Prompt 222 – Roland goes to college

Alma Mater

He'd raced home from school again. Not that he needed to, he always had at least an hour to kill before his parents got home. Usually two before his mom left the mayor's office and made her way back to their cabin in the woods, but Roland wasn't willing to chance that they'd get home early. There was only one more letter left to come and he had to stash it with the others before they found out what he'd done. His truck bounces down the dirt road. It's David's old truck, seen better days but its gets him where he needs to go and his mom had made it pretty clear that if he wanted a car that was his only option. His argument that Henry had a motorcycle his senior year hadn't gone over well. In fact it had gone pretty terrible, leaving his mom in tears and his dad glaring at him from across the table through their entire meal.

That night wasn't the first night he secretly cursed his big brother for up and leaving them. He understands it now, the need to get out on his own, forge his own path and all that stuff you're supposed to do on your journey to adulthood, but he also remembers how quiet the house was, how mom had cried over the most seemingly insignificant things, how dad has bristled when he joked about wanting to go back to the Enchanted Forest to avoid calculus and how that night he found him crying in Henry's empty bedroom.

He hadn't even wanted to apply, but his principal (who also happened to be one of the men that raised him since birth) insisted, Roland relented if only to get John off his back but not before swearing the man to secrecy. Three schools, that's all John had asked, just try three and see what happens. So he'd swung for the fences: Harvard, Yale, Duke. The schools all the characters on television go to; the impossible to get into schools unless you know someone who knows someone or are among the uber wealthy or ridiculously smart. Roland was none of these. He was average and perfectly okay that.

Why the schools thought otherwise, he had no idea. The letter from Yale came first, heavy embossed paper congratulating him on his achievements and inviting him to join their student body in the fall. Duke was next, same paper, same remarks, this one going as far as to mention the creativity of his essay comparing his childhood on the road to that of living amongst Robin Hood and his Merry Men. If only they'd known…

Those letters were stashed under a loose floorboard in his closet. He should have burned them, but there was a sense of pride in the achievement even if he had absolutely no intention of going. So, two down, one to go. When he rounded the final corner to the driveway, Roland slammed on the breaks. Mom's BMW was in the garage, as was Dad's Jeep. "Shit," he pulled around to his spot at the side of the house, grabbed his book bag and headed in. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe one of them wasn't feeling well and asked the other to come home early? Maybe something happened to someone in the family? "Ok, stop it," he scolded himself for wishing some trauma up to avoid the fact that his parents had checked the mail before he did. Roland took a deep breath and walked through the front door, trying to act as nonchalant as possible. His hurried, "Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad," and rush toward the stairs didn't work, he really wasn't expecting it to. He'd only made it four steps up (taking them two at a time) when Robin's "Son, can you come down here?" stopped him cold. Shit.

They were on the couch, Dad at one end, Mom curled into the other patting the empty cushion between them. "I got a very interesting call from your school today."

"Yeah?" Roland tried to play it cool. Mom was the master at leading questions and he was not going to take the bait.

"John's secretary called very excited because John had gotten a letter congratulating him on one of his student's getting into Harvard. Apparently it's something that some Ivy League schools do and since no one from Storybrooke had ever gotten in they sent this letter."

"That's cool," he stared at his knees so hard he was waiting for them to catch fire. He was going to kill John—father figure be damned, he had promised!

"I asked her why Principal Little wasn't calling," Regina scrunched her nose up, the title still sounding foreign to her although she'd be the first to admit, John was made for the job. "John's out of town," she explained and Roland finally looked up at her. "He left this morning and Mrs. Butters was going through the mail and got so excited she had to call my office."

"Why didn't you tell us you applied to Harvard?" Robin leaned over, putting his hand on his son's shoulder. "Roland, we're so proud of you!"

"Because I'm not going, okay! I'm not going to any of them. John made me apply to three schools and I picked the ones I would never get into because I don't want to go and I'm not going to go!" He bolted off the couch and up the stairs, slamming his bedroom door and leaving his parents staring open mouthed at each other.

