I looked at my brother, who shot me a questioning look back. I really wasn’t sure what my father was talking about—especially since I had been so careful not to do anything that might drive him crazy. “Um,” I finally said after a moment, when it became clear my siblings weren’t going to jump into the breach, “what are we doing?”
“You’re not doing anything,” he said, sounding aggravated. “And that’s the problem. I don’t need the three of you staring at me all day. It makes me feel like I’m in some kind of science experiment. Or—even worse—some kind of reality show.”
I saw Warren open his mouth to respond, but then close it again—further proof that none of us were acting like we normally did. I had never seen Warren back down from an argument.
“Look,” my dad said, his tone softening a little, “I appreciate what you are all trying to do. But while we still can, I would like to have as normal a summer as possible. Okay?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what a “normal” summer was. In a normal summer, or at least what they’d looked like over the last few years, we wouldn’t have been together.
“So,” Gelsey said, and I noticed she was sitting up a little straighter, a glint coming into her brown eyes, “what should we do with our time, then?”
“Whatever you want,” he said, spreading his hands open. “Just so long as it doesn’t involve just hanging around the house all day. It’s summer. Go have fun.”
That seemed to be all the impetus my sister needed. She bolted from the table and ran into the house, yelling for my mother, asking if they could do a barre. My father watched her go, smiling, then turned back to me and Warren, who still hadn’t moved.
“I mean it,” he said, waving us away with his hands. “In addition to this case, I have to start work on a very important project soon, and I’d like some peace to do it in.”
“Project?” Warren asked. “What kind?”
“Just a project,” my dad said vaguely, looking down at the papers in his hands.
“So,” Warren said, and I could tell he was trying a little too hard to sound casual, the way he always did when his feelings were hurt and he didn’t want to show it. “You don’t want us to spend time with you?”
“It’s not that,” my dad said, and he looked pained for a moment. “Of course I want to spend time with you. But this is just weird. Go enjoy your summers.” Warren took a breath, probably to ask my dad to qualify what, exactly, that meant. Maybe sensing this, my dad went on, “You can do whatever you want. I just want you to do something. Get a job. Read the collected works of Dickens. Learn to juggle. It doesn’t matter to me. Just stop lurking about, okay?”
I nodded, even though none of these seemed like actual possibilities for ways to spend my time. I’d never had a job, had zero interest in juggling, and had pretty much written off Dickens after freshman year English. He’d lost me from page one of A Tale of Two Cities, when I’d been unable to grasp how something could simultaneously be the best of times and the worst of times.
Warren and Gelsey, in contrast, had no such problems figuring out what to do. Gelsey was going to do a barre with my mother every day, working on her technique so that she didn’t fall too far behind in her ballet training. My mom had also gone over to the Lake Phoenix Recreation Center and somehow convinced the people running it to let Gelsey use one of their rooms—when it was empty and the seniors weren’t using it for yoga—to practice in a few times a week. And as a compromise with my mother, Gelsey had also agreed to take tennis lessons. Warren had blissfully thrown himself into reading what seemed like his entire freshman course-load, and could usually be found on the porch or the dock, merrily highlighting away. The whole situation was yet another reminder of my siblings’ exceptionalism—as ever, they had something to do, the thing they’d always done, the thing that they seemed to know from birth that they were best at. Which left me, as usual, alone and far behind as they pursued their paths to greatness.
So for the past five days, I had mostly been wandering around and feeling in the way. I had never been so aware of just how small the house was, and how few places there were to hide in it. And ever since the two embarrassing Henry encounters, I was avoiding both the dock and the woods, and had pretty much stopped going outside, except for my nightly excursion to take the trash out to the bearbox (which had somehow become my job) and shoo away the dog who seemed to have no intention of leaving. My mother had also reported that when she’d stopped by to bring a planter of geraniums to Henry’s mother, she wasn’t there, but that a blond girl, around my age, had answered the door.