Parasite

shows, and endless reruns of nostalgic sitcoms made before I graduated from high school.

“This is insane,” I’d objected, only to have my father look at me with cold eyes, like he was looking at someone he didn’t even know.

“You should have thought of that before you ran off without telling us what had happened here,” he’d replied. “You made your bed, Sal. Now you get to lie in it. Next time, you’ll consider your actions before you commit to them.”

“But Dad—”

“I’m not ready to talk to you yet. Have a nice day.” Then he’d been out the door, heading for the car where Joyce was already waiting. I never even saw Mom that day. She was up and out before I got out of bed; she didn’t come back until after I’d gone to sleep for the night.

The scope of my punishment didn’t seem to fit the crime that had inspired it. I’d disappeared with my boyfriend for a day, following the sort of traumatic event that probably should trigger that sort of behavior. They were acting like I’d killed somebody. As one day faded into the next, they kept shutting me out. Dad was constantly leaving for the office, or at the office, or not coming home, and Joyce was with him. After the second night, she stopped coming home at all. When Mom came home from her own errands, she made herself scarce, speaking to me only in generalities. All the while, I paced the house like a caged animal, reading Nathan’s copy of Don’t Go Out Alone over and over again like it was going to teach me something new.

The story never changed. Every time, the little boy and the little girl—neither of them with a name, neither of them ever shown fully out of shadow, so that they could have looked like anything, they could have looked like Nathan, or like me—went into the forest, searching for the broken doors. Every time, they found them, and found the prize they’d been searching for: eternity in the land of monsters. That was where the story ended, every time. There was nothing about their parents, beyond “they chased the monster away, and the journey began.” But wasn’t that what parents were supposed to do? Chase monsters away? It seemed like they were just doing their jobs, and yet somehow that was enough to justify them losing their children forever.

On the morning of the sixth day, I opened my bedroom door, ready to face another day locked in an empty house—at least I’d be going back to work the next day, where Will and Tasha would have to take responsibility for keeping me under guard—and found myself looking at my father. I froze. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up for some reason, like he was an intruder, and not my father, who loved me, and had been there since the day I woke up from my coma.

He looked at me solemnly. Then he held up the copy of Don’t Go Out Alone that I’d left on the kitchen table the night before, and asked, “Is this the source of the signal interference in the house?”

“I…” For a moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, I nodded, and said, “It has a scrambler in it to stop people from listening in on me. Or Nathan. It’s his book, really, but he let me borrow it because I hadn’t read it as many times as he had, and it seemed sort of important that I understand it, and—”

“Sal.”

“—anyway, we thought we’d be seeing each other again sooner than this. I know I scared you, but do I really deserve to be locked in like some kind of animal? You’re acting like I did something unforgivable, and all I did was get scared! And—”

“Sal!”

This time, I stopped talking, eyes wide as I stared at him.

He shook his head, lowering the book—but not, I noted, handing it to me. “How sure are you that this works?”

“How did you know it was doing anything at all?” I countered.

“I was scanning for SymboGen bugs. I’ve been scanning for the last six days. You shouldn’t have let them into the house without notifying me.” He sighed, shoulders slumping. For the first time, I wondered if the past five days hadn’t been as hard on him as they had been on me. “All the bugs I’ve found have been nontransmitting. That meant that something had to be blocking them. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“When, exactly, would you like me to have done that? After you grounded me and sent me to my room, or during one of the times when you left me here alone to think about what I’d done?” I glared at him, barely resisting the urge to snatch the book out of his hands. “I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you a lot of things. You never gave me the opportunity. Every time I opened my mouth, you either sent me to my room or walked away. Oh, and that ‘legal guardianship’ bullshit? We are so done. I am taking you to court after this, if that’s what it takes, and I am moving out.”

“Sal…” Dad stopped, taking a deep breath. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I overreacted. You have to understand that I was frightened. There was every chance that SymboGen had taken this opportunity to bug the house, and I couldn’t risk you saying something before we’d managed to find and deactivate all of their listening devices. It was best for everyone if I seemed to be unreasonably angry with you.”

“Why would SymboGen be bugging our house?” I asked. “I already answer all their questions.”

He hesitated, looking at me with an expression of such profound sadness that I rocked back a step, trying to figure out what was going through his mind. Finally, he said, “I’m going to ask a question. I need you to answer me honestly. Can you do that?”

I nodded, not quite sure I trusted my voice at the moment.

“Good. This book”—he held up Don’t Go Out Alone—“where did you get it?”

“It’s Nathan’s,” I said.

“Where did Nathan get it?”

This line of questioning was starting to make me uncomfortable, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I frowned. “I don’t know. He had it when he was a kid.”

“I seriously doubt it came this way, since children’s books aren’t normally equipped to block top-of-the-line surveillance devices from doing their jobs,” said my father. “I’m not playing around, Sal. Who gave you this book? It’s extremely important that I speak with them.”

When I first got home, shaken by my experience in Lafayette and seeing Tansy’s blood-speckled face every time I closed my eyes, I would have told him about Dr. Cale and her lab without hesitation. After five days on house arrest, I just shook my head. Too much about this wasn’t adding up. “It’s Nathan’s. He said I could borrow it if I wanted to. It was really important to him when he was a kid, and I wanted to understand him better. So I borrowed it.” Before Dad could react, I leaned forward and grabbed the book out of his hand, pulling it out of his reach. “Thank you for giving it back. I remember how important it is to respect other people’s property.”

“Sal…”

All the anger that I’d been trying to hold back suddenly bubbled to the surface, pouring out of my lips before I had consciously decided that I was going to speak. “Why did you shut off the Internet? Why haven’t I been allowed to watch the news? What’s happening out there? You ask me questions like you think you have a right to answers, but you’re not willing to let me know what’s going on, or why you’re scared. It’s not fair, and I won’t do it. You raised me better than that.”

“Sal, in a very real way, I didn’t raise you at all.” Dad’s words were quiet, even a little bit sad, like he was admitting something he didn’t want to say to anyone, much less to me. I stopped breathing, and didn’t start again until he continued, saying, “Your accident may have made you a better person—it did, in a lot of ways; I can’t lie to myself about that, even if that makes me feel like I’m betraying the memory of my little girl—but it also made you unpredictable, in some ways, because I don’t know what you’re going to do when the chips are down. You don’t have the training Sally had, and baby, I don’t have the time to give it to you. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to trust me, and do as I say, because there isn’t time for me to explain.”

The sound of drums rose in my ears as I thought about what he was saying to me. Finally, with a feeling of deep regret spreading through my chest, I shook my head and said, “No.”

My father frowned. “What?”

“No, Dad. You say I’m not Sally: fine. I don’t remember being her, I don’t remember the things you say you taught her, I’m not her. You say I don’t have her training: fine. If I’m not her, I can’t have the things that only ever belonged to her, and that means I can’t have the things she learned before I was here. But you don’t get to tell me that my not having her training means you can’t trust me. It goes against every other conversation we’ve ever had. You told me I was more dependable than she was. She was wild and she broke