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“Sounds like you’re trying to get rid of me.”

  “No, no, of course not.” I touched his arm.

  “When do I get to meet your dad?”

  The air got cold. My chest got tight. The way he looked at me was like he never wanted to leave me.

  I liked it. It scared me.

  “Whenever you want. Eh, not really. I’ll let you know when he’s in a good mood.”

  He nodded as he continued to drive.

  Chapter 4

  Five Years Ago

  Monday through Friday, at six forty-five a.m., I woke up in a panic. You’d think I would have gotten used to it after seventeen years. Instead, it just got worse. In the shower, I would try to get my bones to stop feeling numb. My hands would shake brushing my teeth. Makeup was out of the question. Getting dressed was a process. I didn’t mind too much about what I wore—it was one step closer to having to enter my nightmare. Piper started sneaking me Mom’s anti-anxiety medication because she thought it would help. It did, and mom just doubled her prescription once she found out. Mom would never have allowed me go to therapy—that would have meant admitting she’d raised a fucked-up child.

  I walked to school with headphones on. It was a normal day for me. At lunch, Piper met up with me in the library. It was the opening night of her play. I thought for sure she would be going around telling everyone about it, even though she didn’t need to. Everyone was going. Everyone loved Piper. They would have gone just to see her.

  “Hey.”

  “What are you doing here? It’s the library. You have to be quiet.”

  “I am being quiet,” she said loudly.

  “See…you think you are because you’re not aware of your own voice. You naturally have a high tone so you have to try extra hard to be quiet.”

  “Okay, shut up. I came to tell you that after you left we all agreed you don’t have to go tonight.”

  “Really? I can go, Piper. Mom has made me do worse things. This isn’t the worst.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that Mom needs to respect your decisions. Anyway, I’d love to spend all of lunch with you, but…I don’t think my voice tone will allow it.” She smirked and I giggled at her silliness. “After school, I have to go straight to hair and makeup, then dress rehearsal…”

  “So, I won’t see you until tonight, I know. Good luck.” I was so proud of her, truly.

  “Love you. Dad is buying you the good pizza, save me a piece.” She kissed my forehead. I pushed her away because people were starting to stare. I really wished I could go. I mean, I wished I could do a lot of things I couldn’t.

  Not being there for her that night was the only one I was going to have to feel guilty about for the rest of my life.

  No one was home when I got there—just the way I liked it, but I wondered where Dad was. I was fixing myself something to eat when the door flung open.

  “Anyone here?” Dad yelled.

  “Just me,” I yelled from the kitchen.

  “Oh good, my favorite.” He kissed me on the cheek and handed me the mail.

  “You have to stop saying that.”

  “What? Piper knows how much I love her.”

  “College brochures…great.” I rolled my eyes as I flipped through all the different UCs.

  “Mom will probably be working so I can take you to any campus you want.”

  “I’m good. What time are you guys leaving tonight?”

  “The play starts at eight. I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t think your mother is going to make it…”

  “Is that why she wanted me to go so badly? So it wouldn’t look awful that she’d skipped? Jesus, that woman.” I loved my mother, I really did, but sometimes I hated her. No, I hated the way she acted but I loved her as a mother. She spent so much time judging me for my issues that she didn’t look at her own. She didn’t appreciate my dad as much as she should. Sometimes, it felt like she loved her job more than us. We all noticed, and I really didn’t think she cared.

  “I don’t care. You’re not going. She is. I don’t care if I have to pick her up from her office myself and drag her out of there. Is there any beer?”

  Three Years Ago

  “Look in the fridge, Dad.”

  “Why?”

  “Ethan bought us a twenty-four pack…”

  “Why? What did you do? Has he been in your room, Portia Willows?” he said, getting fake angry.

  “Dad, grab a beer and calm down.”

  “I’m just saying, I only bought women beer when I was…”

  “Ew. Gross. Dad…I can’t right now. I haven’t even hugged a boy. Why would you think…?”

  I smiled to myself since this was actually a lie.

  “I know. Just be careful.”

  “You should be nice. We’re not doing too well with money. We’re paying all the bills but the mortgage is a struggle.”

  “I thought Susan dealt with all that.”

  “Susan has five kids and a cheating husband. Remember how hard Mom worked? She only had two kids. Can you imagine?”

  “What do you want me to do, babe?”

  “Cut down. We both should, actually. It’s been over a year. We can’t use this as an excuse anymore.”

  “Oh. Was that what we were doing? Because I thought I was living my life the way I always have, except this time I don’t have anyone nagging me about it.”

  “Before you were a functionally great alcoholic father,” I laughed, “because of Mom, now I’m just making you an alcoholic.” At the end of the day, we both needed Mom. Dad needed her more than I did, but I was barely functioning without Piper. It was all so sad that we just had to laugh about it.

  It was so much easier studying for class with an actual book. I started looking into other ways to do better, but the only thing I could find was study groups—fuck that. Sometimes teachers held study groups on campus. They were only four times a semester, around test time. I didn’t think I’d be able to do that. Plus, I hated driving.

