InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Draft Gore!"

SUMMARY: Monet St. Croix calls her father about the status of her college applications, only to face some questions she isn't ready to answer: specifically those about her choices of school, and just why she always finds a way out of coming home to visit.

"Georgetown. Johns Hopkins. Princeton. California at Berkley. California in Los Angeles. California in San Diego. Stanford. And I added back Harvard. The deadline was last week, and I did early decision on as many of them as possible, so I should start getting decisions back by the middle of December. Of course, if any of them say no, they are complete fools."

The voice on the other end of the line was silent for a moment before speaking. "Monet. Only half of those places are on the East Coast. And none are in New York."

"Harvard is in Boston, Papa," Monet replied. "That's relatively close by, no? And Princeton is New Jersey. The tri-state area, I thought. None of it is that far away, I promise." He could take that to the bank: Monet had gone on the Internet and calculated it again and again. Both Boston to Manhattan and Princeton to Manhattan were too close, as far as she was concerned.

Her father went silent again. "Monet," he began. It was a tone she knew very well, but a tone she had rarely had applied to herself at any point during her upbringing: one that signaled a lecture about to be delivered. "I thought you would consider some schools that are closer to home. And I thought you said you would! Not Yale? You have been in California for so long now, and we barely see you. Why do you always refuse to come home?"

"I thought about Yale again, and I looked, and it didn't seem like a good fit. And I'm not refusing to come home, Papa," she lied. Yale also rejected mutants. It was not something she was afraid to discuss with her parent, since he had always been supportive of his children's -- well, her powers, but it was awkward all the same. New Haven was less than a hundred miles. Too too close. "I am always just so busy with school, and extracurriculars, and...friends. I can't always find the time." Grace à dieu. Three thousand miles away, he couldn't see her face.

"Can't always find the time? You never find the time," her father said. "There is always some excuse. You couldn't even come home when there was an earthquake in Los Angeles, when you would have been safer getting out of there."

Monet bit her lip. It wasn't home, Manhattan wasn't home, it was just a diplomatic waystation where her father worked -- but she knew he meant their family, that her father used home to refer to himself, and her heart twisted painfully inside her chest. "That was a hectic situation. Everything was chaos, and I don't know if trying to get out of the city would even have worked, Papa," she replied, fingers growing sweaty and desperate around the receiver of her telephone. "Nobody knew what was going on. And I think you know I was perfectly all right, anyway."

"You are a special girl with special abilities, but who knows where your limits may be?" her father replied. "You've been all right before, but an earthquake! And you said something about the place you're staying being severely damaged."

"It turned out that everything was fine," Monet said lamely, mindful that the fewer details she gave out about the hotel, the better. "And I was just fine. A few things got scratched, but as for me, not a scratch at all."

"Why don't you want to come home, Monet?" he asked.

"I do want to come home," she lied again. "Don't say that, Papa. Of course I want to come home."

"I may be old, but I am not a fool. Monet Yvette Maria Therese," her father said, pulling out all the middle names to show just how serious he was. "You do not want to come home. Why don't you want to see me? Was there something I did to make you try to avoid me so much?"

There was a plea not so cleverly hidden in his normally smooth and diplomatic tone: please, please come home and see me. Monet wanted to tell him she wanted to see him too, one of the only people in the world who had ever unconditionally loved her no matter what attitude she threw at them, but there was more than a grain of truth to his emotional claim. "Of course I want to see you," she finally forced out. "Papa, I miss you so much. But I don't want to --"

"Then when are you coming home to see me?"

It was what he didn't understand. Of course she wanted to see him. It was other people she didn't want to see. Other people she didn't want to be responsible for caring for. Her sisters required so much help, even if they didn't mean to be so demanding. Other people she didn't want to be afraid of -- visions of her brother, gray skin and red eyes and all, rose unbidden to the forefront of her mind, his disappearance the day she found her mother on the floor --

It was the rest of her family she didn't want to see. Not now, not soon, and as far as some of them were concerned, not ever again.

"I don't know," she said. "I'm sorry."