Lucky Caller(5)

“How?”

“I mean, we’ll definitely have to move.”

I sat up in bed. “Wait, what?”





2.


Conrad: This is Pete Conrad. You’re listening to 100.2 The Heat, and we’re about to, uh, do the resolution thing.

Will: Yeah?

Conrad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. New year, new you, all that crap. Nikki, what’s your resolution?

Nikki: I mean, it’s always the same, isn’t it? Go to the gym more, eat better, blah blah blah.

Conrad: How’d that go last year?

Nikki: How do you think?

Conrad: Well, I think you look great. You look great all year long.

Will: Awwww.Nikki: No, I don’t like when you’re nice. It makes me suspicious.

Conrad: What? Why? I’m always nice.

Tina: Uh-huh. Yeah, right.

Conrad: I am! Tina, don’t pile on with them. You guys always gang up on me. It’s always three against one.

Nikki: You’re a lot of things, Conrad, but nice isn’t one of them.

Conrad: I am … offended. That’s what I am. Truly. I think we’ll find a lot of support out there for me, lotta people on my side. Call in if you think that I’m nice and these other three are full of—

Tina: Probably not helping your case.

Conrad: We’re gonna put it to the listeners. You guys’ll see. And call in if you’ve already given up on your resolutions. God knows I have.

Will: It’s January third.

Conrad: I know—it’s my longest record yet. 555-1002, give us a shout.



TOP 40 MUSIC TOOK OVER, and I paused the show.

I was always a day behind on my dad’s show—with the time difference between Indianapolis and San Diego, I rarely ever caught it when it actually aired. Luckily, they archived them online.

It was the first day back to school after break. Everything had gone by quickly after Christmas. Rose still had another week off, but it was back to business for me and Sidney. No more sleeping in, lying around, eating cereal for lunch, and listening to Mom and Dan doing the crossword puzzle.

I had asked my mom the day after Christmas if the engagement meant we were going to move. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before except that I never really thought too deeply about much of anything if I didn’t have to.

Mom answered in the affirmative.

“Sidney’s finishing up middle school this year, so she can transition into high school anywhere. Rose has graduated, and you’re almost done. Our lease is up in the summer. It just makes sense. The timing is right.”

“So that’s why you guys decided to get married now? For, like, the sake of convenient timing?”

“It was a factor,” she said, “but obviously a marriage isn’t founded purely on timing alone.”

“Are we gonna move into Dan’s house?”

She shrugged. “We might find a new place. Some place between Dan’s job and mine. We’ve also been talking about…” She paused, considering. “Well, I’m thinking about going back to school.”

My mom worked in a core facility at the School of Medicine downtown. A core was a place with shared machines that a bunch of research labs used since the machines were too expensive to buy individually. Mom’s core did flow cytometry, which was a technique used to separate cells into different populations. I remember her explaining it once with M&M’s when we were kids—pouring a bag out on the tabletop, all the different colors mixed together, and then separating them out into yellows and reds and blues. Flow cytometry used lasers to separate the cells out by different properties, just like you could separate M&M’s by color.

She had mentioned going back to school to get her PhD before, but I didn’t know it was an actual thing that was actually becoming real, like the marriage and the apparent move.

“So I’d still be working downtown,” she continued. “If that were to happen. But we can find a place that will fit all of us if we want. If you want to keep staying with us for college, like Rose is.”

“Staying with us?” I said to Rose later. “Can you believe she said it like that? Like it won’t even be our home. Like we’ll be strangers or something. Seriously?”

Rose just shrugged and said, “I mean…” and then she turned back to her sketchbook like she had expressed a complete thought.

I thought of her response to Mom at Lincoln Square: We feel … Okay. Right? We feel okay?

I felt okay with it only so long as nothing changed. That’s what I should have said, but stuff like that never came in the moment. The perfect comeback only comes to you way after the offending incident, most especially when you’re alone in the shower with no one but the shampoo bottle to tell it to.

When I reached my locker the first day back at school, Alexis Larsson was already there. She was someone who had probably never shared searing rejoinders with her shower products. Truthfully, she was the kind of person who probably warranted those comebacks herself, but she was something like my closest friend at school now that Rose had graduated.

Alexis had appeared in seventh grade, a transfer from some fancy junior high on the north side. None of those new-kid-is-an-outsider tropes applied. No, Alexis instantly became the coolest person in our grade. It was like on a reality show when they introduce someone new and controversial midseason for ratings.