Laurie uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “Different how?”
“I don’t know. Just different.”
“I see.” Laurie clicked her pen, finally. And when she did, when I heard that click, something clicked in me, 248
and I got why she did it. Why I’d heard all that pen clicking time after time after time.
Laurie clicks her pen when she thinks I’m lying to her.
When she thinks I’m lying to myself.
“It was different—it was different because I liked it,” I said after a moment, my voice quiet. Saying what I knew but hadn’t been able to let myself say before. Hadn’t even been able to let myself see before. “I liked being with him. I never cared about being with guys before. But with him it was—it meant something to me, and I . . . I don’t know.”
I waited for her to say something. Anything. I’d told her everything, I’d told her the truth I hadn’t wanted to see.
She just looked at me.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” I fi nally asked.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t make everything okay for you, Amy. You said it yourself. But I can tell you this. What you told me just now isn’t about Julia. It’s about you. And you have to make choices of your own, choices only you can make, so I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly. Can you do that?”
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“No.”
For a second, I swear she almost smiled. “Do you want to be happy?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. What kind of question is that?”
“A simple one,” she said. “Do you want to be happy?”
“I don’t—I don’t think I know how.”
“So you can learn,” she said.
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T W E N T Y - T H R E E
DURING DINNER TONIGHT, Mom and Dad asked me to watch a movie with them. I took a bite of black bean burrito and chewed for as long as I could, hoping they’d ask me something else, or at least stop looking at me. I was still processing the Laurie thing from yesterday, was still raw from the things she said, the things I’d felt, and wasn’t ready to do anything else, much less play happy family.
“You can decide which one while your father clears the table,” Mom said, and grinned at Dad before looking at me. I stared down at my plate. I didn’t want to see her grin falter. I wish I’d never seen her cry like I did the other day because no one’s life should be driving their kid home from school and then sobbing.
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“Oh, I see how it is,” Dad said. “You want me out of the way to influence the selection. You’re sneaky and beautiful.”
Mom laughed and I watched the two of them sparkle and wondered why we kept pretending. I was so tired of them trying to be what they’d never wanted to be before, of the whole “we’re available! and dedicated!” parents routine. I was tired of how they were always acting like they didn’t mind living with me.
“You know you love my taste in movies,” Dad said, picking up his plate and Mom’s and kissing the top of her head. She tilted her head back and grinned at him.
I never thought my parents deserved their . . . thing, their endless swallow-up-everything love. I hated it because it made me nothing. Love, to me, was all about exclusion.
I hated that we weren’t a family. We were a couple with an extra person tacked on because they simply happened to forget birth control one night sixteen years ago.
They’ve never said it—not directly to me, anyway—but I heard them talking about it once. Mom realized she was going to have me, and eight months before I was born, Dad had a vasectomy. You don’t forget hearing something like that.
I pushed my plate away.
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“You don’t have to do this anymore,” I said. “You don’t have to play perfect family with me. Things can go back to how they were.”
My father froze. So did my mother, head still tilted back toward him, the smile on her face fading.
“All right, I promise I won’t suggest any possible movies,” Dad said, trying for normal but failing. Teenagers only want to spend evenings bonding with their parents in old sitcoms, and no one in this house ever asked me to watch a movie with them before Julia died. And no matter what Laurie had said and how much part of me wanted to believe her, believe that I’d made choices and Julia had made them too, I couldn’t—I couldn’t forget what I’d done.
“Look,” I said, and my voice was rising, all the things I’d wanted to say and never had spilling out. “I know your story, yours and Mom’s. True love forever and ever, and then I came along and made the perfect couple into
