Begin Again

As I’m setting our giant Big League Burger milkshake in the drink holder I accidentally knock my backpack over, the ribbons spilling out from the front pocket again. “Oops,” I mutter, pulling them out from the console. But not before my dad lets out a hearty laugh.

“What?” I ask with a self-conscious smile.

“Oh, nothing. Just—of course you have more ribbons than you could possibly know what to do with,” says my dad, helping collect a few that scattered over to his seat. “Truly your mother’s daughter.”

I take the ribbons from him, securing them back in my front pocket. “Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. She was insufferable about them,” he says, wiping a tear of laughter from his eye. “Got more than anyone else in her year.”

I balk at him, so stunned that my body decides to forget how seat belts work. “You remember that far back?” I demand, finally getting it to click on the third try.

“Course I do.” He pulls out of the lot, the laughter dissolved into a sly smile. “I was one of the students who started the ribbon tradition in the first place.”

It’s clear from the way he takes his sweet time pulling out that he’s enjoying every second of my shock. “You what?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s how we met.”

“Excuse me?”

My dad laughs again, easy and low, a laugh I remember from a long time ago. It’s less like I am discovering things about him today, and more like I’m finding them again. I wonder if he feels the same way about me.

“Your mom was incensed that she didn’t get a ribbon at the pie-eating contest. Claimed she should have won because the girl who upchucked halfway through should have been disqualified—I think her exact words were, ‘That was at least half a pie she tossed, so I beat her.’” My dad shakes his head with laughter. “She came knocking down my door at ten o’clock at night—”

“You never told me this,” I accuse, the words bubbling with a laughter of my own.

“Oh, your mother would have killed me.” He glances at me conspiratorially. “But I figure she’d have let you know by now.”

Oddly, I have no trouble imagining my mom finding true love in a pie brawl. It’s the other part of the story that I can’t quite process. “You started the ribbons?”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat, suddenly sheepish about the whole thing. “Well, with a dozen or so other kids.”

“What?” For someone who wants to answer people’s questions for a living, I suddenly can’t form a single coherent one to save my life. “How? Why?”

My dad shrugs. “It’s like I said. I liked making plans. We needed a way to get around the new organization ban on campus, so . . . I ran with it. Turned it into a series of events that would turn into organizations. They couldn’t ban something that technically hadn’t formed yet. Which is why,” he says, pointing at my white ribbon, “anyone playing had to have one of those. To prove they were there for the game, and not to rat us out.”

My brain feels like it’s about to explode, trying to process all this at once. For so long I thought of the ribbons as something belonging to my mom that I never once factored my dad into it. Never once did I consider that he might have other reasons for tucking her ribbons away for all these years. That the memories behind them weren’t just hers, but theirs.

I glance at him cautiously, but he’s shaking his head with a fondness that makes him look younger than he is. “As for your mom—the instant I heard her ranting about the pie, I knew. Her voice was unmistakable. She was the Knight who clued us all in to the mishandling of administration funds that led to the ban. The one we’d been working with to drop all the clues.”

In a strange role reversal, it’s me who has to look away from him; me who needs a quiet moment to collect myself as I absorb this piece of their story, as I make it a part of my own. I’d known all this time I was walking on the ground where they’d trod, but I didn’t understand how directly, how luckily, it led to everything else. To them falling in love. To them sharing a life together. To me.

I find my voice and manage, “That’s incredible.”

My dad’s smile quirks. “We were fairly badass back in our day.”

We stop at a light. I’ve waited for this secret for so long. Too long. And now that all these other secrets are unraveled, I need to know.

“So . . . you know what they’re for? Each of the colors?”

My dad plucks the milkshake from my grasp, taking a comically long sip, his eyes teasing. “You have friends who aren’t freshmen. None of them have told you?”

I make a mental note to harass Val and Milo as he passes the milkshake over to me. “Nope.”

My dad raises his eyebrows. “I am deeply impressed by everyone’s commitment to the secret. Damn. It’s been—what? Twenty years?”

“The secret?” I repeat.

The light changes. His eyes are on the road, but still full of mirth. “You’re sure you want to know?”

I can’t help myself. “I just want to know which one Mom was in,” I blurt.

My dad’s head tilts back in surprise, but then settles in a quiet appreciation. Like this means more to him than any other question I might have asked. “Oh. Well. That’s easy—she was in the red one.”

I can’t even explain why my eyes flood with tears. Red doesn’t even mean anything to me. I have no way of differentiating it from the others. It’s just that for every fragment of my mom that I can still hold, I know there are a thousand others I’ll never know about—things she might have told me, things I might have found out on my own. It doesn’t matter how I get them. They’re all precious just the same.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says my dad fondly. “And I was in blue.”

