She smiles sadly and pats my hair. I don’t know if she believes that I’ll get into MIT, but she’ll act like she does. She’ll indulge me. “Good. Then it will be one less thing to worry about,” she says. “Now let’s go figure out what we’re going to do with the Lemon. Then we can get dinner.”

Ironically, the Lemon starts right up for me when we go back for it. Without a hitch or a sputter or anything. She just purrs to life.

“Wouldn’t start, huh?” Mom says from her vantage point in the next parking space over. “Are you sure that’s what happened?” She gives me a look like maybe this whole charade with Steven giving me a ride home may have been a ruse on my part. To spend time with Steven. Because of course I still must like Steven. Because he’s such an upstanding young man.

Maybe Mom doesn’t understand breakups.

“I swear. The car likes to mess with me,” I say. “She’s temperamental.”

Mom nods knowingly and then moves on to the dinner plan.

“How about the Imperial Palace?” she suggests. “You love that place.”

“Meh.” I shrug. “It’s only marginally good.”

She accepts what I say at face value. “All right. We can do better than marginally good, I think.”

“How about the Spaghetti Works? We haven’t been there in forever.” Because it’s too expensive. Not ridiculously expensive, but too expensive for us. “I heard they have a six-dollar spaghetti special. All you can eat.”

“Spaghetti sounds wonderful,” she says. “I could use a glass of red wine about now.”

16.

TIME PASSES. THAT’S THE RULE. No matter what happens, no matter how much it might feel like everything in your life has frozen around one particular moment, time marches on. After my brother died, time passed slowly, with me trudging through all the obligatory activities that I was still expected to do: class, eating, sleeping, brushing my teeth, drying my hair, pretending like I gave a crap. Either that or time disappeared: I found myself on the other side of Christmas without remembering more than an ambiguous pine-scented blur. A calculus final, gone. Whole conversations that I don’t have any memory of.

Now, suddenly, I find that it’s March 3. A big day. A day I was waiting for: the first possible day that I could have expected to hear anything from MIT. After school I go to the mailbox, and there, tucked in the shadows, big and beautiful, is a fat envelope.

I’ve been trying not to think about MIT too much, to refrain from obsessing like some people do or get my hopes unrealistically high—there are other schools, after all, other perfectly decent institutions of higher learning. But MIT is the institution. And somewhere deep inside me, I expected this. I hoped for it, anyway. I dreamed.

I don’t bother going inside. I tear the letter open and read it standing next to the mailbox.

Dear Alexis,

On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to MIT. You stood out as one of the most talented and promising students in the most competitive applicant pool in the history of the Institute. Your commitment to personal excellence and principled goals has convinced us that you will both contribute to our community and thrive within our academic environment. We think that you and MIT are a great match.

I swallow down the hard lump in my throat and scan past the details: I have until May 2 to let them know whether I accept their offer, they invite me to attend something called Campus Preview Weekend in April to get a sense of what life on campus would be like, an MIT student will be calling me in the coming weeks, and they urge me to look over the details of my financial aid package. I flip forward and my breath catches—more than forty-three thousand dollars in scholarships.

I read on:

And now for the requisite fine print—I must remind you that this offer of admission is contingent upon your completing the school year with flying colors. Have fun for the rest of your senior year, but please keep your grades up!

I hope you’ll agree with us that MIT is the perfect place to prepare for your future. As a member of our community, you’ll join builders, scholars, entrepreneurs, and humanitarians. Together, you will all make a difference in a world that desperately needs you.

Many congratulations, and once again, welcome to MIT! Now stop reading this and go celebrate.

This is happening.

This is what I’ve wanted from the time I knew what college was about: to get out of Nebraska, to study math with the country’s best instructors, to bounce my ideas off the sharpest minds. To become someone of consequence. I don’t want to be rich or famous, but I want to contribute something significant to the history of human thought.

The Riggs theorem.

That’s my immortality, my idea of heaven. Something people will remember me for after I die.

As I walk back to the house I’m surprised by how, with this letter finally in my hands, I’m not that excited. Not the kind of excited I thought I’d be.

I’m going to MIT. Okay. Yes. This is what I wanted. Yes. This is, without a doubt, the most awesome thing ever to happen to me. Yes. Yes.

But that will mean leaving Mom all alone in this house.

I sit down on the living room couch and read the letter again. I force myself to imagine it: me standing at a blackboard at MIT, going all Will Hunting on some problem, me curled up on a twin bed in a tiny-but-mine dorm room, reading about quantum mechanics, me strolling along some tree-lined sidewalk, chatting with the other students, a stack of heavy books under my arm.