AN: Hello, again! So wow, this story is almost two years old, toddling around and breaking shit, and we're almost two years* ahead of its timeline (it's May 2013 in A Real Education-verse). There are...ten? chapters left, so at this rate we'll be through sometime around 2020. Thanks for hanging on! I see you guys, following and favoriting, and I appreciate it!
The same night
The front windows of Sybil's house were dark as Tom approached. Ameera and Lindsay must be out painting the town with their fellow newly-minted dentists, or else tucked up in their beds; Tom figured Sybil was asleep as well. It had been a long night.
He shuffled around the house to her door, more than ready to fall into bed himself, and fumbled his keys out of his pocket. She could've at least left the outside light on.
"Tom?"
He about lost a year off his life. "Holy fuck, Sybil." Once his heart had slowed down to twice its normal speed, he crouched down to feel around for the keys he'd dropped on the stoop.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to give you a fright." She sounded funny: like she'd been crying, or was about to.
He felt his way toward her, barking his shin on something and swearing under his breath. "Have you been out here this whole time?"
"I didn't feel like going inside yet."
He found a chair by accidentally kicking it over, righted it, and sat down next to her. He thought about asking if she was OK. Not because he thought she was, but to get her talking. In the end he just reached over and took her hand.
"Tom...I don't know if I can do this."
He'd been waffling on the way over about whether he should tell Sybil about Robert's revelation that Jane had been the one to end the relationship. It felt wrong to keep something so significant from her, but she had enough reason to dread seeing her father tomorrow without that last shred of redemption being torn away. Candor was woven into Tom's very fabric, and no matter what he said or didn't say, he'd no illusions that Robert and Sybil's relationship would be made whole anytime soon. But still he shrank from dealing its death blow. It only made him angrier at Robert for having put him in this position. Who told him to make me his bleeding confidant?
He squeezed Sybil's hand. "Of course you can."
"But I don't want to. I don't want to have to take pictures with Papa at graduation and talk to him and go out to dinner with him and Mama and pretend everything's fine."
"Will they actually try and pretend everything's fine?"
She snorted. "Have you met my family?"
He was silent for a moment. Finally he said, "There's nothing that says you have to, you know."
"Oh, but I do."
"You don't. Maybe you can't keep him from coming to the stadium tomorrow, but you don't have to act as though you're happy to see him. You don't have to go to dinner. You don't even have to go to the bloody ceremony, if you don't want to."
She huffed a sarcastic laugh. "Yeah. Fuck it."
"Yeah! Fuck it."
She let go of his hand. His eyes had adjusted enough to see the shadows of her arms as she raised them, her chair creaking a little, and her voice rose to the clear dark sky: "Fuck it! Fuck graduation!"
He laughed, tension he hadn't known he still carried leaking out of him. Why shouldn't they skip it, if she wanted to? "You've already done all the work. All this is is walking down an aisle in fancy dress."
"Yeah." But that wild note had fallen out of her voice. She sighed. "Mama'd be crushed. Granny...she'd ring me up just to scold me. And I really do want to be a part of it, you know. With the cap and gown and the boring speeches and people decorating their mortarboards and all of it. I know it's silly, but…"
"It isn't, though." If she didn't go to commencement, she wouldn't feel as though she'd really graduated. "Syb, you don't have to explain."
"I guess I just want the reward for all the work. Even if it isn't much of a reward." She stood up and grasped his hands, pulling him up with her. "Let's go inside. We've got a big day tomorrow."
-ooo-
Saturday
It wasn't anywhere near evening, but Tom needed a drink.
The best he could say about the commencement ceremony was that it was over. The day had dawned bright and crisp but the humidity had descended swiftly, leaving the people in the stands sweltering and the graduates broiling in their black robes like ants under a magnifying glass. Far below on the stadium field, Sybil had been just one speck among thousands, though Tom and her family raised a weak cheer when her name was called. The procession—much like the speeches before it—had seemed to go on forever, and then it took forever for them to get out of the stadium and locate Sybil amid the crush of people all trying to do the same thing.
"What did people ever do before mobile phones?" Sybil said when they finally met up, after multiple texts. "They must have spent hours wandering around trying to find each other." She was with her friend Alice, who'd been trying in vain to reach her own family; with all the signals flying around, half the texts people sent weren't getting through.
"We didn't have cell phones, but we did have a little thing called planning," Cora said.
"Yes, the younger generation seems to have lost the knack of it," said Robert. He and his soon-to-be ex-wife shared a smirk at that. They'd sat next to each other for the ceremony and Tom had noticed they seemed quite chummy during the slow bits, of which there'd been plenty.
