Chapter 32: A Girl Worth Knowing
The Cooper Family Home
That Evening
"My baby's going to college."
Mary dabbed her eyes with a dish towel, voice catching.
"Eleven years old," George Sr. said, shaking his head slowly.
Later that evening, Sheldon's grandmother pulled Mary aside in the kitchen and leaned close with a conspiratorial look. "So who's the father, really? You can tell me. I won't say a word."
"Mom!"
Mary leveled a look at her that communicated several things simultaneously.
"Alright, alright." Sheldon's grandmother raised both hands. "I've been around a long time and I thought I'd seen everything. But an eleven-year-old going to college? That's a first. And George's side of the family — honey, his brother failed algebra twice. You can't blame me for wondering how this happened."
George Sr., who had been sitting quietly with a Lone Star beer, took a long pull from the bottle and said nothing. He'd heard versions of this joke for years. He'd had his doubts at the beginning, a long time ago — any honest man would have. But Mary was Mary, and he'd put it to rest and left it there.
He just wished people would stop bringing it up at dinner.
"It would be wonderful if Paige could go at the same time as Shelly," Mary said, shifting the conversation and smoothing her apron.
"No thank you," Sheldon said, without looking up from his book.
"What school did Paige end up choosing?" George Sr. asked.
"Princeton," Mary said. "Top ten in the world."
"Einstein was on the faculty there," Sheldon said. "Their mathematics program is exceptional. Caltech's physics is better, but Princeton is nothing to dismiss." He paused. "It's unfortunate I can't attend either."
He said it without self-pity, just as a fact, but Mary's expression tightened with something she was trying not to show.
Both Princeton and Caltech had reached out. She'd known about those letters for months. But she couldn't uproot the family and move to New Jersey, and Sheldon was eleven. The University of Texas at Austin was excellent — consistently in the top hundred globally, one of the so-called Public Ivies — and it was close enough that she could still be his mother in a practical sense.
Sheldon understood, and to his credit, he didn't make it harder than it needed to be.
"I'll go to Caltech for my graduate work," he said. "It works out."
It did work out, actually. By the time Leonard and the others at Caltech started their careers, Sheldon would already be years into his, holding more degrees than most people accumulated in a lifetime. No one who worked alongside him needed a university name to understand where he stood in the hierarchy.
"So you're graduating," George Jr. said, smiling in a way that suggested he was about to enjoy himself. "You need a date for prom."
"I don't."
"Every guy brings a date. Guys who don't are—"
"That applies to ordinary people," Sheldon said calmly. "I'm not ordinary people."
George Jr.'s smile faded. He regrouped. "A graduation without a date is a graduation with a regret."
Mary filed that away silently.
"What about Paige?" she tried.
"She'll be at her own school's prom."
"Missy could go with you."
"No!" Missy's voice came from the hallway with the speed and volume of someone who had been listening.
George Jr. started laughing.
In the end, the outcome was what it usually was when Mary had made up her mind and Missy's objections ran headlong into the reality that Sheldon was her mother's priority. Missy was going to prom with her brother, and she was not happy about it.
Hard Candy had been booked as the graduation party band — their sixth major school event — and the show was set.
Then, the day graduation arrived, two families moved into the neighborhood on the same morning.
"Come on, Lauren, let's go."
A tall girl with the kind of confidence that filled a room grabbed her best friend's hand and started toward the door.
"Jennifer, we literally just unpacked," Lauren said. She was dressed simply — practical, understated, nothing like her friend's instinct for making an entrance.
"The Hard Candy band goes to this school," Jennifer said, already halfway to the door. "They were the first ones to perform Don't Cry. I want to see the lead singer."
"We haven't even enrolled yet."
"So?" Jennifer turned back with a look that was half persuasion, half dare. "You'd go anywhere when you actually want to. What are you worried about? Is it supposed to rain tonight?"
Lauren checked her phone. Looked up. Looked at Jennifer's expression.
"Fine," she said. "No rain."
End of Chapter 32
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