Vanishing Girls(4)

“Listen, Nick,” Dad says. “Your mom and I are worried about you.”

“I didn’t think you and Mom were talking,” I say, rolling down the window a few inches, both because the air-conditioning is barely sputtering out cold air and because the rush of the wind helps drown out Dad’s voice.

He ignores that. “I’m serious. Ever since the accident—”

“Please,” I say quickly, before he can finish. “Don’t.”

Dad sighs and rubs his eyes under his glasses. He smells a little bit like the menthol strips he puts on his nose at night to keep him from snoring, and he’s still wearing the baggy pajama pants he’s had forever, the ones with reindeers on them. And just for a second, I feel really, truly terrible.

Then I remember Dad’s new girlfriend and Mom’s silent, taut look, like a dummy with her strings pulled way too tight.

“You’re going to have to talk about it, Nick,” Dad says. This time his voice is quiet, concerned. “If not with me, then with Dr. Lichme. Or Aunt Jackie. Or someone.”

“No,” I say, unrolling the window all the way, so the wind is thunderous and whips away the sound of my voice. “I don’t.”





JANUARY 7


Dara’s Diary Entry


Dr. Lick Me—I’m sorry, Lichme—says I should spend five minutes a day writing about my feelings.

So here I go:

I hate Parker.

I hate Parker.

I hate Parker.

I hate Parker.

I hate Parker.

I feel better already!

It’s been five days since THE KISS and today in school he didn’t even breathe in my direction. Like he was worried I would contaminate his oxygen circle or something.

Mom and Dad are on the shit list this week, too. Dad because he’s acting all serious and somber about the divorce, when inside you know he’s just turning backflips and cartwheels. I mean, if he doesn’t want to leave, he doesn’t have to, right? And Mom because she doesn’t even stand up for herself, and didn’t cry once about Paw-Paw, either, not even at the funeral. She just keeps going through the motions and heading to SoulCycle and researching goddamn quinoa recipes as if she can keep the whole world together just by getting enough fiber. Like she’s some weird animatronic robot wearing yoga pants and a Vassar sweatshirt.

Nick is like that too. It drives me crazy. She didn’t used to be, I don’t think. Maybe I just don’t remember. But ever since she started high school, she’s always doling out advice like she’s forty-five and not exactly eleven months and three days older than I am.

I remember last month, when Mom and Dad sat down to tell us about the divorce, she didn’t even blink. “Okay,” she said.

Oh-f*cking-kay. Really?

Paw-Paw’s dead and Mom and Dad hate each other and Nick looks at me like I’m an alien half the time.

Listen, Dr. Lick Me, here’s all I have to say: It’s not okay.

Nothing is.





JULY 17


Nick


Somerville and Main Heights are only twelve miles apart, but they might as well be in different countries. Main Heights is all new: new construction, new storefronts, new clutter, newly divorced dads and their newly bought condos, a small cluster of sheetrock and plywood and fresh paint, like a stage set built too quickly to be realistic. Dad’s condo looks out over a parking lot and a line of skinny elm trees that divides the housing complex from the highway. The floors are carpeted and the air conditioner never makes a sound, just silently churns out frigid, recycled air, so it feels like living inside a refrigerator.

I like Main Heights, though. I like my all-white room, and the smell of new asphalt, and all the flimsy buildings clinging to the sky. Main Heights is a place where people go when they want to forget.

But two days after the skinny-dipping incident, I’m heading home to Somerville.

“It’ll be good for you to get a change of scenery,” Dad says, for the twelfth time, which is stupid because it’s the exact thing he said when I moved out to Main Heights. “And it’ll be good for your mother to have you home. She’ll be happy.”

At least he doesn’t lie and say that Dara will be happy, too.

Too fast, we’re entering Somerville. Just like that, from one side of the underpass to the other, everything looks old. Enormous trees line the road, weeping willows fingering the earth, tall oaks casting the whole car in flickering shadow; through the curtain of swaying green, enormous houses ranging from turn-of-the-century to colonial to who-the-hell-knows-how-long-ago are visible. Somerville used to be the seat of a booming mill and cotton factory, the largest town in the whole state. Now half the town has been granted landmark status. We have a Founders’ Day and a Mill Festival and a Pilgrims’ Parade. There’s something backward about living in a place so obsessed with the past; it’s like everyone’s given up on the idea of a future.

As soon as we turn onto West Haven Court, my chest goes tight. This, too, is the problem with Somerville: too many memories and associations. Everything that happens has happened a thousand times before. For a second, an impression surfaces of a thousand other car rides, a thousand other trips home in Dad’s big Suburban with the rust-colored coffee stain on the passenger seat—a composite memory of family trips and special dinners and group errands.