I’m fully aware I’m pushing my luck when I ask, “So . . . what do they mean?”

My dad makes a show of pretending he’s not going to tell me for a moment with this near-clownish expression. It is, perhaps, the most aggressively like a dad he’s ever been.

“Well—you’ve got more than enough to qualify for any of them, so I guess there’s no harm in telling you. They’re all volunteer societies.” He glances down at my backpack. “You might have noticed there are some themes to the qualifying events. Social and campus activities are red, academic ones are blue, nature ones are yellow. If you get enough ribbons for any of them, you get to choose which society to join and help do volunteer work with.”

Volunteer societies. My heart suddenly feels full enough to burst. I’ve been trying to trust in the idea of these “secret societies” because I trust my mom not to tangle herself in anything bad, but it’s still such a relief to know that I was right to trust her. That I was right to trust them both.

“These days they’re not really a secret. The volunteer societies are open to anyone, freshmen included—the ribbons just give you an opportunity to cast votes on their activities sophomore year instead of waiting for junior year,” my dad explains. “You can only cast votes for one of the groups, but you can still be in any of the other groups you want. Heck, you might have been recruited into one already.”

I almost laugh when I realize he’s right. All this time I’ve been so fixated on following my mom’s path, and in joining the outdoor volunteer group, I’d already picked one myself.

I wait for the worry to brew, or the disappointment to sink in. Depending on the choice I make, all this effort to be in the group that she was in might have gone to waste. But louder than the worry is the comforting thought that maybe I didn’t need her as much as I thought I did. That I may have taken the long way, but maybe I ended up where I needed to be on my own.

“And you helped come up with that?” I ask.

My dad presses his lips together. He’s never been great at taking credit for things. Gammy Nell’s been on his case about him advocating for himself at work ever since I can remember.

“Yeah. But your mom really turned things around after she joined the red squad.”

Only now can I appreciate some of the differences between Dad then and Dad now. Appreciate why he felt like he needed to get away from here. He used to talk about my mom with this impossible kind of weight, but now the amusement in his voice is undeniable. Like he can finally look back and see the joy of things the way they were, instead of the pain of what might have been.

“She was the one who had an imagination for what else we could do with the program—some of our best events were all her doing. The snowman contest, cleaning up the litter in the arboretum, that big dance party . . .”

My eyes widen. All the events that have punctuated and defined my short time at Blue Ridge, for better or for worse. The ones that helped me build friendships, helped me push past the limits I set for myself, helped me realize what was actually important to me, and what wasn’t. It’s as if all this time she was holding my hand.

My dad mistakes my reaction, thinking I’m still worrying about the radio-show-dance-party incident.

“Hey,” he says. “I know you’re upset about what happened. But Milo played it off really well. You should listen to the recording, you’ll see.”

I try not to wince, glancing out the window on the passenger side, watching the little strip of Little Fells’s main street go by. A sidewalk I’ve walked thousands of times, full of people who have always known my name.

“I blew Mom’s big secret.”

“Oh, A-Plus.” I can hear the smile in his voice without seeing his face. “I can promise you that wherever your mom is, she is laughing her ass off about that right now.”

“You think so?”

“There’s nothing your mom loved more than a plan gone awry.” My dad pulls down the street to my grandmas’ house and slows the car more than he needs to, taking his time. “And I know this goes without saying, but—she’d be so damn proud of you.”

I rest my head against the cool glass of the window. “Even after everything I messed up?”

“Especially after everything you’ve fought for,” says my dad assuredly. “These years? They’re not meant to be easy. But I’ve got no doubt you’ll tackle them head-on, the same way you always do.”

It’s not that I am unused to people having this kind of unshakable faith in me. My grandmas always have. Shay and Valeria and Milo do. To some degree, I’ve even had that faith in myself. But it means something entirely different coming from him—not like it counts for anything more or anything less, but it counts in a way more meaningful to me than I thought it would.

I lift my head back up as he pulls into the driveway, and say something I haven’t in years: “Thanks, Dad.”

He doesn’t nod. Just looks at me like the words weren’t meant to be something I accepted, but something that should be a given. “For the record,” he adds, “I’m damn proud of you, too.”

My bottom lip quivers. “You’re gonna give me an ego.”

He laughs out loud again, finally shutting off the car. “If you ever get one, it’s from those badass grandmas of yours, not me.”

I smile this new, wobbly smile, one that’s genuine and confused and grateful all at the same time. “I got plenty of things from you, too.”

My dad’s eyes soften, looking between me and the house where I grew up, full of the women who built me. “Well. If that’s true, I’m one lucky dad.”