If she wrote me a story this year—which she wouldn’t; she hadn’t in years—I would scream and run away.
But it didn’t matter that Mina horned her way into dinner, and it didn’t matter that Mina bonded with Ari and Diana, because she would inevitably leave—that was what Mina did. It didn’t matter that Cal was a little bit crazy and I had kissed Diana’s crush and lied to her and made her cry and that I couldn’t hang out in hospitals or on carnival rides. None of that mattered.
The spell worked, and nothing mattered at all.
I’m the only one of my brothers who has no memory of our dad. None. Not even something hazy like being lifted onto a giant’s shoulders or some other touching Hallmark moment. I was two and half when he died of a heart attack. Cal was six, Dev eight, Brian ten.
I don’t want pity or weeping or group hugs about it. It’s a fact: I am the youngest. I never had a dad.
The missing-a-dad-I-never-knew part isn’t what messed me up, though. That’s, like, okay—he seemed like a great guy and it would’ve been nice but I managed to be basically fine anyway. The part that got to me was that the rest of them—Brian and Dev and Cal—got to be in this club together. The Remember When Dad Club. As in, Remember when Dad made us boiled hot dogs every night for a week? Or Remember when Dad built the treehouse in the backyard? Even next-youngest Cal, six years old when Dad died, remembered the Christmas everyone got Legos and we all went to Legoland. My brothers all got to pool those memories together, trade them back and forth. They helped each other reinforce the ones they already had stored. But I was no help with that. Even when I was in these stories, I was mostly asleep on Mom’s lap or crying horribly in the background.
In a way it felt like we were in two different families: the three of them, who once had two parents, and me, who’s only ever had one.
And what I wanted, more than Dad, was to be let into that family, the ones who had two parents. I wanted it so bad. I watched them and kept trying over and over to belong with them. The Waters brothers.
I got pretty good at pretending to be one of them. Confident, funny, flirty but never serious. Steady Bs and the occasional C. Pick a sport, be a team player. Don’t get angry, or sad, or impatient, or excited. Stay cool. They could tell I was a fraud and they gave me shit for it, but no one on the outside could ever tell that I didn’t belong.
The weird thing was—or, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t all that weird if you thought about it—was that I hadn’t thought about my dad much at all this whole summer. You’d think being confronted by the specter of death and grief and all that shit I might’ve spared a couple minutes for Dad. He was my first major loss, but like I said, it’s not much of a loss when there’s nothing there to remember.
After I found out Ari erased Win, I started thinking about my little soft baby brain that could barely handle eating and shitting, let alone the death of a person. Ari was like baby me, babbling and oblivious. She couldn’t remember someone who should’ve meant everything to her, like I couldn’t remember my dad.
She and I, we had been a family of our own: those who loved Win. I was finally a member of an exclusive club—what I’d always wanted with my brothers. And then she’d gone and had herself purposely thrown out of the group.
I could understand now why my brothers had closed off that part of themselves from me. It wasn’t because they were selfish or mean. They wished I could be in the club, too, to better hold the shared memories. But you’re either in or you’re not. You can’t fake it.
The worst thing is to be alone with it.
When she showed up in my living room, I was lying on the couch wrapped tightly in a red fleece blanket, watching a blond man demonstrate amazing 100-percent-guaranteed, stronger-than-steel ceramic knives, set of twelve for $49.99. She turned off the TV and stood in front of me, scowling.
Part of me wanted to leap off the couch and strangle her for forgetting Win, but the rest of me was too exhausted to move.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
“I heard you were sulking. I wanted to see it for myself.”
“What? From who?”
Ari didn’t answer. I saw her looking over the couch and half-empty bottles of Gatorade and my face, which was probably greasy and pale, not that I’d looked in a mirror in a long while.
“Why did you mess with Diana?” she asked.
I swallowed. As bad as I looked, she looked terrible, too, dark circles under her eyes and hands bent awkwardly at her sides, not lithe and bendable like she used to be.
“She thought you were being real,” Ari said. “You must have gone to a lot of effort to convince her. Why bother?”