AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I light up and cough when I inhale. “These things are disgusting. I don’t know how you smoke them.” I drag on it again. I’m suddenly lightheaded and tingling from head to toe. I blink hard to stop the waves of dizziness. “Okay, maybe I take it back.”
She laughs, lighting up too. “Don’t worry, you only get the buzz the first couple weeks. So was that Lindsey?”
“Um, no, that was Todd. I think we broke up.”
“That sucks,” she says, tapping her cigarette on the railing. I was hoping for a little more sympathy. But what can she say? It’s not like she can say anything that will change it.
“Yeah. He slept with Elaine. I can’t believe it.”
But even as I say it, I know that’s not true. Of course I can believe it. She told me it was going to happen. Some part of me was expecting it the whole time, waiting for it. I’m not even surprised. Maybe that’s why I don’t know what to say, how to react. Girls in movies always fly into a rage and burn all his clothes when they get cheated on, but I can’t have a big reaction to something I’ve known was coming all along.
“What are you going to do?” Meghan asks after a while.
I throw my cigarette over the railing, watching the orange spark tumble through the darkness and disappear when it hits the ground. Then I lift my face, closing my eyes and blotting out the millions of twinkling stars in the black over the lake. I used to look for constellations with Dad. He’d point at the sky and find horses and warriors and women, drawing patterns out of the random like some kind of magician. I don’t want to see them anymore, to look for them now, when he’s not here to explain the science behind the trickery.
I turn back to Meghan, wrapping my arms around myself against the cold, the ghost that haunts me everywhere I go—in my room, at the movies, in the night sky.
Maybe I’ve known the answer to her question all along too.
“I’m going to sleep with a college guy, of course. What else would a Connecticut girl do to get back at her high school boyfriend?”
eight
Now Playing:
“2 Become 1”—Spice Girls
There’s no sign of the guys the next day.
“Of course I decide to sleep with him and he disappears,” I grumble as we head back to the house in defeat after an evening walk on the misty lakeshore.
“He’s probably just got family shit,” Meghan says. “They’re staying with their uncle.”
“Or he found someone who’s not a total freak.”
“Trust me, if you’re just looking for a hookup, that does not matter. Even if you turned into a stage-five clinger, he’ll be across the ocean, which makes stalking a wee bit difficult. That’s why dudes like to hook up on vacation. No strings.”
“Right,” I mutter, my heart flip-flopping like a fish. “No strings.”
Could I really do that? It’s so not the kind of thing I do.
But then, that’s kinda the whole point, isn’t it?
Our last day at the lake is New Year’s Eve. My last chance—not that I have much chance. Mom is going out with the adults, which means I have to stay in and babysit Lily.
I don’t even care anymore. I’m too despondent to celebrate, so I haul the yearbooks up to the sunroom and sit there alone, staring into Dad’s smiling face and hating him for being happy. When I finally work up the anger to fuel me into looking, I find him in the section of senior portraits at the end of the yearbook, each student getting a full page where a large gold-framed portrait sits in the center of a black page, the school’s motto in Latin inlaid in the frame.
On the following page are more pictures of them, along with some dated clipart depicting what they were into—a guitar, a skateboard, a sheet of paper with an A+ at the top. There’s a picture of him with another kid that says it’s senior project, though I can’t tell what the project is, one where he’s holding a skateboard behind his head and grinning, and one of him in the music room with a guitar, his longish hair falling over his forehead, his face deep in concentration. With his hoodie and baggie jeans and Vans, it’s the most 90s thing I’ve ever seen. There’s another picture of him with the vaguely familiar guy, with the title above reading, “My personal motto is…” At the bottom, there’s a blank space where Dad scribbled in his messy, male handwriting,“Bros before ho’s.”
The guy towers over Dad in this one, his arm slung around Dad like he’s the big guy’s little buddy. At first glance, it looks like someone popular saw the yearbook photographer and was trying to get into the yearbook again by crowding into a smaller kid’s moment. But the longer I study it, the more genuine their friendship appears. The big guy isn’t clamping a hand around Dad’s shoulders to keep him in place, and Dad’s not standing stiffly in a picture he doesn’t want to be in. They’re both relaxed. The tall guy has his head tilted sideways toward Dad, like he’s trying not to look so much bigger. They both have those tough-guy expressions that middle class white guys do in pictures when they’re trying to look ‘hard,’ but I can see a glimmer of laughter in Dad’s hooded eyes, like he’s trying not to laugh. Combined with his motto, it’s all so cheesy and generic—everything Dad hated.
Was he faking it all to fit in, like he faked the World’s Best Dad routine? Like I fake it? I shiver and flip through on a whim, looking for Lindsey’s dad. I find a Justin Darling in thesenior pages, but aside from the stark blue eyes and blond hair, he doesn’t resemble the man I’ve met at her house. He must be one of her uncles, maybe Colt’s dad. I study his page of candid shots and read his handwritten motto, “Family is forever.” Guess Dad’s not the only one with a cliché motto.
I flip back to his page one more time, that eerie feeling creeping back into me, like I’m looking at a stranger. It’s weird seeing him looking like someone’s sidekick. He was always the center of our lives. I slam the yearbook and shove it onto the shelf, not bothering to look through the others. There’s nothing more to learn. Dad didn’t fit in at Faulkner High, so he went to the private school. They had guitar lessons, and he loved music, so he took them. He was happy there. He had friends.Bros.
When did he stop being happy with Mom, with our family? With me?
Why weren’t we enough?