"Oh, please," said Martha, fanning herself with a program. "I seem to remember someone calling me in tears, collect, from a payphone in the middle of nowhere because she'd snuck off to some kind of hippie love-in without bothering to make sure she had a ride home."
"I did have a ride home," Cora grumbled. "But he decided to go to San Francisco instead of back to Newport. Didn't want to be part of 'The Establishment' anymore." She glanced at Robert, the very embodiment of all things Establishment, even as she spoke to Sybil. "Darling, you're lucky you didn't end up the daughter of a flower child."
Alice's mobile phone went off several times in a row as all her texts came in at once. "Finally!" she cried, but pulled a face when she read one. "Ugh, they're all the way over at Gate Four. Good thing I brought my flip-flops!" She dug them out of her bag, switched them for the maize-colored leather pumps on her feet, and gave Sybil a hug. "See you out later?"
Sybil's gaze ran over her grandmother and her parents, who were still making eyes at each other like teenagers at a dance. "I'm sure you will."
-o-
At dinner that night Robert was sober and on his best behavior, bending over backward to charm his wife and mother-in-law. Tom he mostly ignored; Sybil he treated with his usual affectionate reserve. She seemed caught off guard. She'd girded herself for more conflict, but Robert actually apologized for having overstepped in the matter of the London job, and he was so attentive to Cora that by the end of the meal Sybil was looking cautiously optimistic.
The scene only depressed Tom, though he tried to hide it. He couldn't stop thinking about the slump of Robert's shoulders the night before, the bleakness in his voice. Tom was intimately familiar with such feelings, though judging by tonight's performance Robert was much better than him at covering them up. The man was heartbroken. He'd been in love with Jane, or at the very least infatuated with her. He might very well have feelings for Cora—some combination of devotion and duty—but he'd never have come back to her so soon if he'd had any other choice. The man had bollocks, you had to give him that. Carrying on like that in front of the one person who could be his undoing. He must have figured that if Tom hadn't told Sybil last night (and it would have been obvious, if he had) then he wasn't going to.
Tom still wasn't sure about that. But Sybil seemed more relaxed than she had in weeks and he hated to spoil the mood. A few times he caught Martha eyeing the couple, but she didn't say anything either, which seemed (for her) like a Herculean display of restraint. She must have been hoping for a reconciliation as well.
After an eternity the meal ended and finally, finally, he and Sybil had the night to themselves. Almost.
"Everyone's going to Rick's," Sybil said as they walked across the Diag. The blazing day had mellowed into another gorgeous evening, and she and Tom had declined Cora's offer of a ride home. "You don't have to come if you don't want to. I know how you hate sweaty frat bars."
Actually, Sybil was the one who hated sweaty frat bars; but this was the last night she'd have with her uni mates before they all went their separate ways. Possibly it was the last time she'd see some of them. "Nah, I don't mind," Tom said. "Someone's got to keep the douchebags away, yeah?" He'd been to Rick's—once—and he knew what went on there.
Sybil's mouth primmed up and she raised an eyebrow at him, though she kept hold of his hand. "Aren't we in a patronizing mood tonight."
"It's true, isn't it? I seem to remember you telling me all about some scanger groping you on the dance floor, last time you went there."
"Well, yes, but—" she stopped suddenly enough to jerk Tom's arm half out of its socket. He looked back at her questioningly; there was a little smile on her face. "Look," she said, nodding down at their feet, which were directly on top of the brass "M" set into the pavement in the center of the quad.
He smiled too. Where it all started. "No more exams to worry about," he said lightly.
"Nope."
He stepped closer, pulled her into his arms. "Did I already tell you…" She was looking up at him, her eyes dreamy in the dusk. He felt slightly dizzy; there were people walking past, but the two of them might have been the only ones around. "Did I tell you how proud I am of you?"
"Not yet." She raised her head a little more. Her lips just barely brushed his.
"Well, I am." He took a breath, rubbed his cheek against her smooth one, something in him standing to attention at her throaty chuckle. "Congratulations, love," he whispered in her ear. "You did it."
She pulled back and he was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She blinked them away. "Thank you." She swallowed. "That means a lot, coming from you." Her hands tightened on the back of his neck, drawing him down to her, and she pressed her mouth to his.
-o-
At Rick's they didn't have to wait too terribly long to get in (Sybil and her friends' relatively conservative dress seemed to work more in their favor than otherwise, in the bouncer's eyes) but inside was absolute madness. There wasn't much difference, Tom thought, between a few hundred punters blowing off steam at the end of term and a battle scene in your average medieval war movie. In either situation there'd be a fair bit of piss, puke and blood on the ground by the end of it.