  “Do you want to go to a bar tonight? Like a dive bar?” Dad asked. Ever since the accident, my dad had lost all of his drinking buddies. It had hit him pretty hard. He was literally stuck with me. Part of me knew it was a rhetorical question, but I also knew this was one of those moments when he was really missing his friends.

  “If you really want to…” He was walking into the kitchen. I heard the footsteps stop.

  “What?”

  I was really hoping he wasn’t going to make me go, so I kept reading and taking notes.

  “Did you just say yes?” Dad came back and plopped down on the couch next to me, messing up all my papers.

  “Dad! Watch it…”

  “You want to go to a bar, Portia?”

  “I said if you really want to go…”

  “Wait…I keep thinking you’re twenty-one, you can’t go.”

  “You used to take Piper and me to bars all the time when Mom was on business trips.”

  “That’s because you guys were under ten and I worked there. You guys drank cranberry juice.” He smiled at me while tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “I remember being on my knees, looking over and watching the cranberry juice squirt out of the gun. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.”

  “You stayed next to me and watched everything. Piper…I couldn’t get that girl to relax. She played with everything and everyone.”

  “The only reason she kept it a secret from Mom was so you’d take us again.”

  “I thought she was going to grow up to be an alcoholic.” We both laughed. Neither of us was going anywhere and he knew that, he just liked to talk about it to seem normal.

  Ethan and I were on the porch again. I suddenly realized how old the bench looked. There was nothing romantic about this. Did I want it to look romantic? I wasn’t sure. I found myself putting way too much thought into us hanging out on my porch with a couple of beers and smokes. />
  “I was thinking…I want to take you to the beach,” Ethan said, grinning like he was wasted but he’d only had two sips of his first beer.

  “It’s September…”

  “The beach never closes, Portia.”

  “It doesn’t?” I’d never really thought about it before.

  “Are you serious? You’ve never been to the beach?” His eyes widened like he couldn’t wait to take me.

  Yeah, not happening. “I don’t like being around people, what makes you think I’d like being around people half naked?”

  “What about Piper?”

  “She only went during the summer.”

  “I guess coming from Florida, I went to the beach every day.”

  “That sounds nice. Were you happy?” I was trying to change the subject.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I had fun. I went out every day, but I don’t miss anyone besides my mom. It just makes you think…”

  “You think you’d miss me if I died?” It just came out of my mouth. For the first time I’d said out loud what I was thinking. I’d only ever done that with my dad and Piper. I hadn’t even done it with my own mother. He stared into my eyes and I looked down, mortified.

  “This is why I don’t talk.”

  “It was a legit question.” He still seemed taken aback by it. “We barely know each other and yet I feel closer to you than I felt to any of my friends back home that I’ve known my whole life.”

  “Why is that? We don’t do anything.”

  “We talk, and there’s literally not one distraction between us.” He looked around. It was a ghost town. The only thing we could hear was my loud television coming from inside the house and the birds chirping. It was a nice day.

  “What do you mean?” I knew what it meant but I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted validation.

  “It’s just us. All you see is me and all I see is you. There’s no social media, waiters, friends, parents…”

  “I can tell that your parents’ divorce affected you a lot.” I wanted him to tell me more about his past.

  “You’re so random.” He shook his head and smiled.

  “And you really don’t like talking about it,” I said, hoping to get him to open up.

  “I just wish my family was whole…”

  My eyes started to water because no matter how bitchy my mom was to me, I missed her judgmental looks. I missed our family dinners even though I had hated them. We had been together—not a lot of people got to have that. That stupid accident had ruined everything. It broke us apart. Now we would never all be together ever again. The more I thought about it, the more I broke down crying.

  “I’m so sorry…” I said, wiping my tears.

  “No, I’m sorry. Come here.” He grabbed my shoulders and put my head on his chest. I was so weirded out by the touching that I stopped crying. I wanted to get up but didn’t. We just swung in silence.

  “Is your dad going to come out here with a shotgun?”

  “He doesn’t own a gun, and he definitely doesn’t know how to use one.”

  “Well, that’s good to know.”

  “But he is worried that you only want one thing…” I said.

  “I do only want thing…”

  I jumped up.

  “…for you to be happy,” he finished.

  “Are we friends?” I mumbled.

  “I hope so.”

  “Good, because I look at you like I want to kiss you, but I don’t know what kissing means. I don’t know…a lot.”

  “Why do you want to kiss me?” He backed away from me, just a little.

  “I don’t know, but Piper would know, so without her, we’re just friends.” Yikes.

  “If Piper was here, what do you think she’d say?”

  “She’d tell me to stick my tongue down your throat and grab your junk.” We both busted up laughing.

  “She was forward.”

  “So forward. She lost her virginity at fifteen, and Mom put her on birth control for her sweet sixteen. You’re the only boy I’ve ever hugged,” I said.

  “I like hugging you.” He smiled as I hugged him.

  I wondered why.

