Read Online Wait Until Tomorrow by Pat MacEnulty - Free Book Online Page A

scholarship. Not for the whole thing, but enough so that if I watch my pennies I’ll be able to make the payments.
    When we lived in Tallahassee, she went to a very small “handson” learning school, like Montessori only with a little more structure. It wasn’t a particularly expensive place, but I was even poorer then so I split janitorial duties with another mother to get half off the monthly tuition. Mopping those wooden floors where my daughter and her friends had been playing, pouring Lysol into toilets, scrubbing sinks and wiping down tables in the evenings in the empty school house—those were the most meaningful jobs I ever did.

    As eighth grade comes to a close, Emmy and I are prowling through the mall, searching for the ear-piercing place. I know it’s un-American, but I’m not much of a shopper—especially these days when checks always seem to be in the mail but not in the mailbox. I may buy new clothes for Emmy, but for myself, it’s usually
Goodwill—or some discount place if I’m feeling extravagant. We find the boutique (hair bows, cheap jewelry, and lots of stuff that is pink and plastic) beside the food court: “Ear Piercing—Free.”
    Inside a young woman whips out a cardboard tray with tiny birthstone earrings, and my daughter locks on the fake emeralds. The piercing is free. The earrings cost thirty-five bucks.
    Emmy sits on a stool and the young woman uses a ballpoint pen to mark the spot where the hole will go. The girl offers my daughter a mirror, but Emmy just wants to get it over with. She’s petrified.
    â€œDo you want me to let you know when it’s coming, or just do it?” the girl asks.
    â€œJust do it,” Emmy says with a tight smile. A few seconds later, a green stone sticks out of her earlobe on a gold stem.
    Â 
    We had intended to do this a week earlier on her fourteenth birthday, but those plans were ambushed by a well-meaning science teacher who told her that in spite of her “remarkable” gift for engineering (her rockets went higher than anyone else’s) and how much she had impressed him with the self-propelled car she had built, she would not be getting the science award at the end of the year. Her right-brained tendencies (terrible organizational skills and an inability to get homework turned in on time) had exacted a heavy price. She would not be eligible.
    When I picked up my child from school that day, I had not been expecting this storm of grief. It was her birthday, after all, and I’d just been there a few hours earlier with pizza and cupcakes. But now she was inconsolable.
    â€œEveryone thinks I’m an idiot,” she sobbed. “It’s always the same ones who always get the awards. No one knows that I’m smart.”
    It was not a minor issue. The birthday plans I had mapped out
went down the drain, and I spent the rest of the day comforting my brokenhearted girl.
    So a week later, the day before her eighth grade graduation, the day before the dreaded awards ceremony, we are finally strolling out of the mall with a couple of pretzels and a pair of newly adorned earlobes.
    As we drive to the ceremony the next day, Hank can speak of nothing but piercing. My daughter sits in the backseat in her new black dress with spaghetti straps, her strappy black shoes with wedged high heels, a slight sheen of gloss on her lips, her thick golden-brown hair gleaming as it falls past her shoulder blades—and he can see nothing but the tiny green dots on her ears.
    â€œWhat’s it going to be next, babe? A tongue stud? How about a nose ring? I know a girl who wore a bone from her dead poodle in her nose. It was quite the conversation piece.” Hank’s teasing has a sharp edge to it.
    Emmy has never been a prissy girl. She scorned some of her classmates whose lives revolved around shopping and makeup counters. She called them “nail polish girls.” She had never shown any