t know,” I said, relieved he’d changed the subject but annoyed at his lame, forced switch to the aspirational, his fallback. “I’m thinking it might be good to stay in New York.”

“What about Wesleyan?” Dad had gone to Wesleyan. We both knew it was rapidly becoming a pipe dream, given my plummeting grades, but he liked to dream.

“I’m a New Yorker. A city girl. I think I’d get bored.”

“Hardly,” he said.

“NYU’s still within my reach if I do well on the SATs. And I’d be close to home.”

He threw salt from the shaker onto his roll in jerky bursts, as though the salt weren’t coming out.

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s get cracking on the grades so we have some options, shall we?”

“ ‘Let’s’? I believe it’s ‘You get cracking, Thea.’ Last I checked, you’ve been out of school for, like, decades?”

He took a deep breath, as though trying to suppress some deep, white-collar rage he felt toward me and my lack of ambition. “You know, Mommy never finished school,” he said.

“Yeah, but who cares? She ran her own business.”

“I think she suffered for it,” he said. “She’s savvy but undisciplined. That, in my mind, is a result of not having a good, solid education. I don’t want you traveling down that route.”

“None of her friends in Gloucester went to college. If you’re smart and creative, it’s a waste of time.”

“Not exactly,” he said, his left eye twitching slightly, as if he were imparting some secret knowledge he wasn’t supposed to. During moments like those, hearing his tight, confined sentences and comparing them to Mom’s loud rush of words, I wondered how they ever got together in the first place.

I sat back, tossing my napkin onto my plate, knowing how much Dad hated seeing dirty napkins on plates. “I should get home,” I said. “I have tons of homework.”

“Let’s get you home, then,” Dad said, wincing at the napkin or me, I couldn’t tell.