INSIDE THE PAGES | BOOK EXCERPTS

‘Boundless’ by Carolyn Dawn Flynn | Chapter 3: Raucous Departures

IN THE RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW of the year of Where Will You Go, the twins and I stood in a calming silence as the sunset descended around us. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the most mysterious element in our domain is the sky. Its presence is everywhere, these questions, too, all around us and above us, prisms that hold the light and bend it to a mountain. The sky is our ally because it has much bigger fish to fry. It’s not that the sky doesn’t care about our problems—it’s just that our problems are so solvable from its perspective. First, we looked east as a watermelon pink washed over the mountains, glowing on the peaks and trickling down into the deep blue folds of the foothills. Then we turned west as the sun blazed through clouds, yellow as a field of Tuscan sunflowers. It is a sunset in two movements.

Sitting on the west-facing porch, I pointed to the evening star as it rose. Hello, meet spring of senior year. Hello, meet the razor edge of the future.

“Tell me more about MIT,” I said.

Hello, meet hope. Hello, meet worry. Hello, meet the keen edges of every conversation we have now. They won’t tell me they are frightened about the future. They will tell me they are being brave. They won’t tell me that most conversations with me cancel out their conversations with their father — and vice versa. They won’t describe how our sharp swords hold them in a delicate maze.

For the past two years, we had been churning out college essays, including two killer applications, one to MIT (Paul), the other to Tulane University’s neuroscience program (Grace). Some seventeen-year-olds sought validation through the mirror of college acceptance, some through unlimited sexual conquest — or both. Some through an inner guidance system, hopefully, provided by a loving parent, or even two. The twins seemed to be a mix that was dominated by “loving parent” but could be especially validated by “MIT said yes.”

“I’ve been calculating the odds about whether I have a chance,” Paul said. “If they only have, say, two slots for students from New Mexico, that means I’m competing with seventeen-year-olds out of a pool of a population of two million, about 44,000 people. Not that many people. If we assume most of the applicants are from the Albuquerque-Santa Fe corridor, that’s the seventeen-year-olds out of only one million people. About ten thousand. Fewer people. Then we have to earn the ACT score to get in. Smaller pool.” He turned to me. “I think it’s me and six people.”

“And you probably know them,” Grace said.

“Mom, I really want this,” Paul said.

Want this. Really want this. This was the unvoiced desire I had already heard beneath every essay he’d ever written. Many friends and sisters will say how remarkable the twins are at achieving things. Some who are mothers of not-studying teenagers will lament that their own seniors are not trying harder, not willing to work through the confusion of the future. I cannot voice the real stimulus because it would mean disclosing our poverty. The twins want a better future because they know where the edges are. They know they could tip over. There is a reason that two of the past five presidents have been sons of single mothers. It’s because their single mothers knew that at any moment, their children could fall off the edge of the earth.