Picture Us In The Light(60)

I still can’t believe the way the days ran out right in front of me, how we’re really doing this. Someone else will move into our house, hammer some cheap IKEA print over my mural wall, rip up my mom’s garden. “I wish my parents would just come out and tell me everything. You know? Everything just snowballed and I still don’t even know exactly why it all got so bad so fast.”

“I…don’t think you do.”

“You don’t think I do what?”

“I don’t think you do wish they’d tell you. If you really wanted to know you’d be pushing harder for it. But you aren’t, because you don’t. It’s easier not to know.”

“Aren’t you the one who told me sometimes it’s better to just let the truth exist on its own or however it was you put it?”

“Yes, but not necessarily better in general. I meant better specifically for you.”

“Specifically for me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means—” She hesitates, and something in the way she does it makes me think that whatever she’s going to say, it’s something she’s been holding on to a long time. “It means, among other things, that I know you rigged an election to help your best friend win.”

Twin flashes of light in my peripheral vision. “You—what?”

“Are you going to deny it?”

“It’s not—” But then I don’t know where I’m going with that, and then my body betrays me, my heart clanging against my rib cage, my breaths catching shallow in my throat. You always catch up to yourself in the end; you can’t hide who you are. “Shit.” Finally I say, “How do you know that?”

It’s a long story—something about how her numbers had been different enough from mine that she’d wondered, and after we’d all left she’d gone back into the teachers’ lounge and found the ballots and recounted herself. All this time she knew.

“All right.” My breathing hasn’t recovered. “Well. All right. You’ll make a good journalist someday. Did you—you didn’t tell Harry, did you?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

She doesn’t answer right away. I say, “Please don’t. Reg, please. It’ll kill him to know that he—to know that I—”

“It wouldn’t kill him.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

Then I run out of words. Regina makes zero attempt to rescue me from the silence. It’s hard not to lose your foothold when someone peers inside you, sees all those things you tried the hardest to keep hidden, all those ugly shames you’ve tried to tell yourself aren’t really as bad as they seem. All those lies disintegrate in the light; I could never tell Regina I didn’t take anything from Sandra, that I only ever wanted the best for her.

My lungs pucker into themselves, shrinking against the air I need them to hold. I’m getting a headache. Finally I say, “Do you hate me?”

“Of course not,” she says, and I can’t locate any of what I’m looking for in the flatness in her voice. “How could I? Now you and Harry are my best friends.”



I’m still reeling when I get off the phone and go out into what’s left of the living room. My dad is stretching packing tape over all the boxes stacked up to the ceiling, and my mom is working on the binder she plans to leave the new tenants with instructions for the garden. How foreign it feels that just a few months ago I was worried about leaving them behind next year—worried that I’d miss them, that the house would feel empty with just the two of them in it.

“I will do anything if you let me still go to MV,” I say. “Please. I’ll do anything.”

They exchange a long glance across the dining/kitchen area. My mom says, “That isn’t possible.”

“I’ll take the bus, I—”

“It’s against the rules.”

“But it’s so close to the end of the year. I’ll be so careful. They aren’t going to care this close to June. Did you already do the green card notification?”

My dad looks at me blankly. “What do you mean?”

With a green card, you’re supposed to notify officials within ten days of moving—I learned that when I went to look up whether it was true what my mom said that it would make his getting a new job more complicated. (A little, maybe, but not the way she was implying.) “The address change. Can we just wait until June? Then it won’t be on any records that I stopped living in the district.”

“Daniel—” my mom says.

“I looked up what happens if you get caught, and it’s a misdemeanor in the absolute worst-case scenario. But it said nothing ever happens because they don’t have time to go around prosecuting people for forgetting to give their address, and if you get fined, I’ll pay the fine. Just—please. I won’t ask for anything like this again.”

I feel a little sick, the corners of the room wobbling. I stare at where the living room couch used to be. And Regina was right, I think—because I start to ask the other questions, too, but then I don’t.

My mom turns away. She folds her arms and she’s staring at the wall, so I can’t see the look on her face. Finally my dad says, “You have just three months at this school and then you’ll be at RISD, Daniel. Think about that part instead.”