Hunter’s walking ahead of me, but I hear him snort. He thinks everyone at our school’s TV station takes it way too seriously … even though he’s just as intense about the Ringtones.
“Yep,” Alisha says, either not hearing Hunter or choosing to ignore him. “I went in yesterday to cover football practice.”
It’s only then that I notice Brynn has increased her pace, then gets in the back seat with Hunter before I can get to the car. I realize I’ll be getting dropped off last, since I live closest to Alisha—and me being in the front seat makes sense—but it almost feels like Brynn was racing me. I bite my lip as I buckle my seat belt and Alisha starts the car.
We turn out of the woods and onto the road leading to Brynn and Hunter’s neighborhood. I gaze wistfully out the window as we pass all the gorgeous old mansions and their manicured lawns on either side of the road. While Brynn and Hunter’s parents don’t own houses like this, they are definitely upper-middle-class. They live in the new section of Ringvale Heights, in the big brick-and-stucco homes that were built in the last ten years, complete with gourmet kitchens and three-car garages. Alisha and I are in the older section of town, where the houses are far less opulent. Most of them don’t even have garages, let alone ones for three cars.
“Damn it,” Hunter groans. “I got a mosquito bite on the bottom of my foot.”
I peek behind me and Hunter is studying his bare foot in his lap. I notice Brynn’s sitting closer to Hunter than to her actual seat. They’re shoulder to shoulder and she touches his foot as she examines it for a bugbite.
I chew the inside of my cheek as if to keep myself from spitting out the snarly “Can you move to your own damn seat please, Brynn,” that’s bubbling up in my throat. The last thing I want is to look like a psycho possessive girlfriend, so I stare straight ahead and silently will my sex deadline to get here quickly.
There’s something vaguely terrifying about coming home after deciding to have sex and having both your parents sitting on the porch as if they can read your mind and are waiting for you just to be all, “You’re going to sleep with him? When we’ve both somewhat passive-aggressively made known he’s totally not worthy of you? Really?”
But when I get closer, I can see they’re merely relaxing with glasses of ice water, and I’m struck for maybe the millionth time at what an odd couple they are. You couldn’t tell when they’re sitting, but Mom’s about two inches taller than Dad. She’s pretty bohemian—my grandmother used to say she dresses like a “flower child,” even though she was born too late for Woodstock and all that. Today, for example, she’s wearing a flowy yellow-and-orange blouse over jeans that are cut off right above the knee, and her long, light-brown hair is tucked back under a red bandana.
My father is more straightedge, though with a slightly European flair. Right now, he’s wearing khaki shorts and an A.C. Milan soccer T-shirt he picked up about eight years ago during one of our trips to see his side of the family in Italy. Everyone tells me I look like him, even Mom, who claims I’m “all Agresti.” I guess Dad’s thick, almost-black hair and brown eyes genes won the DNA battle over Mom’s fairer features, though I did inherit a taste for cheesy made-for-TV movies and the dimple in my right cheek from her.
They met when my mom was backpacking through Italy after graduating from college and my dad was a waiter at a café in Milan. He offered to give her a tour of the Duomo cathedral where he was once an altar boy, and the rest is history. When I ask them what attracted them to each other, my mom always says, “He had a great head of hair,” which will make my dad respond with, “She tipped well.”
I think of what I’d say if someone asked me what attracted me to Hunter: He saved me from being the new-girl social outcast.
I notice then how my parents’ clothes are grass-and-dirt-stained. “What were you guys doing?”
“Cleaning out the gutters and patching up holes on the roof,” Mom says.
“You went on the roof?” I practically yell. “Are you trying to make me an orphan?” Not that the roof is that high—the old farmhouse is two stories tall—but I was afraid of them falling through the roof. The house was built by my great-great-grandfather in 1910 and not much has been updated since then.
“El, you know we can’t afford a roofer,” Mom says. Dad just kind of stares off in the distance when she says this, and I instantly feel bad. It’s not really his fault we’re broke.
For years, my dad had wanted to open his own restaurant, and he finally got enough investors together about five years ago. He opened Agresti’s in our old town, Green Ridge, and food critics loved it. It was crowded every night and making decent money, so my parents bought a bigger house. It made enough money that Dad was able to hire a business manager, Dave, so he could go on vacations and not work weekends and stuff like that.
Except Dave basically screwed us out of all our money and we had to shut down the restaurant. My father didn’t get out of bed for almost two weeks after this all went down. I’m not sure I can describe what it’s like to watch your father give up on his dream and be incredibly in debt.
That led to us moving to Ringvale Heights, to the farmhouse, which has seen better days. Its weather-beaten white clapboard siding is in desperate need of a power washing, the slightly crooked black shutters are hanging on by some gravity-defying