Sybil and her mates started right in, ordering a big bowl of some unnaturally blue concoction that came with six straws. They drank it down in seconds, still standing at the bar, and ordered a round of shots, followed with bottles of candy-colored malt liquor that probably had twice as much alcohol as the watery beer the guys here favored. Tom abstained from all of it, nursing a Harp. The way Sybil was going, he had the idea she was going to need some nursing herself later on.
He didn't say anything. God knew he'd had plenty of sessions himself, with a corresponding number of mornings after, and all of Edna's snide comments hadn't done a single thing to improve them. But he wasn't sorry he'd come. He'd said that lightly before, about keeping the douchebags away, but there were plenty of them about and from the look of it they were on the hunt, despite the fact that two of Sybil's friends had also brought their boyfriends. Their mere presence wasn't enough to discourage the wankers—not from six fit and obviously tipsy women—but he was sober enough to make sure none of his group went off with one of them. And in any case, it made for entertaining people-watching. So they drank, Sybil much more than Tom, and she went out onto the dance floor with her mates while he and the other two boyfriends leant against the wall and nodded awkwardly to each other, it being too loud to talk. Eventually Sybil dragged him out onto the floor and they gyrated together in a sweaty tangle of bodies and she kissed him, her mouth hot and sweet and alcoholic, and it was late and everyone else was doing the same thing but it didn't matter; it was special because it was them.
At closing time the club vomited its patrons up the stairs and into the streets, which rang with drunken laughter and shouts and car horns. Alice invited everyone to her place for more drinks, but Sybil waved them off, saying she had to meet her parents for breakfast the next morning before they left for the airport. Tom was surprised she'd remembered. They all parted with tearful hugs and promises to stay in touch. Sybil would be in town until the end of May, when she'd fly to Dublin with Tom for Katie's wedding and then on to London, but most of her mates were leaving within the week for new jobs or their parents' houses.
"Let's go to your flat," Sybil said, or rather slurred. "I'm feeling a bit...I think I need to lie down." She did look a bit green. And she'd had an awful lot of different kinds of drink. They started up Church Street toward Hill.
She caught her heel in a crack in the pavement and almost fell. Tom caught her arm, holding her up. "We'll be there in fifteen minutes, love. You sure you can make it?"
Her answer was to stumble to one side and lose her dinner behind a tree, clutching its trunk for balance. Ah, feck, thought Tom, and went over to hold her hair for her. After a couple of minutes she straightened up and wiped her mouth, looking considerably more sober.
"OK...better now."
"You sure? We can stay at this tree all night if you like." That raised a weak smile. "Or the next one down maybe could use some fertilizing, eh?"
"I don't think puke's any good for trees." She grinned and tried a couple of times to put her arm through his, before he helped her. "I really need to clean my teeth now."
They started off again, slowly, in deference to Sybil's high heels. "So did you have fun?"
"Yeah, too much." She laughed. "It was good to go out with the whole crew one last time." They'd all met as freshers, had lived on the same corridor in the residence hall. Sybil and Alice had been roommates their first year, but wisely decided that their friendship would be better for not living together after that. "It's so weird...I've lived here for four years, and now I won't anymore."
"Don't remind me," Tom said before he could think, but lightened it with a laugh.
"Sorry." Sybil went quiet for a moment. He could tell she was trying to think of something else to talk about. "Today went pretty well," she said brightly. "Papa was cert...cert...he was sure trying to sweep Mama off her feet."
It slipped out: that was what he told himself later, about what he said next. And then he had to admit that it hadn't. The thread of longing in Sybil's voice was too much, after a night of watching her watch her parents and hope in spite of herself. Usually Tom thought Sybil's capacity to see the best in people was something to aspire to, but tonight he found it naive. He'd spent the better part of two months dealing with the fallout of Robert's bullshit and he was finally, thoroughly sick of it. Robert didn't deserve her fucking forgiveness.
"Yeah," he spat. "I'm not surprised he'd want to, since his mistress dumped him."
As soon as the words were out he wanted them back. Of course Robert didn't deserve to be forgiven; but Sybil needed to forgive. And he might have just taken that away from her. But she was silent. Maybe she hadn't heard, he thought desperately. Maybe she was too drunk to get it.
"What?" Her steps slowed until they almost stopped. "What did you say?"
"Nothing."
She stopped walking altogether. A trio of shitefaced young women almost ran into them and swore amiably, but she didn't even turn her head; her eyes burned and she seemed to be having trouble getting a full breath. "Tell me, Tom." She wasn't slurring at all any longer.
