Wait, what? Maybe school isn't the way you show people you earned anything. Um, wasn't this the same guy who insisted she have the tutor, who casually left dumb college pamphlets all over the tower, who pretty much encouraged this whole venture in the first place? This wasn't making sense at all. Bringing up Steve just made it worse because Steve was pretty much what she aspired to be- the self made super hero (except maybe a less uptight version). Yeah, he didn't finish school, either, and he became Captain America and Tony didn't want Cassie running around being a vigilante, so what in the world was he trying to encourage her to do now?
Sure, college wasn't for everyone. It wasn't for her mom, she'd only finished high school. It wasn't for her Dad, either; he started and then dropped out when he knocked up a waitress and nine months later Cassie came into the world. What a family legacy. Probably her parents would've wanted her to go to college, but Cassie legitimately didn't know if she wanted to be in college.
This was the first time she'd really thought hard about that. Her classes weren't fun, it was a lot of work she didn't like to do and she didn't really feel like she'd got much out of it beyond this thing she was filling her time with. She just kind of kept hoping it would get better, that something would click. As Tony spun her around like a rag doll it occurred to her that she'd gone because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it wasn't even her idea. She'd never been the kind of student to even scrape together the grades to get into a university and here she was at NYU and it was, she realized with sudden clarity, because of Tony.
Tony got her the tutor that made her not only get her high school certification but made her take the tests for college, too. Probably, the lack of applicants after the zombie apocalypse helped, but there was no way she would've gone without the tutor's help, without Tony's brochures, without that list of scholarships that appeared in her email inbox after she decided on NYU. Tony was a subtle driving force behind the decision, and now he was telling her never mind, try something else. To Cassie that felt like giving up, but maybe to him that was like scrapping a failed project and starting over with something new. Maybe Tony was right. What a stupid epiphany, she could never admit that to him, not in a million years.
"Yeah, I'll think about," she shrugged, nonchalant. And for once, she actually would.