How (Not) to Fall in Love(14)

Cut to shot of reporter on our front porch, ringing the bell. Toby’s muffled bark sounded in the background.

“Now can I make jokes about celebrity offspring? And their tats?” I asked.

Mom rose creakily from the couch and tossed the remote at me. “Knock yourself out. I’m going to bed.”

Whatever, Mom. Just go ahead and check out. Dad did; you might as well, too.



After Mom went to bed, I opened my laptop with Toby curled next to me. After watching a few puppy videos that made me almost smile, I typed in a new search.

There he was. My dad, sort of blurry and poor audio quality, but that was definitely him. He paced the stage, lit by spotlights. I wasn’t sure which arena he was in, but it was a big one. The camera cut to the audience where thousands of people hung on his every word. A picture of my old pink bicycle flashed on the screen behind him.

Dad told the audience how J.J. had taught me to ride a bike when I was six years old. My dad couldn’t do it because he’d been very ill. So sick he almost died. This was the famous brush-with-death speech. He told the audience how his illness made him see what was important in life, how it inspired him to follow his dreams, and to teach others how to do the same.

I kind of remembered my sixth summer. J.J. visited often, and one day he brought me a Barbie bike with pink and white handlebar streamers. He ran behind me for days, holding onto the back of the bicycle seat until I mastered the sidewalk on my own.

“No training wheels,” he’d insisted to my worried mother. “They’re a crutch. She needs to learn to trust herself.” That was part of Dad’s spiel, too, how J.J. reminded him that we rely too much on training wheels in life, that we need to learn to balance on our own.

The camera panned the audience for close-ups. Most of the women and a few of the men were in tears, picturing me on my bike, my dad on his deathbed, J.J. reassuring my overwhelmed mother.

When I was younger, Dad dragged Mom and me along during his summer tours, and this was the point when he made me join him on stage. Unlike Dad, I looked petrified, and more than once I reached around to pull my underwear out of my butt crack. Those videos had done wonders for my social life. Not.

I stopped the video and leaned against a pillow. It was quite a story, at least the way my dad told it. I closed my eyes and remembered how proud I’d felt watching him from backstage.

What had happened? What had caused him to run away? To go against his own philosophy of facing life head-on, no matter what curveballs it threw?

I opened up Dad’s Facebook fan page. I scrolled the page, reading all the gushing comments about how awesome he was, how his philosophy had changed lives in dramatic ways. I scrolled down to the entries from before he’d disappeared, looking for some clue about what was going through his mind.

“Is Ty okay?” Written by somebody named Bethany. “I’ve seen him speak so many times,” she wrote, “but this last time he seemed off, somehow. The fire wasn’t there.”

I sat up, propping pillows behind me.

“I thought so, too,” someone named Li Wei had replied. “It’s like he wasn’t all there. Like part of him was missing.”

A chill ran up my spine. I looked at the dates. Three months ago. I’d been busy hanging out at the country club over the summer, swimming and playing tennis. I hadn’t thought about it since it happened, but now that I read these comments, I remembered coming home late one night and hearing a noise from Dad’s office. When I’d peeked in, he was at his desk, head in his hands. He looked up when the door opened, wiping his eyes.

“Are you okay, Dad?” I didn’t think I’d ever seen him cry before.

He’d flashed me his magazine cover smile. “I’m fine, sweetie. Just…tired.”

I’d said good night and closed the door. And hadn’t worried, because my dad was always fine.

How many other clues had Mom and I missed, or ignored, because we didn’t want to see them?

I closed my laptop and tried to sleep, but my phone pinged with a text from Charlie. “R u ok? Saw the reporters on your porch on the news.” Punctuated with a frowny face emoticon.

His concern was comforting, especially in light of Mom’s cranky exit.

“I’m ok,” I typed, then amended it. “We both are.”

It was a lie, of course, but what else could I say?





Chapter Seven


September 27


Sunlight woke me earlier than I wanted, especially for a Saturday. I’d begged for blackout window shades so I could sleep in, but Mom always refused since they wouldn’t match the pastel and lace that covered every inch of my bedroom. Sometimes I felt like I lived inside a wedding cake.

I wanted to wallow in the few blissful seconds between asleep and awake, where I could pretend Dad wasn’t a late-night TV joke, and Mom wasn’t keeping the liquor store in business, but I couldn’t. At least it was the weekend. I squeezed my eyes shut, picturing Chloe prepping the CNN report for my locker, maniacally waving her glue gun like a weapon.

Downstairs, Mom was already dressed and drinking coffee.

“Big day in the real estate world?” I asked, surprised to see her awake.

She shook her head. “You and I are going to the cabin for the weekend. I don’t want to be here if the paparazzi come back.” She took a sip from her mug. “After everything that’s happened, you and I could use a break.”