He took her elbow and steered her a little off the pavement. "Look, I should have told you before, but I didn't want—I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"What have you got to be sorry for?"
"Nothing. I…" He should have known he couldn't keep it from her. He should have said something this morning, before she'd seen her parents together and allowed herself to hope that things could be like they were before. He should have let her go into it clear-eyed, he saw that now. But it was too late, and all he could do was make it quick. "Last night, when I drove your father home, he told me that Jane had left him." It took a moment for it to sink in, and Tom made himself look into Sybil's eyes while it did. It was the least he could do.
"So the way he was acting today…" She shook her head slowly. "God. I'm so stupid."
"Sybil…"
"No. Tom, do you know, my mates we hung out with tonight...all of their parents...divorced. They used to make fun of me a little, because mine were the last ones standing, but I could tell they were kind of jealous." She let out a mirthless laugh and mashed her fingertips into her forehead as if she were trying to drive them through her skull. "It really can't last forever, can it. We just aren't built for it."
He wanted to tell her how his own parents had loved each other to the very end; how he would love her, to the ends of the earth, no matter how long she stayed away. But his tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth. By the time it came unstuck she'd whipped around and was stomping off down the street.
At least she was stomping toward his apartment. He didn't know what he'd have done if she'd turned toward her own place. He felt a strange sensation of traveling back in time: Maybe it's just not in God's plan for us to be together, Edna whispered from his past. But Sybil was his future.
He caught up with her easily. "I'm sorry," she said, not looking at him. "I'm pissed and...pissed off."
"I can see that." He was so shocked he couldn't find much else to say, but he put his arm round her shoulders. "Come on. Let's get you home."
-ooo-
The next morning Sybil was in no condition to get out of bed, let alone negotiate the minefield of her current relations with her parents. She rang her mother at ten to apologize for missing breakfast and tell her she'd see her in London in a month; the conversation lasted less than five minutes.
"You didn't say anything to her," Tom said, over the news feed on his laptop screen. For all he knew, Sybil didn't even remember last night, but he wasn't going to try and cover it up.
She did remember, though. "If she wants to stay in a marriage of convenience, that's her business." She snapped her mouth shut, climbed back into bed, and pulled the duvet over her head. Her muffled voice issued from it: "Ugh, I'm never drinking again."
Tom just laughed and brought her two paracetamol and a big glass of water. "You're twenty-three, love. You'll bounce right back."
By evening she was back to her old self, showered and declaring she could eat a horse, or at the very least half a pizza. They walked to The Brown Jug and ordered a medium supreme, drinking Cokes while they waited for it. Neither was in the mood for alcohol.
"You're very quiet," Sybil said after a few minutes of watching Tom play with his napkin. He'd been trying to figure out the angle from which to probe her about the things she'd said last night, but it was difficult: he didn't want to make more of it than it was. If he'd been able to, he would have chalked it up to intoxication and stirred-up emotions and tried to move on. But moving on had never been his specialty.
He looked up at her. "Syb, you know what's going on with your parents has got nothing to do with us, right? They're them, and we're us, and it's completely different. You know that, right?"
She gave him a quizzical smile. "Of course I do."
"Well, last night you said…" how much did she even remember? "You just seemed really jaded all of a sudden. Are you sure you're OK?" Now she looked really confused. Fuck, he was dancing around it. He took a drink from his glass and made himself say it. "I mean, I have to admit, I'm a little worried about us sustaining a long distance relationship if you've decided you don't believe in love anymore." He laughed, as if to say Yeah, it's ridiculous, isn't it?
Her brow cleared, though there was still uncertainty in her eyes. If he'd had to, Tom would have guessed she didn't remember making the statement that had been echoing in his brain all day. It really can't last forever. We, she'd said, we just aren't built for it. She'd meant people. Tom had rolled his eyes at his share of Internet comment threads claiming humans' innate inability to be monogamous, but he'd never in a million years have thought Sybil would believe something like that.
But she'd been angry. And surely she hadn't meant we as in herself and Tom.
Had she?
Her face grew solemn. She reached across the table and took his hands, looking straight into his eyes. "Tom, whatever I said last night...I wasn't myself."
She didn't remember, then.
"But I know in my heart that we can do this."
"I do too," he said.
Their dinner came, and he let the subject drop. It took him until long after she'd gone to sleep that night to realize that believing in them wasn't the same as believing in love. He had to hope that, for her, it was close enough.
* AN #2 - I originally (and mistakenly) put down that we're in May 2014 in story-verse, but it's actually 2013. Yes, we are almost two years ahead of story timeline. That's what I get for not checking my notes! And taking so long to write. Apologies!