"Them?" Robin asked his wife.

"Don't look at me," Regina shrugged, looking up to their son's door and then scooting closer to Robin. "I didn't know he applied anywhere. He said he wanted to hang out for a year and see what happened and after Henry running off at his age I never pushed him."

"Me either," Robin says regretfully. "Maybe we should have?" he asks not really expecting an answer.

"Did John say anything to you?" Regina asks also not expecting an answer; Robin wouldn't have kept this from her.

"Not a word. I don't know whether to shake his hand or punch him for that."

"We should go to talk to him."

"Give him a minute," his fingers trace up and down her arm. "He's got your temper."

"I'll roast you," she wiggles her fingers at him, tiny flames dancing from their tips.

"My point exactly," Robin laughs grabbing her hand before she can swat him with it and kissing her fingers.

"Did we do this? Did I do this? Did I make him afraid to leave home because I was such a wreck over Henry?" she snuggles into his side, wraps her arms around his middle and lets him soothe her.

"We were all a wreck over Henry, Roland included." Robin bends to drop a kiss to the top of her head. "And we'll be a wreck over Roland too."

"Has it been a minute yet?"

He doesn't jump when he hears their soft knock on his door; he's honestly surprised they waited this long. Dad must have been holding her down. "It's open," he sighs, no point in delaying the inevitable any longer. He hands over the other letters before they make it inside. "I'm not going to accept any of these so we really don't need to have this conversation," he flops down on the bed with the grace of an exasperated teenager.

"Okay," Robin tosses the letters into the wastebasket by his bed. Roland sits up instantly sharing his mother's wide-eyed look at his Ivy League acceptance letters in the trash. "But why didn't you tell us you were applying? You can tell us anything, you know that."

"I…"

"You didn't want to hurt us?" Regina sits next to him, runs her fingers through his curls like she used to when he was a toddler chasing after the Evil Queen. "You didn't want us to have to watch you leave like we did Henry?"

"Part of it," he stares at her knees this time, change of scene. "You cried a lot."

"I'm going to cry a lot when you leave too, Roland. You're my baby. When your 50, you'll be my baby. But you're going to leave and you're going to start your own story. If it's not at Harvard, that's fine. But please don't think you have to stay in Storybrooke for your father and me."

"You didn't go to college and you're the mayor," he argues. "Dad didn't even go to high school and he runs his own business. I don't need to go to college."

"First of all, you're mother got her education from a curse," he sits on the edge of the bed so Roland is once again between them, shooting an apologetic look at Regina which she shrugs off. He's not entirely wrong, after all. "And I had schooling in the Enchanted Forest and a lot of help from people when I first got here." He's lecturing and he hadn't intended to. "Roland, I just don't want you to regret not going and trying something new."

"I really don't want to go to any of those schools. I didn't even look in to them or anything I just filled out some forms and wrote a stupid essay and…"

"You like to write," Regina interrupts him. "And you certainly have had some interesting experiences to write about."

"Henry is literally The Author and I…"

"…are not Henry," Regina scoots back on the bed, turns so she's facing him and he can't look away. "No one is asking you to be anything other than yourself, Roland. If you want to stay here forever and get a job at Grannies, do it. If you want to move to Bangkok and open a comic book store, do it. Please don't decide you're future on what you think we want for you. We just want you to be happy."

"I…I might want to go to school, but like a closer one. Just to see what else is out there."

"Okay," Regina gives him a watery smile and squeezes his knee.

"We'd like to help you look. Maybe visit some campuses, see where our son could be living." Robin's arm goes around his shoulders and he leans into the half hug his father offers.

"I'd like that. I'd like that a lot."

Regina snakes her arm around him, hugs him from the other side and leans over to pluck the letters from the trash. "I'm keeping these," she winks at her boys, tucks the letters under her arms. She pulls Robin to his feet and together they make their way back downstairs.

Roland exhales in an audible whoosh, the stress of the last year evaporating with it. He grabs his tablet from the nightstand and flops across the bed. Time to start looking at schools.