No Regrets
Clara’s bouts of not sleeping for three days at a time never seemed to line up with Jen’s. And Clara came out of such bouts exhausted and drained, while Jen emerged with functional software or mastery of a new leather working technique.
Oddly, her schedule of this seemed better synced to Ezri’s insomnia bouts than Jen’s, and often this led to sitting with Ezri at her house or wherever was open at midnight while Jen slept for all of the five or six hours she did at night. She always had trouble sleeping past four-thirty and didn’t seem worse off for it, and Clara never believed that humans were meant to be up before ten.
Ezri, tonight, at some bar open late, was off about some peer reviewed academic journal article by someone, PhD from Yale, about the neurological chemical processing of pain in subspace. Only Ezri seemed to find such official research on what for most people was just an orgasmic rush.
Clara stared down her water. If she'd listened to her mother’s advice to pursue her own future outside of the home, and hadn’t ignored the tall stack of acceptance letters and scholarship offers, she could’ve been studying the neurochemistry of subspace at Yale, too, or Harvard, or Princeton, instead of sitting at a shitty bar with her ex sipping a water she didn’t want.
Yale sounded miserable.
When she said so, Ezri laughed. “I do wonder why you didn’t go, sometimes.”
“I would’ve killed myself. It’s just four more years of high school except everything’s an AP. And I’d already practically done that. That’s how you get into Yale. And I had the kids.”
Her application essay had begun with, My twelve year old brother asked a girl out for the first time recently. He learned a lesson about cruel rejection and I learned that thirteen years of ballet did not teach me the grace to not drop the girl’s drink all over her the next time she arrived at Starbucks during my shift; nor did ballroom, modern, or swing.
The Ivy League loved passion.
“You could've gone after the kids. I loved college,” said Ezri with the dreamy sigh she got when she talked about academia. Her notebook, the printout of the discussed paper tucked in it, annotated in purple cursive, looked out of place on the bar wiped down for effect every half hour with a uselessly dry cloth. “Every minute of it. I wanted to get a Master’s, but I couldn’t figure out where it would get me.”
“In English.”
“Well, that’s why I didn’t. I think I also hoped if I stayed in school, Emma would’ve stayed, too. We'd agreed we’d both leave when we were done. Graduated at the same time, Bachelor’s. Emma Rodriguez. English Major. We got to be next to each other at graduation. She had such good literature takes. And God, she was good at oral. At the time. I’ve been better impressed since.” She flicked Clara’s arm.
“See, I learned things outside of college.”
Ezri laughed until she had to push her glasses back into place. Alcohol made her giggly and devious and no more stupid somehow, and it made Clara feel like thoughts were things that happened to other people, valedictorian stereotype or not.
Her mother had also said she did too much homework and should try a party, a drink, getting laid. She’d tried all of those if she'd never answered that acceptance letter from Yale.
Hence, the shitty bar with her ex sipping water she didn’t even want.
Yet, no regrets.