  For dinner, Dad made chili with Parmesan cheese, salsa, and crackers. It sounded disgusting when he was explaining it to me in the kitchen, but it actually wasn’t that bad.

  “What do you want to drink?”

  I looked at him, super confused. We always drank beer. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “What you want to drink?” was never a question.

  “We’ve got to cut down, right?”

  “Do we even have anything else?”

  “Water.”

  “Ugh.”

  “I know. Your idea.”

  “Pour me some water, Dad.” There was nothing on television so we ate at the dining room table. We hadn’t sat there in a while. It was awkward. He sat in his usual spot and I sat in mine. I kept staring at Mom’s and Piper’s chairs. Piper would have been texting. Mom would have been talking on her phone while slamming down the dishes.

  “Drinking this, I feel like your mother is here,” Dad said.

  “Let’s not have it for breakfast. Like, as soon as we wake up, maybe we drink orange juice, or just coffee?”

  My dad stared at me. He stopped eating, stopped drinking.

  “Does it really sound that bad?”

  “No, you just suddenly reminded me so much of your mother.”

  I put the fork down my throat and gagged.

  “You know, you didn’t always hate her. There was a time when you wanted only her. I couldn’t make you stop crying. She had the special touch.”

  I hated talking about the past.

  “I came out of her vagina, Dad. Every mother has ‘that special touch’. She always had it. She just…didn’t know how to use it.” I finished my plate and got up.

  “Hating her may be helping you grieve for her, but she was still my wife. I miss lying next to her every night.”

  “Yeah, but I bet you don’t miss having sex with her because it never really happened.”

  Dad slammed down his water. “That’s enough, Portia!”

  I grabbed a beer. Fuck it.

  I went into my room and cried for hours before I took out the box of letters—I hadn’t looked at them in six months. When Piper and Mom died, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel tears. I couldn’t feel like they were actually gone. So I wrote them letters. I wrote one every single day for a week. Then Dad introduced me to beer and cigarettes. Suddenly, I didn’t need to write letters anymore.

  Dear Mom,

  I can’t believe you’re actually gone. I refuse to believe it.

  Actually, I’d rather be drinking beer than reading sad letters. Actually, I’d rather be hanging out with Ethan. So, I texted him. I saw that his name had jumped up above Piper’s in my message list. I freaked out and deleted it. I went downstairs. A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door.

  “It’s pretty late, Portia.”

  “Now who’s sounding like Mom.” I went into the living room—Dad had had five beers. “So much for cutting down.” I grabbed two from the fridge.

  “Don’t you have a friend at the door?” he said as I rolled my eyes.

  I went to the door and saw Ethan, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t have a jacket on.

  “You okay? It’s late.” He sounded worried.

  “Let’s go to my room.” I grabbed his arm and took him upstairs, glaring at my dad. He just continued downing the beers.

  “How many have you had?” Ethan asked.

  “Just one.” I threw him on the bed.

  “Portia…what’s all this?”

  I had left the letters on the bed. I grabbed them, threw them in the box and then threw the box in the trash. His facial expression never changed. He just looked confused.

  “What?” I snapped.

&nbs
p; “What happened? Where’s your dad?” He still had this puppy dog look on his face.

  “You didn’t see him in the living room?”

  “He was in the living room?” Ethan raised his eyebrows at me.

  “It’s okay. He doesn’t care you’re here.”

  Ethan got up off the bed. “Let’s talk.”

  “We talk all the time. What else do you want to talk about? The weather?”

  “Yeah…it’s really hot today. It’s like it’s summer. You wanna go to the beach?”

  “It’s cold.” Ethan was acting so strange that I just decided to drink. I opened another beer.

  “I don’t think you should have another one.” Ethan grabbed my beer. I looked at him like he was insane.

  “Do you know how much beer I drink in one day?” I said. I was being myself, I was being open. I was letting this guy into my life—into my room. And he honestly thought I was drunk.

  “I know I’m acting weird. You’ve never seen this side of me. No one has. I’m not drunk. I’m just letting you in.” I put my hand on his thigh. People did that in movies. It seemed appropriate. He looked at the box and then he looked at me.

  I kissed him.

  I did it.

  It was slow. There was no tongue—just four lips that somehow fit together. I stayed pressed against his lips, wondering how this was working scientifically. He moved, and I moved mine as well. I didn’t get it. Why did this feel nice? His lips were so soft—mine were chapped. I could smell my beer. He put his hand on my cheek. It literally felt like everything was happening in slow motion. I stopped and touched my lips.

  “How was that for your first kiss?” he whispered, inches away from my face.

  “My heart is racing.” I put my hand on my chest.

  “Let’s just relax.” His other hand appeared on my shoulder and he laid me down. He was right next to me. We talked for a while but I couldn’t remember anything we talked about—just the way we kissed.

  I woke up to a familiar smell, but it was a forgotten one. It was eight a.m. I was getting ready to roll over and go back to sleep but thoughts of what happened last night kept clouding my brain. I got up and peed and then I heard someone downstairs. There was a smell coming from my kitchen. It was so quiet, but I heard pans clinking.