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table, breaking its spine. “Remember what I told you. I’m only paying for Western Washington.”
    “But —”
    “No buts.” He slapped his hand on the journal so hard his empty teacup rattled. “If that was good enough for me and good enough for your brothers, it’s good enough for you.”
    I swallowed. That college was good, the campus pretty. But it was also huge. The entire population of my town is a whopping 349 people. Western Washington University boasts 13,000 students. That makes six times more students at Western Washington than at Williams College. While I wanted to get lost in the world, I didn’t want be lost at school. I wanted to meet people who would understand how the sight of a tree’s jasper green needles against a cloudless sky could make my heart go POW ! People who wouldn’t think I was weird because my body remained with them, but my mind had already escaped to the studio, figuring out how to replicate the colors on canvas — which scraps of paper would work and which I needed to find.
    That was why I succumbed to Mrs. Frankel’s sales pitch, hopeless against her promise: Williams is big enough you’ll meet lots of great kids, but small enough you’ll actually get to know your professors. These are the soul mates who’ll be your friends for life.
    “I’m not paying for some overpriced private school filled with spoiled brats who grew up in country clubs.” Dad picked up his teacup, pointed it at me. When he realized it was still empty, he jiggled it in the air again, signaling Mom. She hustled over with the teapot. “Not when you’ll just end up working for someone who graduated from a state college.”
    “Williams is one of the best small colleges in the country,” I parroted Mrs. Frankel, and wished that once, just once, Mom would say something to support me. But she only hurried back to her scones, scoring the perfect circle of dough with a knife — deep enough to pull the pieces apart once they were baked, not deep enough to separate them raw.
    “Yes, and it has a great art program,” Dad said.
    How did he know that? As hard as it was, I stopped from opening the envelope to read the acceptance letter and steeled myself for what I knew would come. It was the same thing that happened to Mom when she once admitted she’d love to open a bakery (“Do you know anything about profit-and-loss statements, Lois? That’s a lot of croissants you’d need to sell to break even”) and Merc when he announced he wanted to major in Asian studies (“And be hired to do what, exactly?”).
    Dad’s mouth curved into a smile more mocking than wry. “But your collages . . .”
    My mouth dried. How the hell had he known about those? I kept them all — my completed collages, my works-in-progress — at my studio.
    “The ones you made for your brothers last Christmas? Well” — chuckle, chuckle — “they aren’t exactly what you’d call art, now would you?”
    The sting of his disregard hurt me more than I thought it would. I blinked back both my tears and response: I’m going to Williams because a ton of their alumni run major corporations, like I will. But I didn’t want to hear that esteem-scraping chuckle, chuckle again. Claudius always told me, “Just cry, okay? Dad will stop picking on you if you just cried in front of him.” It wasn’t that I couldn’t cry. I wouldn’t, not in front of Dad. Every tear was bitter surrender.
    So I made my face go as expressionless as a blank canvas and told myself this was just a trap street — one of those fictitious roads cartographers hid in maps to catch plagiarizers. Or in Dad’s case, to catch one of his own attempting to break out of his rigidly drawn grid lines.
    For a brief moment, we watched each other before I dropped my eyes the way I did whenever I ran past unfamiliar dogs and didn’t want my presence to challenge them. To be honest, one of the best things Williams had going for it other than its academics and arts program