“You can decide which one while your father clears the table,” Mom said, and grinned at Dad before looking at me. I stared down at my plate. I didn’t want to see her grin falter. I wish I’d never seen her cry like I did the other day because no one’s life should be driving their kid home from school and then sobbing.
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“Oh, I see how it is,” Dad said. “You want me out of the way to influence the selection. You’re sneaky and beautiful.”
Mom laughed and I watched the two of them sparkle and wondered why we kept pretending. I was so tired of them trying to be what they’d never wanted to be before, of the whole “we’re available! and dedicated!” parents routine. I was tired of how they were always acting like they didn’t mind living with me.
“You know you love my taste in movies,” Dad said, picking up his plate and Mom’s and kissing the top of her head. She tilted her head back and grinned at him.
I never thought my parents deserved their . . . thing, their endless swallow-up-everything love. I hated it because it made me nothing. Love, to me, was all about exclusion.
I hated that we weren’t a family. We were a couple with an extra person tacked on because they simply happened to forget birth control one night sixteen years ago.
They’ve never said it—not directly to me, anyway—but I heard them talking about it once. Mom realized she was going to have me, and eight months before I was born, Dad had a vasectomy. You don’t forget hearing something like that.
I pushed my plate away.
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“You don’t have to do this anymore,” I said. “You don’t have to play perfect family with me. Things can go back to how they were.”
My father froze. So did my mother, head still tilted back toward him, the smile on her face fading.
“All right, I promise I won’t suggest any possible movies,” Dad said, trying for normal but failing. Teenagers only want to spend evenings bonding with their parents in old sitcoms, and no one in this house ever asked me to watch a movie with them before Julia died. And no matter what Laurie had said and how much part of me wanted to believe her, believe that I’d made choices and Julia had made them too, I couldn’t—I couldn’t forget what I’d done.
“Look,” I said, and my voice was rising, all the things I’d wanted to say and never had spilling out. “I know your story, yours and Mom’s. True love forever and ever, and then I came along and made the perfect couple into perfection plus an eight-pound shackle. You don’t have to pretend that this”—I gestured at the three of us—“is what you want.”
Dad sat down, the plates he was carrying making a cracking noise as they hit the table. He looked at me like he’d seen something surprising. Maybe even frightening.
Even when he came into the emergency room the night Julia died he hadn’t looked at me like that.
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“It’s true,” he said after a moment, his voice very quiet.
“Your mother and I love each other very much. And it’s true that we—that we didn’t plan on having children. But Amy, it doesn’t mean we didn’t want you. That we don’t love you very much and want to make things better for—”
“Stop,” I said, and looked at Mom. “Please, just stop this. Make Dad stop. Make all of it stop. I saw you the other day. I was there. I made you cry. I know you can’t stand this. That you can’t stand what I did.”
“Amy, that’s not—that’s not why I cried.” She stretched her hands across the table toward me. “I cried because I can’t reach you. I can’t stand to see you so sad, so deter-mined to be alone. Your father and I, we need to be better parents to you, need to—”
I shoved her hands away. “Why are you doing this?
Why are you pretending? You know what I did to Julia.
You know I—”
“Don’t,” Mom said, her voice shaking, and I could see the words she didn’t want to hear written on her face.
“I killed her. You know that. I know that. Why can’t you just—why won’t you just say it?”
“Because you didn’t!” Dad said, pushing away from the table and running a hand through his hair. “How can you even say it? How can you even think it?”
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“How can I not?” I said. “I told her to get in the car!”
“But she chose to do it,” Mom said.
I shook my head, shoving her words away, shoving away her echo of what Laurie had said. Shoving away how those words—from Laurie, and now from Mom—
made me think, hope.
Mom leaned over and grabbed my hands.
“Listen to me,” she said, and when I tried to pull away, she wouldn’t let go. She held on to me. “We all make choices, Amy. Sometimes we make good ones. Sometimes we make bad ones. You made choices that night, but Julia made them too. What happened was terrible, but it isn’t your fault—it isn’t—and you have to stop blaming yourself.”
“I—but if I didn’t do it, then it—”
“It was an accident,” Dad said, and his voice was so gentle. So sure. “A horrible one, one where you lost your best friend, but that’s what it was. What it is.”
“But—” My eyes were burning, all of me was burning, shaking, and Mom said, “Amy, honey, it’s all right,” and then she put her arms around me, she was hugging me.
She hugged me, and I let her. I wanted her to.
“Your father and I want to spend time with you, we want to be here for you,” she said. “We want you to see 255
that Julia’s death isn’t your fault. We want to be a family.
Those are our choices.”
“I —” I pulled away, and looked at her. I looked at her, and then at Dad.
“Try,” Dad said. “Try to see how much we love you, try to see that Julia didn’t die because of you. That’s all we ask. Just . . . try. Please.” He cleared his throat, blinking hard. “Now, do you know what movie you want to watch?”
So I picked a movie, and we watched it. I didn’t know what else to do, and everything else, all the things they said, I . . .
I want to believe them.
I think about what Laurie said, about learning to be happy, and think that maybe—that maybe I can learn how to do that. How to be that.
Maybe.
Julia’s still gone, though. I still have to live with that. I still have to live without her.
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T W E N T Y - F O U R
I WENT TO A PARTY TONIGHT.
There’s six words I never thought I’d say again.
The party was at Mel’s. His parents are in Aruba or something. I wasn’t invited, obviously—Mel hasn’t spoken to me since he asked me what I’d done to Patrick—but I knew all about it because Mel talks very loudly and also because right after English today he asked Caro if she was going.
Actually, what he said was, “I really hope you can come tonight. I need to talk to you.” And he said all that in front of Beth. I was in the student resource center during lunch, so I missed the drama, but Caro’s eyes were red afterward so it was easy to guess what happened.
I was in the student resource center because I’ve given up on lunch in the cafeteria. It’s not worth the 257
daily race with mustache girl to get a crappy seat and eat crappy food. I can eat yogurt in the resource center instead. The whole thing was Giggles’s idea, actually.
She cornered me as I was skulking down the hall, late to physics class, and made me come to her offi ce. (Patrick had been standing outside the classroom door, looking like the world was going to come smash him in that way he does, and I’d ducked into the bathroom till after the bell rang. Fifteen days. It’s been fifteen days, and I still keep thinking about him.)
When Giggles realized I didn’t have enough tardies for detention, she said I needed to “give back to the school”