In an Instant(46)

I cringe.

She listens and laughs again, a shy giggle. “Thanks for checking in. Karen and Natalie doing okay? . . . Good . . . Okay . . . Yeah, I’ll call you tomorrow . . . After work? . . . Yeah, that would be good . . . I could use a drink.” She laughs again. “You’re right—I could use several.”

She clicks the phone closed and, with a deep breath, returns to the house.

“Was that Bob?” my dad asks, surprising my mom as she walks through the patio doors to find him leaning awkwardly against a counter stool, his leg sticking out like a post.

“He was just checking in,” she says defensively.

“I bet he was. Good old Bob,” he spits. “You two sleeping together again?”

I rear back at the same time as my mom, and then her face goes red with outrage. But the reaction took a beat too long, the accusation not denied for a single revealing pulse. “How dare you?”

“How dare I what? Accuse you of what I know, that you slept with him, or question what I’m not certain of, whether you’re sleeping with him again?” my dad lashes back.

My mom stiffens.

My dad stares.

“You knew?” she says finally, her eyes dropping and her voice small.

“Of course I knew,” my dad spits, but I feel the steam draining from him, horrible hurt replacing it, and all of me is on fire, for him, at her, and for her.

My mom stares at the tile between them. “You stayed,” she mumbles.

“Where was I going to go?” he says. A dagger to the heart would be less painful than his declaration that the only reason he didn’t leave was because he had no choice, and I feel the last of my mom’s air go out of her. She staggers to a chair beside the table and collapses into it, her elbows on her knees, her face buried in her hands, and my dad turns from her. His eyes stick for a second on the lemon tree through the window, and then he continues on his way, hobbling back to the living room and away from her.

I knew they were unhappy, but I had no idea the depth of their misery.





56

I torture myself by starting the morning with Mo at school. The hardest thing about being dead is watching the world move on without me. It’s been four weeks since the accident.

My soccer team is in the playoffs. I’m thrilled for them and sad for me. Most of the kids in my grade have their licenses and have new cars. And last week was formal, and everyone is talking about it.

Mo now hangs with the drama kids, a development I view with great horror. We hate . . . hated the drama group. They’re always so dramatic. I think this is why she chose them. They’re the only group so wrapped up in their own crises they don’t dwell on hers. At least most of the time. Today is the exception.

“Hey, Mo, why didn’t you tell us about the cute boy who was with you in the accident?” Anita, the head diva of the group, asks when Mo joins them. “Natalie says he was hot and that he was, like, totally heroic and pulled her back from Finn’s body when she was, like, freaking out.”

Natalie says seems to be the start of a lot of conversations these days. The novelty of the accident has worn off, and with it so has Natalie’s newfound popularity, her irritating personality spiraling her quickly down the social strata. So in order to hang on as long as possible, Natalie’s been blabbing more and more about that day and straying further and further from the truth.

“Excuse me,” Mo says, standing, and I watch as she walks across the quad to the table of jocks, where Natalie sits at the end beside her new boyfriend, Ryan, a grade A jerk whose greatest claim to fame is getting thrown out of more football games for unsportsmanlike conduct than he finishes.

“Looking fine, Mo,” Ryan says as his squinty eyes rake over her.

Mo ignores him. “Natalie, can I talk to you?”

“I’m eating,” Natalie says as she pushes her salad around on her plate.

Ryan uses his hip to nudge her off the bench so she falls to her butt on the concrete. “Mo wants to talk to you, babe,” he says through his laughter. “Don’t forget to discuss that threesome you’ve been promising me.”

Natalie picks herself up, pretending not to be humiliated.

“What do you want?” she seethes when she and Mo are around the corner and out of sight of the tables.

“Why do you go out with that guy?” Mo says.

Natalie’s nose flares. “What do you want?” she repeats.

Mo takes a deep breath, then says in a surprisingly calm voice, “I want you to stop talking about the accident.”

“I can talk about whatever I want.”

Mo studies her and says nothing, her brow furrowed as if trying to figure something out.

“Is that all you wanted to say?” Natalie says impatiently.

On the surface, Natalie seems the most unaffected by what happened, her detachment during the accident seeming to have protected her from any lasting repercussions. Only I see the differences, her constant nervousness that borders on neurotic—how she checks the lock on the door when she gets home at least six times before she will go upstairs to her room, how she walks three blocks out of her way to reach a crosswalk with a light, how she hoards food in her backpack, her locker, and the side table beside her bed. She never did get the MINI Cooper her parents promised her, a dozen excuses getting in the way of her taking the driver’s test.