Minutes later, while pressing an ice pack to the goose egg on the back of my skull, Mitchell apologized repeatedly. “I’m sorry—God, I’m so sorry—of course I trust you. These are my insecurities, leftovers from what Darla did to me, you know?” Darla—his freshman-year girlfriend who’d cheated on him with his best friend and broken his heart. “Please, Pearl. You know I didn’t mean for you to get hurt. I’ll never talk to you like that again, I swear.” His blue eyes were glassy with tears.

I’d forgiven him in the end, accepting his sworn promises.

“Are you. Fucking. Kidding me?” he repeated from across the table, snapping those months-old vows like they’d never been given.

Despite the music pumping through the packed restaurant and the voices raised in conversation all around us, the two women at an adjoining table heard him. Both went silent, sliding looks between each other and the developing scene at our table. Mortified, I sensed them deliberating whether or not to intervene. I hated being a spectacle almost as much as I hated what he’d said, and he knew it.

I leaned in, face on fire, voice low. “Mitchell, not here.”

“Not here?” He angled his head as if he was offended. “You decided to drop this on me here. Maybe you should have considered where you wanted to have this absurd discussion instead of trying to tell me how to react to the fact that my girlfriend is tossing her future away—and mine, by the way—like it’s no big deal.”

His words snuck under my arguments, igniting guilt that what I decided could alter the course of both our futures, not just mine.

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I thought we could discuss this—”

“Sure, sure. Let’s discuss it. So what are you planning to do instead with your degree in premed biology? Teach high school? Work in some mind-numbing lab for the rest of your life? Oh, wait—I know.” He sat back, mouth settling into a hostile smile. “Slink back to your sheltered small-town existence, away from the big bad world, and collect shells or diagnose fish allergies or whatever the hell you did last summer. Is that your brilliant plan?”

Indignant, I sat back and crossed my arms, refusing to answer. I hated when he ridiculed my hometown—a habit that had worsened instead of improving after he’d visited for a week the previous summer. Though he’d seemed impressed with my parents’ bayfront property and had spent as much time discussing his surgical aspirations and opinions about the medical profession with my stepdad as he spent with me, he still insisted my homesickness was juvenile. Something to be outgrown.

He dipped his face into my field of vision and peered at me. “Oh Jesus—seriously? Have you lost your mind, Pearl? You must be certifiable, because no sensible person would sacrifice the chance to attend one of the top medical schools in the world to work with fish.”

We’d almost broken up that night, but once back in my room, he convinced me that he was only concerned I was acting rashly.

He begged me to reconsider. “You just have cold feet,” he said. “You’ll see.”

So I agreed to continue the med-school interviews, consider the offers of admission, and even accept one of them: Vanderbilt, in Tennessee—one of two that had also accepted him.

Meanwhile, I took the GRE and applied—on the final date to submit an application—to one graduate program in marine biology, located, as Mitchell predicted, in my hometown. I told myself that if I didn’t get in, I would go to medical school like everyone expected me to and no one would ever know I’d applied.

In December, I got the acceptance e-mail. Fellowships had been allocated months before, but I was offered a small stipend—just enough to cover tuition, fees, and equipment—in exchange for working in the lab or collecting marine samples in the gulf. I was welcome to begin in summer, but the student apartments—weatherworn but beachfront—were full. Unlike other students, however, my parents owned a four-thousand-square-foot home minutes from campus. I wouldn’t need housing.

There’d be no high-paid position awaiting me when I earned my degree, and most people would never quite understand what I did for a living or why. A lifetime spent studying the ocean and the life in it wasn’t something people did for money or social prestige. It was something they were drawn to, like people are drawn to the sea itself. I would discover my research niche in grad school—something environmental in scope—and spend my career building a body of work to support it.

Instead of going to medical school and becoming the surgeon I’d always planned to be.

I’d stared at that screen while rational arguments for bowing out, alternating between the voices of my boyfriend and my mother, played on a loop through my mind. But the mounting elation in the pit of my soul obliterated them. Growing up on the coast, I’d been witness to the devastation, aquatic and human, caused by oil leaks and spills. But there was more to it than seagulls slicked with oil and globs of tar polluting the beach, and marine scientists were the ones who explored those far-reaching consequences. I wanted to be part of that research.

It had taken me a month to tell Mitchell. The first weekend back after winter break, we were watching a movie in my room—rather, he was watching while I was being consumed by guilt for letting him believe we would be going to Tennessee together in six months.

Finally, I sat forward and knotted my fingers in my lap. Say it, say it, say it. “So, about Vanderbilt…”