And then Carson popped in beside Janna. “You’re coming Friday, right?”
“I’ll try,” I said. Decker dropped his arm.
My parents were in high spirits that night. They’d been feeding me sleeping pills for three nights, and I’d been pretending to take them. They beamed at each other over the dinner table and asked me about exams, like everything was normal. They smiled at each other when I spoke, like they were extra proud of themselves. Like they believed they had successfully drugged the crazy right out of me. Like Unpredictable was a disease and they had cured it.
I had asked to go to the winter break party last year, too. Mom had launched into a tirade about underage drinking and the health risks associated with driving drunk on ice. Like maybe she would’ve stocked our car with alcohol if only we’d lived in Florida. As long as it wasn’t hurricane season.
I didn’t insult her intelligence by claiming there wouldn’t be alcohol or that I wouldn’t drink. My academic situation already predisposed me to the bottom of the social ladder. I wasn’t going to be the smart girl who refused to drink at a place that people only went to for drinking.
I asked with a forkful of buttery mashed potatoes in my mouth. I hoped that maybe they wouldn’t understand me and say okay to whatever they thought I was asking. In short, I was hoping for some serious miscommunication. My plan failed.
Mom stopped beaming. “We talked about this before,” she said. “And after all you’ve been through recently on top of all my previous reasons, which still stand, by the way . . .”
“You can go,” Dad said as he stabbed at a piece of steak.
Mom dropped her fork. “Kitchen. Now.” She spoke through her teeth. They really didn’t need to go to another room. It’s not like I couldn’t hear them through the thin door. And it’s not like they even pretended to whisper.
“It’s not safe.” Mom spoke each word in a staccato burst.
“The worst that can happen already happened, Joanne.”
“No, it didn’t. She could’ve died.”
Quietly, Dad said, “We thought she did.”
Nobody spoke for a few moments. Then Mom said, “I already lost her once.”
“There are other ways you can lose her and you know it.
She’s seventeen. How old were you the last time you spoke to your parents?”
Mom only ever mentioned her parents in the negative. She inherited bad eyesight from her father and cavity-prone teeth from her mother. She never told me who gave her the hazel eyes or the dimple in her left cheek, both of which I inherited. They were long dead and I never knew them. I couldn’t believe Dad played that card.
They came back into the dining room and resumed eating. “You can go,” Dad said again. “This steak is delicious.”
I stared at them. “Why did you stop talking to your parents, Mom?”
Mom shot Dad a look and threw her napkin on the table. She excused herself and started scrubbing pots in the next room.
Dad shook his head at me. “Anyone can have kids,” he said. “Anyone.”
Ceramic and glass banged against one another as Mom loaded the dishwasher in record speed. “At least they’re dead,” I said.
Dad put down his fork and wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “They’re not dead, Delaney.”
“But she says—”
“She says they’re dead to her.”
A piece of steak went down the wrong way, and I coughed and gagged into my napkin, like I was choking on the information.
Dad stood up to bring his plate into the kitchen, but first he grabbed my wrist. “Don’t,” he said. “I can already see the wheels in your head spinning. Leave it alone.”
My brain scrambled to make room for the existence of these people. Grandparents I’d never known. They went from hypothetical, empty memories to blurry, unformed shapes in my head. Dead one second, alive the next.
Kind of like me.
Chapter 7
The next few days passed in the comfort of the expected. Studying and exams and Decker and no twitching hands or itching brain or excursions down the street in the middle of the night. Maybe I was healed. Maybe all I needed was time. Maybe I needed to immerse myself fully in my life and stop thinking about dying. Or resurrected grandparents.
So on Thursday when exams were done and Decker came over, I had plans to keep busy.
“I have a project for us,” I said.
Decker looked out the window at the falling snow. “Is this like the project where we had to categorize the different types of snow like the Eskimos?”
“Not at all. And it wasn’t like the Eskimos. It was my own original idea. I didn’t know someone else tried it first.”
He turned back to my bookshelf. “So, is it like when we had to alphabetize your books and then the kitchen pantry?”
“I think the food was your idea.”
“I was really, really bored.”
“Well anyway, I have a plan to finish all our required reading for next semester over the break.”
He rolled his eyes. “That’s a really lame plan.”
“It’s a great plan. We’ll save so much time in the spring.”
“You’re forgetting a major point. I don’t do required reading.”
When we were ten, he took pictures of every heap of snow and taped them into a loose-leaf notebook. He wrote descriptions under each image. I, on the other hand, collected samples in Mason jars and stored them in the freezer. By the next day, they all looked the same. When we were thirteen, we alphabetized the contents of my parents’ cabinets. I ordered by brand name: Campbell, Kellogg, Kraft. He categorized and subcategorized for content: soup, chicken noodle; soup, minestrone; soup, split pea.
He’d do it. I knew he’d do it. It was all a matter of what I’d have to give. “I’ll do your math homework for a month.”
He raised his eyebrows at me and smirked. “Sold.”
“You’re cheap,” I said as I scanned my bookshelf.
“Joke’s on you. I would’ve done it anyway.”
I handed him Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Decker’s eyes widened. “Never mind, joke’s on me. This is a joke right?”
I sat on my bed and leaned back on the pillow, watching the planets circle my head. “Better get started,” I said.
Decker fanned the pages. “This is, like, twelve hundred pages!”
“Like I said, better get started.”
Decker propped his legs on my bed and crossed his feet at my waist. I hung an arm over his ankles, and he started to read.
He uncrossed and recrossed his feet sometime during the first section and said, “So, Carson.” And it took me a second to realize he wasn’t reading anymore.
“Hmm?”
“Carson. I can’t believe you like him.”
I sat up, folded my legs, and picked at my fingernails. “I never said that.”
Decker dropped his feet to the floor. “So then what the hell were you doing with him on my couch?”
I examined my fingernails very, very closely. Decker and I were skilled avoiders of uncomfortable conversations. I was irritated that he was bringing this up, weeks later, a lifetime after the fact. But it was the truth, I didn’t like Carson. Or not in the way he thought. But nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Nobody had ever made me feel like I was something to be desired or someone worthy of pursuing. So when he smiled at me and cocked his head to the side and wrapped an arm around my lower back and pulled me close, I didn’t push him away.
Decker was my best friend, but he was also a guy. And there were some things impossible to explain to him. Which is why I said, “You wouldn’t understand.”
Decker slapped Les Misérables facedown on my desk, breaking the spine. “No, I understand perfectly.” He stood up, stretched his arms over his head, and turned for the door.
“You’re driving me tomorrow, right?”
“Driving you where?”
“To the party.”
“You’re going to the party? Because Carson asked you to go?”
“Because I want to go,” I said.
He didn’t answer, but I knew he wouldn’t leave without me. In fact, I was reasonably sure that after Falcon Lake, he would never leave me again.