He moans and pulls away. “Now I’ll have to limp to practice.”
“Poor baby,” I say without a trace of sympathy. He makes his way—?not limping at all, more like swaggering—?toward the locker rooms over by the field. I check the time on my phone and realize I’ll have to run to make the bus, so I turn, and that’s when I see David Fields sprawled out on a nearby rock with a book in his hand, watching me.
“What are you looking at?” I snap, embarrassed and irritated by my own embarrassment.
“You,” he says. “But only because you want me to. I mean, the only reason anyone would get as physical in a public place as you two just did is because they get off on being watched.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“Me? I’m sitting here peacefully reading while you and your boyfriend grind against each other in a public place—?and I’m the one who’s disgusting?” He shakes his head. “Trust me, I would have enjoyed the last five minutes a lot more without having to see or hear any of that.”
“So sorry,” I say. “I forget how upsetting other people’s pleasure is to those who have none.” I’m trying to make it sound like we’re just joking around, but inside I’m seething, and there’s nothing good-natured about his tone.
He says, “You know, studies show that couples who have a lot of public displays of affection are insecure and unstable.”
“You just keep quoting your little statistics, and maybe someday a girl might be willing to overlook your personality long enough to actually let you hold her hand.”
“I just hope she won’t be a conceited, self-centered blonde,” he says. “I find those unpleasant.”
“She won’t be blond. She probably won’t even be breathing if she’s willing to stay in a room with you.” I turn on my heel and walk away before he can see that I’m not just pretending to be annoyed.
Mom comes into the room Ivy and I share to ask us what kind of pizza we want—?it’s Friday night and she’s tired, so we’re ordering in.
“None for me,” I say over my shoulder before going back to flicking through the dresses in my closet. “I’m going out for dinner with James and his parents. Which I told you.”
“Oh, right,” Mom says. “I forgot. I should really have their whole family over for dinner sometime—?they’re always hosting you.”
“Yeah, we’ll take a turn soon,” I say with absolutely no sincerity whatsoever. Introducing James’s classy parents to my dysfunctional family could only ever take place over my rotting corpse.
Ivy looks up from the screen. “James is your boyfriend. Before you went out with him, you went out with Juan. And before Juan, you went out with Brian. You also went on dates with Nick, Loren, and Braden, but you said you weren’t actually ‘going out’ with them.”
“Wow,” I say, both amused and uncomfortable. Some things you want to forget—?like Brian and Loren, for example. I’m glad I never told Ivy about the other half dozen or so guys I’ve hooked up with at parties. “I can’t believe you remember all that.” I turn back to my closet—?well, technically, Ivy and I share it, but it’s almost entirely my clothes in there. Ivy only likes to wear pants and tops, which she keeps in drawers.
“You’ve had a lot of boyfriends,” Ivy says. “So did you, Mom. You went out with Rick, Bill, Jim, and the guy whose parents owned a seafood restaurant.”
“Bobby,” Mom says, a little wistfully. “His name was Bobby.”
“You got married when you were twenty-four and then again when you were forty-six. Dad would have been forty-six in August if he hadn’t died. You were married for sixteen years when he died, and if he hadn’t died, you two would be celebrating your twenty-third anniversary in November.”
“Yes,” Mom says, “but I started counting anniversaries again from the beginning when I married Ron.”
“The twenty-fifth anniversary is called the silver anniversary,” Ivy says. “And you’re supposed to give people gifts made out of silver. In two years, you and Dad would have celebrated your silver anniversary, but you probably won’t now because Dad died.”
“But I will celebrate my third anniversary with Ron that year,” Mom says with a forced smile. Her fingers are twining around each other, like she’s trying to braid them together. She doesn’t have any huge problem talking about the fact that Dad died, but it’s probably hard for her when Ivy casually tosses it out the way she does. Or maybe I just think it’s hard for her because it’s hard for me.
It kills me to think about Dad. Sometimes when I see Ron strutting around the house, filling up rooms with his bulky chest and kissing Mom like he has a right to, I want to scream at him that she’s not his, that she’ll never be his, that she belongs to someone else.
I miss my dad, even though we never really talked that much. He wasn’t the “sit down and tell me what’s going on in your life” kind of father. He worked long hours, and when he was home, he was usually on his computer. His eyes could slide right past you without seeing you—?just like Ivy’s. You had to work to get him to pay attention to you, but if you made enough noise or tugged at him hard enough, he’d suddenly blink and look at you like he’d just returned from a long trip and was glad to see you again.
I can’t remember a single mean thing he ever said or did to any of us. He still drove Mom crazy, though—?he was always forgetting to do stuff she asked him to and she’d yell at him and he’d apologize. And then forget to do what she asked again.