It isn’t what I want, but it isn’t not what I want, either. I tell myself this over and over while staring at the door. I pin the idea to the front of my brain — remember this, I insist. Remember what this feels like. My arm moves automatically, robotically, elbow squeaking as my fist goes to knock — raps against the fresh yellow paint three times — then my arm unhinges. Drops.

Mama says to make the best of things. Like if the cake burns in the oven, you eat the bowl of icing on the counter anyway. Or if you dye your hair blue accidentally, you braid it and stick flowers in the knots. But when my brain looks at burnt cakes and swamp hair — acceptance letters, too — I just want to throw that shit away.

Looking down at the cuffs that cover my wrists, I want to run away. I imagine what it would feel like. Pinch-toe dress shoes slap the asphalt, my heels bruising, lungs filled like red balloons. I’d fling my dad’s blazer into a sewer puddle. I’d set the white envelopes on fire. I’d rip the pages out of my textbooks I’d —

Then the door opens.

I hear him say good morning, but it wiggles through one ear and out the other. I shake his hand weakly — for one lightning-hot second I’m hyperaware of how sweaty my palms are — and then I come into his foyer. He’s talking, saying a lot of cordial stuff, laughing some. He has a deep, fatherly laugh. He leads me to the parlor — he calls it a parlor? — and sits me down. I don’t talk much, just laugh when I’m supposed to, and when he sits down across from me in a stiff-backed burgundy chair, I notice how well-starched his sleeves are. There’s a line.

“Well, Amos,” he says.

“Well,” I say.

“Tell me about the major you’re interested in.”

The first thing I think of is art class. I like the feeling of my fingers in cold, creamy paint. I like the feeling of a brush smoothly rolling across a campus. I like the way artists figure out lighting, how gray becomes a patch of moonlight on a floor. Or sketching hands. The shadows between knuckles. The smear of lead on the side of my palm after drawing for hours.

“Aerospace engineering,” I say. I fill in the speech bubbles with things about science and research and think tanks. He smiles, nods enthusiastically at the parts where I mention million-dollar companies, and interjects sometimes with comments that make me think, okay, this guy watches NBC while he eats dinner.

“What extracurriculars are you a part of?”

The thing about this guy is my guidance counselor has told him plenty. He knows what I’m going to say, which is shit like the rocket club, or Dungeons & Dragons, or reading physics books for fun during detention. Nothing like Student Government or an Honors Society or volunteering with old people. But that doesn’t matter with me — my guidance counselor got really excited when she saw my scores for the first time. She says I’m a genius. The school psychiatrist told her that’s probably why I am the way I am, and by that I assume she means flunking all my classes, because that’s what geniuses do, supposedly.

“What about hobbies?”

I think about my fingertips in cold, blue paint. Instead, I say something about number theory, 3-D modeling, some astronomy. I tell him about using my telescope to study stars and how I might have stumbled upon a new planet. That last part’s a bit out there, but Mama told me to be out there. She says I have nothing lose. Not even that telescope. I’ve never had a telescope in my life.

“Why do you want to attend here?”

At this point, I imagine that I’m a bowl of cookie dough and my intelligence is the dough and this university just wants to scrape anything and everything out of me. He keeps asking questions that make me feel like a horse. He examines my teeth with his veiny, old-man hands, turning my face this way and that. He seems pleased with what he sees when he looks into the folder placed carefully on his crossed legs.

So I tell him what he wants to hear. Why not? Opportunities and all that. You know, burnt cake. Sticking daises in blue hair.

“What are your career goals?”

My goal is to keep my hands completely submersed in a rich, velvety midnight shade of blue, all the way up my wrists, and then slap my hands on the wall, or maybe all over my guidance counselor’s blonde bob. Then I’d paint a night sky on my own skin.

“I’m very interested in working with NASA,” I begin.

When I finish, when he sighs in a friendly way and leans back, which is my cue that this is over, I don’t think the interview has gone well at all. Mainly because my factory manufactured responses are deposited from my mouth at the appropriate times. Besides, I’m not charismatic in the first place, just awkward and kind of smart. My blazer is too big. I’m too small. My mind isn’t in the right place. He drives a Subaru, and I want to paint pictures. In what world does this work? But at the very end, he informs me that he’s pleased to offer me a scholarship covering the full cost of tuition, that he hopes to hear back from me soon, that they need an answer before a certain day in March that I don’t bother remembering.

He shakes my hand again. I smile because I’m excited, and I’m excited because I’m expected to be excited.

“Thank you for this opportunity,” I tell him. We part, the yellow door closes, and the smile drops from my lips into the dirt. I don’t move from the front stoop for I don’t know how long. Mainly because I don’t know anything. Honestly.

-

I squeeze my toes out of my shoes, toe them into the pile of mud-streaked, kid-sized sneakers. There’s a dog bowl half-filled with water and miscellaneous strands of hair that haven’t been picked out yet by my three-year-old sister. Sometimes when I get home from school she’s squatting there, hair in space buns, pulling out each hair. Our dog watches oldly and sadly with cataracts in his eyes. He can’t see the kindness.

“Hi, sweetie. How’d it go?”

I look at Mama. She has gray roots that frizz, she wear a too-small apron with four sets of primary-color paint hands on the pockets, she wears purple fuzzy socks with holes in the heels. When she turns with a rusty spatula in hand she smiles, and when she smiles her face wrinkles up. I know what she’s expecting. I know from the way she opens the ACT score reports and uses Disney World magnets to tack up my 36s and 2400s. My Cs and Ds stay in the wastebasket.

“I didn’t get the scholarship,” I say.