Free The Infinite Moment of Us by Lauren Myracle Page A

thought. “It just, um, feels like the right
    thing for me.”
    “For myself,” her dad said.
    Wren looked at him.
    His jaw was tense. “‘It feels like the right thing for
    myself .’”
    “You’re correcting my grammar?”
    “I’ll always correct your grammar, just as I’ll always love
    you,” he said, managing to make it sound like a threat.
    But myself , the way you used it, isn’t correct, Wren was tempted to say. She stuffed her hands under her legs.
    “You’re being very selfish, Wren,” he went on. “You’re
    showing extremely poor judgment.”
    Wren pulled her hands from beneath her and drew her
    shins toward her chest.
    “Please be still and stop wriggling,” he said.
    She lowered her legs.
    “We put down a five-hundred-dollar deposit when you
    accepted,” Wren’s mom said. She swiped beneath her eyes.
    “Wren, sweetheart, you withdrew all your other applica-
    tions because you knew what you wanted, and what you
    wanted was to go to Emory.”
    “I’ll pay back the money.”
    Her mom held out her hands. “When we visited the
    campus—when I brought you in to meet everyone—you loved it. What changed?”
    I changed, she thought. But that wasn’t an acceptable
    answer.
    Selfish. Foolish. Bad judgment.
    “Nothing changed,” Wren said to her knees. “I don’t
    know. I don’t know .”
    “Use your words,” her dad said.
    She shook her head. “You took me to that TED Talk,
    remember?”
    “The talk Professor Tremblay told us about?” her dad
    said. “Professor Tremblay, who wrote a letter of reference
    for you?”
    Yes, that Professor Tremblay, whom her mom knew
    from her job at Emory, and, yes, Wren felt guilty. He’d
    gone to so much trouble. Everyone had gone to so much
    trouble. She was so much trouble.
    Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, she thought, and miracu-
    lously, it gave her strength.
    “What talk?” her mom said.
    “It was called ‘The Road Not Taken,’” Wren said. “All
    these people talked about their lives, and how they chose
    unconventional paths, and how that made all the differ-
    ence. Like in the Robert Frost poem.”
    “Yes? And?” her mom said. “You don’t even like that
    poem.”
    “Mom, I do,” Wren said. How in the world would her
    mother know what poems she liked? “I guess it made me
    think about things. Like, one woman was a lawyer, but
    she gave up her job to go help people in developing coun-
    tries have clean water. Another guy was in an accident and
    ended up in a coma, and when he came out of it, he could
    suddenly play the piano, and he became a concert pianist.”
    “So your plan is to fall into a coma and wake up a musi-
    cal prodigy,” her dad said. “Terrific.”
    Wren pressed her lips together. She loved her dad, but
    right now, she hated him.
    Her mom cleared her throat. “I wonder, Wren, if maybe
    you don’t know enough yet to make this decision. You can
    always do . . . something like this . . . after you get your
    college degree, can’t you? You don’t know what you’re
    throwing away.”
    Wren dug her fingernails into her palms.
    “I’m sorry you’re upset,” she said. Her voice quavered.
    “And maybe it wasn’t the talk, and even if it was, that
    wasn’t the only thing. And you’re right that I don’t know
    enough. I kind of think I need to rethink everything.”
    “Like being a doctor?” her dad said. “Wren. You’ve
    wanted to be a doctor since you were ten.”
    No. When she was ten, Wren had wanted to work with
    animals. She’d had a book about a hospital for cats, and
    she’d carried it around everywhere until it mysteriously
    disappeared. When Wren asked about it, her father had
    said, “What book? Wren, I have no idea what you’re car-
    rying on about, but for the record, you can do better than
    becoming a veterinarian.”
    But she didn’t go there. She said—and it was awful,
    because disagreeing with him felt like saying she didn’t love
    him—“I kind of think I need to figure out if being a