“Cool. I’ll text everyone; we can all meet up and go together.”
Graham is already in his room, his door shutting with a soft click.
***
I spend the afternoon in my room, finishing a novel that leaves me depressed as hell. The main character is giving a party, and the entire story is the day leading up to the party. But all during that day, as she’s getting everything prepared for this party, she’s recalling her past, and the people who’ll be attending: one guy in particular, someone who was in love with her years and years before, someone she didn’t choose. And it’s not like she’s miserable; it’s worse, like she sometimes feels dead inside. At least that’s what I got from it.
Reading a story like that makes you either want to go out and party or stay in to contemplate slitting your wrists.
I’m still deciding.
Me: Everyone going out tonight, prepare for compromising internet photos tomorrow. Still confused. Call when you get a break?
Em: Trying to feel sorry for you… 2 hot guys, 1 you...
“Hey, I’m on dinner break. Jasper gave me a whole twenty minutes,” Emily says when I answer. “God, today’s been a nightmare. Some of Derek’s anti-Goth friends strolled through the store to check me out, and I didn’t disappoint. You know how I dress when I’m working.”
“Yeah.”
“Hold on a sec.” I hear her ordering a slice of pizza and a lemonade, the buzz of hundreds of conversations and the squeals of children in the background. I can almost smell the oregano and tomato sauce of the food court pizza place, mixing with the aroma of constantly frying baskets of French fries at the Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick next door. It feels like months since Emily and I were there together, contemplating my looming celebrity.
“Okay, I’m back. So. What are you more hesitant about, how you feel about Reid, or how he feels about you?”
“Not really how he feels, but what it means, you know?”
“Like the ‘What are your intensions, Mr. Alexander?’ kind of what it ‘means’?”
“Too nineteenth century?”
“Kinda. Plus this isn’t some tool who works at the Gap, this is Reid Alexander.”
“I know. And I’m 17, not 35. It’s not like I need promises of forever.”
“Just because you don’t want somebody to pull the rug out from under you doesn’t mean you’re asking for forever. You’ve had enough grief, Em. I’ve always wondered how I turned out to be the one who pens binders of melancholic poetry, for chrissake.”
***
My father and I never talk about how my mother died.
It was cancer, and it was quick. What I’ve deduced in the past eleven years: she was too young to have known to start looking; there was no family history, no pressing need to be diligent about checkups. The malignant cells were masters at camouflage, with so few telltale signs that photos of her, taken mere months before she died, didn’t contain a single warning. I know. I looked. She appeared healthy and beautiful, but appearances lie.
The discovery was accidental. Her dentist, troubled about the amount of blood loss she sustained from a simple dental procedure, badgered her to go see her doctor. She gave in to shut him up, and I picture her getting the phone call two or three days later, sitting down hard at the kitchen table, speechless.
I was a child, so the truth was kept from me until there was no avoiding it. I don’t know how long I had with her, from the knowledge that I was losing her to the moment she was gone. I have a few strong memories from that time. In the hospital, the tubes and needles that seemed to anchor her to the bed scared the living daylights out of me. Once home, she lay propped in the center of her bed with so many pillows that she seemed to be floating on a cloud of them. Six-year-old reasoning told me that being home meant she was getting better. Bits and pieces of the funeral are vivid. I cried because my father did, because my grandmother did, because everyone did, even the priest, and because my mother wasn’t there to console me, and I didn’t completely understand why.
My grandmother moved in for a week or two, but she finally had to go back to work. She lived nearby, and she became the one I turned to most often when I missed my mother, the one who felt it like I did. Like a giant hole had opened in the middle of my chest, and nothing would ever fill it.
My father was so completely withdrawn and silent after Mom was gone that I began to forget that he was ever easygoing and cheerful. I forgot the way we had chased each other around the house, our food fights, and how he’d get me to help him wash his car and I’d splash him with a bucketful of soapy water. He’d spray me with the hose, and Mom would put her hands on her hips and say, “Connor, I swear to God, I am a single mother of two.” Mouth turned down, eyes big and blinking, he would do what she called his puppy dog look, holding my hand while I mimicked his expression, and she’d throw her hands up in surrender, walking away, hiding her smile. He’d stage-whisper, “She’s no match for our green-eyed charm.”
For a brief time, when he began seeing Chloe, he was like that again—happy. He looked at me instead of through me. And then at some point he belonged to her, and even if he was still there in my life, it was like we’d come apart. I was outside of his embrace again, fighting in vain for a way back in that I never found.
They married thirteen months after my mother died.
I know my father loves me, in his own way. That’s how they say it: He loves you in his own way. Well, what about my way? What if I need for him to love me in my way?