Trying the Sequential.

The minute Jeff Knight arrived home from school, he went to the mailbox. He expected acceptance letters to arrive in the mail any day now and he was desperate to begin this next phase of life. Canby was nice and all, he’d had a nice childhood, but it was beginning to feel like a python, constricting against every move he made and he was desperate to flee.
As he had anticipated, there was a large white envelope bearing the seal of the University of Arizona on the upper left hand corner. It was thick with its contents, which, to Jeff, heralded only good news. They wouldn’t bother sending catalogs and registration information if you’d been denied. He must have been accepted. He stuffed the envelope into his backpack, tucked the rest of the mail up into his armpit and crossed the front yard to the wide front porch of his house.
He dropped the mail on the dining room table as was the custom in his family and bounded up the stairs without a word. His mother appeared in the kitchen door just in time to see his backpack straps trailing in the air behind him.
“Well, hello…” she called.
Jeff’s voice echoed back down at her, “Hey, mom.”
“Are you coming down?”
“Yeah, just give me a minute, I want to put my stuff away.”
It was not unusual for Jeff to lock himself in his room for long stretches of time but it was the urgency with which he disappeared that sometimes caused his mother alarm. His mother, Beth, understood his excitement. She remembered what it was like to be a teenager. Although she would never admit it to anyone, she felt like she hadn’t aged a day since eighteen. She knew her body was different, her hips wider after childbirth, her chest larger from nursing her boys after they were born. She didn’t mean these physical things, in that way she knew she had aged, it was the inside of her that didn’t feel older. She felt like she did when she was dating Randy Durmeyer and taking long drives down to Molalla State Park in his tricked out Mustang. While nothing had changed on the inside, she knew her children would never believe such a thing. They saw her, checkbook in hand, at the dining room table paying bills, with flour in her hair at Thanksgiving. They knew “mom” and, in moments where she knew Jeff felt misunderstood, she couldn’t help but feel the corners of her mouth crawl up into the beginnings of a smile.
With his bedroom door firmly closed behind him, Jeff reached back into his backpack and pulled out the letter. He was visibly nervous. His hands shook and were moist with sweat, the white envelope barely darkened where his palms pressed into the paper. He didn’t know what he was going to do when the time came to tell his parents. He pushed the thought to the side, allowing himself the victorious moment, and ripped into the envelope. He withdrew the packet and began scanning the title page. He stopped reading after, “Congratulations.” His heart fluttered with the word, as if someone he missed had spoken his name after a long absence. He took the moment, thrilled at it, but then had to face the facts that he was going to have to talk to his parents.
He hadn’t exactly discussed out-of-state schools with his parents. There was a prevailing history in their family of attending local universities. The fact that it was never said made it seem somehow more sinister than it ought to have been, but the Knights suffered from the same lack of communication that affects most families with teenagers.
Each of them, Jeff, his mother, even his father, Tom, a jovial guy with a small insurance business in town, didn’t want to “interfere” with each other. The modern idea of privacy for teens is a good one for the most part, but it has quickly escalated into a remote distance, a silent absolution for the tight family unit.
So, Jeff had application packets mailed to the school. Filling them out was a furtive activity, one that required late night hours, solitude and a shut door. He needn’t have worried about being disturbed. His father had told his mother he was probably masturbating in his room and so there was no chance of his being discovered. His parents’ distance had always seemed like a disinterest to Tom, but to his parents it was a sign of respect. The cross-wiring and miscommunications in their family were too convoluted to be understood by any of them.