Hold On Tight by J. Minter

scrambled eggs. “Yes, that’s exactly right. Scrambled, with a side of Northern fruit.”
    David took out a pan and was poised to put it on the stove when he heard a footstep in the hall. He froze, pan in the air like he might smack an intruder with it. Sara-Beth, thankfully, did not freeze. She jumped up and leaned against his back, her silhouetteentirely engulfed by his to the person stepping through the kitchen door.
    â€œDavid,” said Sam Grobart. His hair was sticking straight up and he was wearing boxers and his
Psychoanalysts Do It Better
T-shirt. David realized with relief that he was not wearing his glasses. “What are you doing here?”
    â€œJust making a little snack, Dad.”
    â€œNo, what are you doing back home from Vassar?”
    â€œUh … I came back early to, um, study.”
    â€œGood boy. Well, get some rest.”
    David could feel Sara-Beth’s hands running up and down his spine, and he was really hoping that his dad would go away soon.
    â€œThat’s what I’m going to do at any rate,” he said, turning. But before he disappeared back down the hall, something occurred to him. “By the way, David, how did that interview go?”
    â€œSuper, Dad,” David said, even as the one person who knew that it had not gone super was blowing on his neck. Or, more in the direction of his neck, as the top of her head was at about his chest level. “Almost perfect, I’d say.”

i’m back, and i’m trying
    As it turned out, a weekend away did just the trick. When I got back to the city I was feeling all amped—everything just seemed possible, you know what I mean? It was nice to know that there was a light at the end of the dark tunnel that was high school, and it was called college.
    Seeing my brother had been even better than I’d imagined. He hadn’t really made me feel better about myself—at least not in the way I’d been expecting—but he’d taught mean important lesson, which is that when you get a little distance from yourself you really can transform. All these icky feelings about being a shallow person who cared too much about that whole HPSB thing didn’t really matter, because by the time I got to college I was going to be known as someone who really cared. About something.
    I just hadn’t quite figured out what, yet. That wasthe one little anxiety I brought back from Vassar with me.
    Just to get my foot in the door with this whole caring thing, I attended all my classes on Monday. This seemed to go pretty well. We were reading
Romeo and Juliet
for our Drama as Literature class, and after we all went around reading different parts from a couple scenes in act II, Arno raised his hand.
    â€œI think I finally get what this is all about,” Arno said. “I think what Shakespeare is trying to say is that absence is the single most important ingredient to desire.”
    We had a sub that day—he graduated from Princeton like last year or something so he’s really young, and he just teaches part-time. He looked at Arno in this way that made me think he’d never heard the word desire said out loud before.
    â€œMr. Preston?” I said, raising my hand. “I just wanted to say that I couldn’t agree more. Arno, that was a really intelligent point.”
    And you’re thinking right now: he’s either being sarcastic or very Dr. Phil, but you would be wrong. I raised my hand because I thought that what Arno said was really smart, and I
cared
enough to say so.
    After class we went to the computer lab to check our e-mail. This always makes me a little sad, because Flan always used to send me little stories from her day—even before we were going out, when she was just Patch’s little sister to me—and she doesn’t anymore. Now, sometimes all that’s in my inbox is a mass e-mail about a sample sale or something. Flan would definitely know of some