Free Full Ride by Margaret Peterson Haddix

then . . .”)
    I pretend I don’t hear Stuart. I keep walking. I shove my way into the girls’ bathroom, and it is blessedly empty. God still loves me, after all.
    Debatable, I think.
    I can’t bear to consider that issue right now. And I can’t count on the bathroom staying empty. I enter the stall at the far end and bolt the door, guaranteeing myself eight square feet of privacy. I lean against the concrete block wall, which is probably exactly like the concrete block walls imprisoning my father.
    Vanderbilt, I think. Vanderbilt University.
    If my father really had stolen all that money for me, it wouldn’t have been Harvard he’d try to buy or bribe my way into. It would have been Vanderbilt.
    If.
    He wasn’t actually stealing all that money for you, I tell myself.
    But it’s too late. I’m plunged into some alternate-world fantasy based on another “if”: If Daddy hadn’t been caught . . .
    If Daddy hadn’t been caught, I would still live in Georgia. He and Mom and I would have spent the summer visiting variouscollege campuses, maybe with groups of my giggling friends, all of us imagining glorious futures for ourselves of frat parties and sorority formals and midnight pizza runs. . . .
    We would have saved the trip to Vanderbilt for a special day. Maybe it would have been just the three of us; maybe I would have picked some truly beloved friend to marvel with me at Daddy’s tales of his days as a student at Vanderbilt.
    â€œI lived in that dorm freshman year,” he’d say, pointing at Tolman Hall. “My roommate and I were always playing pranks on each other. . . . One time I answered the phone and he’d put shaving cream all over the earpiece.”
    And:
    â€œThose are the gates we all walked through, starting out as freshmen,” he’d narrate as we’d stroll around. We wouldn’t even need the official campus tour, because we’d have Daddy. “Founders Walk, it was called. And then my whole class marched through them again, all together, after graduation. . . .”
    I know my father’s Vanderbilt stories by heart.
    The thing is, after he was arrested, it came out that he’d never actually gone to Vanderbilt. Not as a student, anyway. He’d worked in the dining hall washing the real students’ dishes. He’d put in again and again for a job in the computer lab instead, but it had never come through.
    People swore to this version of my father’s past in court. That Vanderbilt dish-washing job must have been the last one he’d gotten without a lie. After that, in job interviews, he’d talked about his Vanderbilt degree, his years of computer experience. He made it all up. And then he got big, important jobs; he got those years of experience; he started his own company.
    All because of the Vanderbilt lie.
    I know my daddy lied. I know he lied to me and Mom and pretty much everyone else he ever met—including all thosepeople whose money he stole. I know the truth about my daddy.
    But there’s still some dumb, hopeful voice whispering in the back of my mind, I want to go to Vanderbilt like my daddy. No—I want to go for real.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    I don’t cry. I can do this sometimes: hold back the tears until it’s safe to let them out. I tell myself I’ll wait until tonight, after Mom’s left for work and I have the apartment to myself. But maybe I won’t cry even then. Maybe I’ll fill out college applications instead.
    The sixth-period bell rings and I step out of the bathroom like I’m perfectly fine.
    Rosa drops my lunch sack and my gov book on my desk when I get to AP lit.
    â€œAren’t you starving?” she asks. “I bet Ms. Darien would let you eat in here if you explain what happened.”
    I frown and shake my head.
    â€œI can wait until after school,” I tell her.