She looked at his dad again. “There’s no easy way to say this . . .” Her voice dropped off.
His dad cleared his throat and then folded his hands in his lap. “Your mom and I have decided to go our separate ways. I’m going to be moving out of the house into an apartment in Durham at the end of the month.”
The news shook Gael, shocked him. It was like everything slowed down, froze. His eyes drifted to the wall of family photos behind his parents—good times, bad times, their times—the pictures seemed to mock them all.
And then his gaze drifted to Piper, whose face was scrunched up like it was when she was trying to decipher a bit of French.
There was silence for—a minute? A second? An hour? Gael could hardly tell.
Go our separate ways. What the hell does that even mean? he wondered.
Piper was the first to speak. Her face unscrunched and hurt washed across it. “You don’t want to live with us anymore?”
His dad’s voice cracked. “Believe me, baby, I do. But”—he looked to Gael’s mom—“we think this will be best for everyone. We still love both of you more than anything, and we still care about each other, but it will be better this way.”
His mom stared at her hands, then up at Gael. “Sometimes people just don’t get along as well as they used to,” she said weakly.
Gael had a deep urge to rip one of the pictures off the wall, smash it over his knee, send glass shards everywhere.
Piper began to cry, and Gael had to look away. It was too hard to watch. Her face was too shiny, too red, too raw. “I don’t want you to live somewhere else,” Piper yelled. “I want you to live here!”
His dad stared at Gael, and Gael stared right back.
Gael realized this was serious, that they weren’t changing their minds, that this wasn’t some insane joke. That suddenly he was occupying a foreign world, and everything—from the photos on the walls to the marks in the dining room charting his and Piper’s growth to the small crack in the sliding glass door from where a pigeon had flown into the window—well, it all felt suddenly so alien. So . . . off.
Gael couldn’t stand being in the room anymore. He jumped up from the couch, walked as quickly as he could to his room, closed his door, and fell, facedown, in the bed.
And as he felt the tears dampen his pillow, he knew, deep down, that something huge had broken.
That a part of him would never feel the same about love, about family—about any of it—again.
night of the loving dead
It was Gael’s fourth Halloween on Franklin Street.
The street was packed, as it always was. Each year, students, professors, some high school kids like Gael, and people from colleges nearby descended on the stretch of Franklin that edged the campus. The city estimated about seventy thousand people came each year, making it one of the larger centers of Halloween revelry in the country.
As such, people took Halloween quite seriously in Chapel Hill, turning three or four blocks into a giant party packed with people wearing everything from mass-produced costumes of the Party City variety to elaborate group numbers that made you wonder just how much the UNC freshmen were actually studying for their midterms.
Gael had been no exception. At the end of September, just a week or so before Anika had dumped him, he’d bought a couples’ costume for the two of them, Marc Antony and Cleopatra, but given the Mason-and-Anika situation, Gael thought it was too weird to use it with another girl. (Not to mention, Cara certainly wouldn’t have seen the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton film it was based on.) And so, a quick run to Target this afternoon had resulted in enough zombie makeup for a Walking Dead episode. It wasn’t as elaborate as his usual setup—past costumes had included the dude from A Clockwork Orange (bowler hat, eye makeup, and all) and the Joker from The Dark Knight—but it would have to do.
He and Cara had gotten ready in Cara’s dorm. Cara’s roommate took shots while her boyfriend touched up her Bride of Frankenstein makeup. By the time they were finished getting dressed, the roommate was on her third shot (luckily, Cara only had one, so Gael didn’t feel too bad about not joining in), and both Gael and Cara were oozing blood and gore, faces pale and eyes rimmed in black.
Bonus: With all the heavy-duty makeup, Gael didn’t think Cara could even tell that he’d been crying.
So now they were on Franklin, perfecting their jilted zombie walk, while Gael, unbeknownst to Cara, tried to hold it together after the revelation about his parents. Lucky for him, the street offered plenty of distractions.
“Can we agree that mimes are creepier than zombies?” Cara asked, as the black-and-white troupe headed off in search of their next target.
“One hundred percent yes,” Gael said as a swarm of yellow Minions ran past them.
“Come on.” Cara linked her arm through his. “Let’s go this way.” There was a small break in the crowd, where a group of firefighters in high heels had just sauntered through.