Taylor was doing the dishes when the phone rang. “I’ll get it!” he yelled, even though no one else had moved to answer it. “Let me get it!” He lunged for the receiver without pausing to dry his hands. “I’ve got it! Nobody else answer it!” He took a deep breath. “Hello?”
“Hello,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “I’m calling for Taylor Conway. Is he available to come to the phone?”
“So.” Dan was sitting on the living room couch, reading the newspaper. “You get your phone call?”
Taylor swallowed hard, nodding slowly.
Dan raised his eyes from the paper. “What’d they say?”
Taylor bit his lip and thought for a moment. “Um. . . well. . .” he whispered, “I guess. . . I mean. . .”
He didn’t get in, Dan thought. How could he not have gotten in?
“I mean, I passed,” Taylor said. “But. . .”
Dan rolled his eyes. “Look, if they’re idiots over there that can’t appreciate-”
“No.” Taylor shook his head. “No, I got in. But. . . but. . .”
“But what?” Dan, who had attended a few too many exclusive private schools himself and emerged without much affinity for them, indulged his ever available cynical side. “There’s special stipulations for kids who come from public school? There’s-”
“No, Dad, it’s not that, either,” said Taylor. “It’s really not bad news, it’s. . .”
“It’s what?” Dan prompted.
Taylor blinked. “I guess. . . I guess they want to give me some kind of scholarship. It’s named after some dead guy or something.”
It occured to Dan that Taylor seemed far more shocked than happy. “This is a good thing, right?”
“Yeah, I’m just surprised.” Taylor shook his head. “Just surprised.” He blinked again.
Nora, when she heard, was more than just surprised. In fact, Zac reflected, one would think that Taylor had come up with a cure for world hunger or something, the way his mother got on the phone and started calling everybody in the world who might be remotely interested in the news. (And, Zac reflected, probably a few people who were not.)
It wasn’t that Zac thought it was bad that Taylor had gotten a scholarship, nor was he at all jealous. It was just that one could reliably expect things like scholarships and good grades to happen to Taylor, because he worked very hard and did very well in school and high achievment was usually rewarded. The whole thing seemed very logical to Zac. But he would not want to be Taylor.
For one thing, because everybody had always known that Taylor could do well, everybody just expected him to do well. If he didn’t, they would all be surprised and confused and they would want to know why. Therefore, Taylor always felt as if he had to do very well at everything, all the time. And he felt like he was letting everybody down if he didn’t do exceptionally. That was Taylor’s fault, Zac knew.
Zac knew that it was Taylor’s fault because their parents were not evil, pushy parents who always wanted their kids to be the best at everything. In fact, Zac was well-aquainted with the fact that his mother and father could be amazingly gullible at times. He could scribble a bunch of stick figures on the back of a grocery receipt, show it to his parents and pretend he thought it was the best thing he’d ever drawn and they would want to frame it and put it on the wall. Zac knew that his mother and father had never told Taylor to get good grades; Taylor had always just gotten them. He was the one who had to be perfect at everything all the time; nobody else demanded that he be. Even so, Taylor’s motivation for doing well was the fact that people responded well to straight A’s and never being in detention. He’d learned that doing well in school was a method of getting approval and acceptance from adults way back when he couldn’t get approval and acceptance anywhere else.
Zac didn’t like to make mistakes either, and he knew he probably tried harder to avoid making them than Taylor did. Zac wasn’t sure if many people knew that, though. He didn’t like to try too hard at certain things, because it was much, much worse to screw up something that you’d invested a lot of your self into than to mess up something you’d taken pretty lightly. That was a big difference between himself and Taylor, Zac reflected. Taylor took just about everything he did equally seriously, and tried equally hard at all of them. When Zac was worried he wouldn’t be able to do something well, he either avoided doing it, tried it by himself until he knew how to do it, or, if he couldn’t get out of having to do it right then, pretended he wasn’t very worried about getting it right, even if he was worried. He only liked to do things that he felt prepared to do. Early on in life Zac had decided that he wasn’t particularly fond of surprises, and that hadn’t changed a bit.
Even so, Zac never worried that his parents would be disappointed if he made a mistake at something, only that he would be disappointed in himself. For Taylor, it was the opposite. He probably wouldn’t be disappointed in himself if he didn’t feel that other people would be disappointed in him if he did something badly. When Zac made up his mind that he was going to do something right, he would still be mad at himself if he messed it up, even if there were no people around to see. If the same thing happened to Taylor and nobody else was around, Taylor would probably just try again and never give it a second thought. Zac would probably try again, but first he’d get mad at himself and he’d probably kick something.