The house is quiet when I get home. There’s an empty champagne bottle on the kitchen counter. For a brief moment, I forget everything that happened in the last thirty minutes. I forget about Laney’s betrayal and Austin’s lies and three and a half years of friendship down the drain.
My dad had an amazing night tonight. He reached a career milestone. Everything’s going to change for him now. Some people thought he was crazy. Turning down job offers all of those years. Rejecting the opportunity for a steady paycheck and a steady job just so he could take pictures of eyeballs. But in the end, everything worked out. He believed in something with all his heart and it paid off.
He made the right choice.
I run upstairs to my room and collapse on my bed. I pull my phone out of my bag and immediately click on CoyCoy55’s SnipPic feed. I scroll through the photos, finding one of my favorites from a week ago. It was another Caption Challenge with her and Luce_the_Goose. They were studying in the Windsor Academy’s stunning high-ceilinged student union. Their signature school-issued navy blue laptops are open on the table. In the picture, they’re both swooning theatrically—CoyCoy55 collapsed in her chair with her hand to her forehead like she fainted in a Jane Austen novel and Luce_the_Goose sprawled across the table, fanning herself.
The caption reads: “My Book Boyfriend Just Proposed!”
I should be in that photo. I should be fake swooning right alongside them.
Seething, I toss the phone aside, stand up, and head straight for the bottom drawer of my desk. That’s where I keep the letter.
I gently run my fingertip back and forth over the blue and silver Windsor Academy logo embossed right onto the paper as my eyes skim the words on the page that I still have memorized all of these years later.
Congratulations …
A place has opened up …
You have shown tremendous potential …
We are thrilled to offer you admission …
Please respond by …
The truth is, I didn’t get into the Windsor Academy. At least not at first. I got wait-listed at the end of the sixth grade. I was beyond devastated because I knew there was no chance I’d ever get in.
No one ever gets off the wait list. Because no one ever leaves. The Windsor Academy is the kind of school that unlocks doors that don’t even have handles. If you’re lucky enough to get accepted right out of elementary school then you stay put. All the way until high school graduation.
But then, two years later, right before the end of eighth grade, the impossible happened. This letter arrived informing me that a space was available. And, if I so chose, I could start freshman year of high school with the young elite.
It was a miracle.
But as my fickle luck would have it, it wasn’t the first miracle that had happened to me that week.
The first miracle had arrived five days earlier, also in the form of a letter. I opened my locker to find the note carefully folded up inside. My name was written on the outside, surrounded by a lopsided heart.
I tore it open and my heart hammered in my chest as I read the words I’d been waiting to hear for nearly two years.
Wanna go to the movies with me tonight?
It was from him. Austin McKinley. If there was ever anything I wanted more than the Windsor Academy, it was Austin McKinley. I had loved him from afar since the first day of seventh grade. I had fallen asleep to fantasies of kissing him every night. I had scribbled our names in thousands of hearts on thousands of notebook pages and Photoshopped our faces together more times than I’d ever admit.
And now, he wanted to go out. With me.
Of course I said yes. I agonized over the date for hours. What would I wear? What would I say? Where would I put my hands? When my mom dropped me off at the theater later that night, I saw him waiting for me in the lobby, standing next to the refreshment stand looking jaw-dropping in jeans and still-wet hair.
After the movie, he told me what a good time he’d had and asked if we could hang out again. Then he leaned forward and pecked me on the lips, lighting a hundred fires all over my body. When he pulled back and I looked into his clear-as-crystal blue eyes, that was it. It was all over.
When the Windsor Academy letter came, I immediately knew.
I could never say yes to both of them. I would have to choose.
Turning down the Windsor Academy was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Although truthfully, I never actually turned them down. The letter had an expiration date. Respond by this day or your spot will be given away. I simply didn’t respond.
I hid the letter in my bottom drawer and never told a soul.
Maybe because somewhere deep inside, I always knew it was the wrong choice. Maybe because I assumed if anyone knew, they would try to talk me out of it. And I didn’t want to be talked out of it.
I wanted Austin.
I knew our budding relationship would never survive if I went to Windsor at the end of the summer. Even though it was only a few miles away from Southwest High, I was smart enough to understand how these things worked. Long-distance relationships in high school—even three-mile-radius ones—were doomed to fail.
Of course I had doubts at first. Of course I still wondered if I’d made the right choice every time I passed by Windsor on the way to school. But I dealt with it.
As my relationship with Austin blossomed and evolved and we eventually became one of the longest-standing couples at Southwest High, my self-doubt slowly faded until it was background noise. Until I could barely hear it.
I fold up the letter and place it back in my desk drawer. I don’t even realize I’ve been crying until I turn around and the room is blurry. I sniffle and wipe at my eyes. And that’s when I see the framed photograph sitting on the floor near my closet. It wasn’t there this morning, but it’s there now, leaning against the wall. I recognize it immediately.
It’s my eye.
My extreme close-up blue spiderweb of an eye. The one that was on display at the sold-out gallery show tonight.
Curiously, I step closer to it until I see the small Post-it note with Dad’s neat handwriting attached to the top left corner of the frame.
Couldn’t bear to sell this one. —Dad
Then my gaze falls to the little white placard at the bottom of the frame. The caption I wrote for him:
Make a wish.
I feel tears well up all over again as I collapse in front of the photograph and stare into my own eye. Into my own past. Into my own messed-up choices. Dad always thought spiderwebs were lucky. That I was his lucky charm. And while that might be true, when it comes to me, it turns out I’m my own curse.
I brought this on myself.
I chose wrong.