THE ACHING IN my chest starts about an hour into the six-hour drive back home. The feeling is foreign and uncomfortable, and if I could physically claw it out of my heart, I would. The entire ride, my ears are half tuned in to Rowan and half tuned in to my phone, listening for text messages that never come. I drop her off at her house and finish the drive to my dad’s, parking in the driveway and double-checking to make sure my phone isn’t on silent. When I verify that it isn’t, I huff out a disgruntled breath and climb out of the car.
My dad opens our front door even before I step up to the porch, and I set my overstuffed suitcase down to give him a big hug.
He’s a few inches taller than I am, with a lean build and soft smile. He and my mom were both twenty years old when she had me, but he looks even younger than his thirty-eight years, with smoky blond hair and dark brown eyes. When I was in middle school, I banned him from chaperoning school events because all of my classmates developed creepy crushes on him, and even though he hasn’t dated since my mom left, he could have started his own phone-book company with all the numbers women have tried to give him.
With his hands on my shoulders, he pulls away to smile at me. “Alright, let me look at you.” He turns my chin from side to side. “No facial piercings.” He lifts my arms up one by one, and I giggle while he inspects me. “No tribal tattoos. Turn around.”
“What? Why?”
He spins me around and lifts the back of my shirt. “No tramp stamp. Oh thank God.” I roll my eyes, and he laughs and kisses the top of my head.
“Are you done?” I ask.
“Worrying about you? Never.”
“Being weird,” I correct as he picks up my suitcase and opens the door.
“Also never.”
He laughs at his own joke, and I try not to laugh too. I’ve missed my dad even more than I thought I would—probably because these last few weeks have been some of the messiest of my life.
“Your room is where ya left it,” he tells me. “Your closet missed you.”
This time, I do laugh. “I missed my closet too.”
I start down the hallway, and he says, “Help me in the kitchen when you’re done having a sobby reunion, will ya?”
“Be there in a minute.”
My dad disappears into the kitchen, and I start toward my room, huffing out a slow, irritated breath when I pass through our hallway of misfit pictures. Ever since I was a teenager, my dad and I have waged a passive-aggressive war where I’ve taken down all the ones of my mom and hidden them, and my dad has always found them and put them right back up. He insists that they contain memories I shouldn’t block out, and a certain person I shouldn’t try to forget. I insist that some things are better off forgotten and some people are monster bitches who don’t deserve to be displayed in our house when they couldn’t even bother to stay faithful to their husbands or raise their daughters.
I ignore the pictures and walk straight to my room, dropping my suitcase next to my old bed and flopping face first onto my royal-purple comforter. My phone beeps in my back pocket, and I nearly pull a muscle throwing my arm behind my back to yank it out. I deflate when it’s just a text from Rowan.
My parents both work tomorrow. Come over when you wake up?
I text her back to let her know I’ll be there, and then I pick myself off the bed to prevent my mind from lingering on thoughts of Joel. I wonder what he’s doing right now. Watching TV? Playing guitar? Sleeping with all the girls he’s been abstaining from for the past month while I’ve been hoarding all of his time?
“Dee?” my dad asks from across the dining room table at dinner, and I catch myself staring at my phone again, willing it to ring.
I look away quickly and busy myself with carving into my burnt pork chop. “Sorry.”
“So the guys in this band,” my dad says, reminding me that we’d been talking about the music festival, which got me to talking about the T-shirts that have been selling like hot cakes on the band’s website, which got me to talking about the capes I made, which got me to thinking about Joel, “they’re all just friends?”
“Yeah,” I say, avoiding glancing at my phone. “They’re all really cool.”
“Even this Joel guy?”
I made it a point to talk about Joel no more or less than any of the other guys. And still, my dad picked him out of a damn invisible lineup. “Dad,” I groan, “are we seriously going to talk about boys?”
“I’m just talking about the reason you keep staring at your phone,” he says with a shrug, stabbing his pork chop and lifting the entire burnt thing to his mouth to take a bite out of it.
I turn my phone on silent and tuck it back into my pocket, making a serious effort to spend the rest of dinner giving my dad my undivided attention. We talk about everything—work, school, friends. Soccer, lasagna, neighbors. After hours of watching TV together and nodding off on the couch, I change into my pajamas and he insists on tucking me into bed. He kisses me on the head and disappears, closing the door behind him, and I immediately grab my phone off my nightstand.
Nothing. Eleven o’clock at night and nothing. Not a single word.
“You’re an asshole,” I tell my phone. Still, it says nothing back.
Are you awake? I text Rowan.
Sorta. What’s up?