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It’s either Caltech or not-Caltech.
Caltech is the farthest school Mary applied to. Every other school on her list was on the East Coast- the farthest of them just a few hours’ drive, close enough to easily visit on the weekends or on holidays or whenever she felt lonely.
Caltech had started with hazy memories of visiting it (for what reason, she didn’t remember) with her birth family when she was young- not hazy as in unclear, but hazy as in that little-kid view where everything seems amazing and beautiful and you fall in love in a snap. Even when they flew back to Pennsylvania, she dreamed about getting back to that place someday.
And, well, she had kind of needed a dream at the time anyway, considering her birth family was basically a hell. She ran away just a few years after the Caltech visit, and when CPS started looking into why, she got plopped into her first ever foster home.
Naturally, Mary ran away again after two months.
In seventh grade (when she was already on her third foster family), a teacher asked what college everyone wanted to go to for the first time. Everyone had to do a research project on their choice and present it to the class. Slowly, a hazy memory conjured itself up in Mary’s mind, a little-kid memory.
But sitting there with thirty tabs open on the clunky school computer, Mary felt herself falling in love with Caltech, not just in a little-kid way, but in a real way. She closed her eyes and imagined walking through the campus, feeling almost as if she would open them again and she’d be there.
Her presentation was almost twice as long as anyone else’s.
And so what if she changed schools every couple years? So what if she had to patiently explain her dream to every new foster family, and if most of them still either didn’t care or didn’t know how to help her? She could handle things on her own. She could make her own appointments with school counselors to talk about her goals and politely steer the conversation in a different direction any time they asked what her “family” thought about it; she could talk to every teacher on the first day of a new school to make sure she was keeping up with requirements; she could do all her own research about GPAs and essays and interviews and buy SAT prep books on her own to study with. Maybe other kids needed their parents to help them with college applications, but not Mary Bromfield.
Because Caltech was where she could start her real life, on her own terms. Away from Pennsylvania and all its foster families and counselors and social workers and people (so many different people, different faces, always changing) thinking that they knew her and could tell her what to do, she could start finally making something out of Mary Bromfield. Once she was at Caltech, nothing about her early life would matter anymore. Every A, every extra point on the SAT was her ticket to a new life, and she counted down the days until she could leave it all behind for good.
Then right before her junior year, she got placed with the Vazquezes, and that threw a wrench into everything.
Things didn’t change at first- Mary still ran away twice in the first couple months, and everyone agreed that junior year was the most crucial for college apps- she couldn’t afford to get distracted this late in the game. But the Vazquezes were different than any other foster family she’d been in, and slowly and inexorably, she felt herself settling into their home.
Before, she’d have applied to exclusively colleges that were all the way across the country. She hadn’t wanted to stay anywhere near Pennsylvania. Now, hesitantly, slowly, all of her colleges ended up being within just a couple hours’ drive of their home.
Except Caltech. Caltech was at the very top of the list, just like before, just like always. When Victor saw it, he raised his eyebrows.
“I see an odd one out,” he said, keeping his tone light. “That’s pretty far away, are you sure-?”
“I’m sure,” she says. “I’m probably not going to get in anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
(How much of that is she just saying to Victor, and how much is meant to reassure herself?)
And that question wouldn’t matter either, except that she does get in. And then everything falls apart.
The reason it’s either Caltech or not-Caltech is that Mary doesn’t bother to distinguish between all the East Coast colleges. If she did have to choose between them, it would probably still take a bit of thought, but nowhere near what it’s taking her to decide whether she wants to go to Caltech alone. That’s the big choice, the one that really matters.
So Caltech and not-Caltech it is.
Rosa and Victor sit her down and give her hugs, tell her that they’ll love and support her no matter where she ends up going. All that does is just make things worse, really. She can feel how much they want her to stay, but they’d never say it in a million years because they want the best for her and for her to do what will make her happy. And that only makes it all hurt even more because she knows how much they really, truly love her.
If they didn’t love her, it would make it so much easier to leave because she wouldn’t be missing out on anything. That’s what she’d been counting on this whole time, wasn’t it? None of her foster families before had cared about her this much, so she had nothing to lose by leaving Pennsylvania. And now, suddenly, she does have something to lose.
She wishes they would yell at her, forbid her from going far away (because don’t other parents do that sometimes?), tell her where to go. At least then she wouldn’t be stuck making this choice herself.
Because it’s stupid, isn’t it? It’s stupid. Every single one of her classmates in her AP classes at school would say she’s stupid to turn down Caltech. Every article and thinkpiece online says that wanting to stay near your family is sweet and admirable, but college is a place to become an independent adult and you should never turn down your dream just for your family. (The implication being that staying is childish.) Especially where ultra-prestigious colleges are involved.
Hell, even that one superhero (Red Cyclone? Thundercrack? Who knows) basically says as much after he saves her from getting run over. “Families are for people who can’t take care of themselves,” he tells her. “You have to look out for number one.”
(And then later it turns out that was actually Billy or something? Which is weird, but whatever.)
Isn’t that what Mary always thought? Families were for kids who needed other people’s help, who didn’t know how to play the college admissions game and get through life all on their own. If you did know how to play the game, how to make something out of yourself and only yourself, then you didn’t need a family.
Except she had gone through life thinking that, only to be proven wrong at the last minute. The Vazquezes were the only real family she’d ever found. If she gave this up now, what if she never found anything like it again?
“Here’s a trick I learned once,” Rosa says. “Think about the question right before going to sleep, and when you wake up in the morning, you’ll have your answer.”
Mary tries it, she really does. She turns it over in her mind, tries to remember every possible detail about the situation that could matter, and then closes her eyes. When she wakes up in the morning, she searches her mind for some kind of new insight, but there’s nothing. This repeats for a few days before she finally gives it up.
Sometimes the full force of how much she’s wanted to go to Caltech for so long slams into her, a torrent of memories, and then she has to go to Caltech, she has to, because this is and has always been her dream. A thousand sleepless nights and exhausted days spent fixating on this one goal, and she got it in the end. How can she just give up on all of that at the last minute? She can’t, she doesn’t want to have to.
And then sometimes she can’t imagine leaving her family behind, can’t imagine being alone again, and in that moment she knows she absolutely can’t go to Caltech, can’t abandon her family for something like a college. She has to stay.
She paces around her room and flips from one side to the other from hour to hour- hell, from minute to minute. It gets harder and harder to focus on school when it feels increasingly like there’s an undercurrent of stress beneath all her thoughts, and especially when the other people at school talk about nothing but college all the time. Then they’ll turn to her and say, “Mary, do you know where you’re going yet?”, and she’ll have to say that she still doesn’t know.
Rosa and Victor aren’t pushing her about it (yet), seeing as she’s still got a month left before the deadline, but she knows they’re still wondering about her. But no matter how long she thinks about it, she can’t seem to give anyone an answer. It’s like she’s standing on a knife edge and no matter which way she falls it’s still going to hurt. At some point every day she thinks she’s finally got the answer with complete certainty and that she knows what she wants to do, but then minutes later it unravels.
She can’t help but feel like she’s unraveling too.