by TE Carter
I look up at my dad. When we were growing up, he was a cliché. A teddy bear with a massive beard, always wrapped in tweed. Now he’s a frail old man with gray hair, with only the stubble he forgot to shave this morning. He’s wearing a gray suit that hangs on him. He still has patches on his elbows, but they don’t look professorial anymore. They just look sad.
And my mom. She smiles when I step away from my dad. She doesn’t hug me, because that’s not how she is, but she smiles, and it should be light. It should be a smile that says we’re okay. But she’s always smiling now, and it’s somehow wrong. A contrast to the serious literary scholar of my childhood. That could be okay, but it’s not the same accidental light that appeared every so often then. Instead it’s practiced muscle memory. Years of pretending you’re not listening to the things people say when you just want to buy eggs.
“Did you like the show?” I ask her.
“It was wonderful. And you really shone, even in a small part.” I listen for more, but there’s nothing. It’s almost like she’s really happy. Like she’s proud of me. Like for one instant I finally exist outside the shadow of our memories.
“We wanted to surprise you,” my dad says. “Are you surprised?”
“Yeah. I had no idea you were coming. Are you staying? For how long?”
He shakes his head. “Just for the show, and we want to take you out to lunch. To celebrate.”
“I’m sure you probably have some things planned with your drama friends,” my mom adds. It’s weird to hear that phrase. Drama friends. Everything about today feels different. But I can’t tell if it’s a good different or if this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. When everything falls apart.
“We have a party tonight, but I have a few hours,” I say.
“Let’s go, then?” my dad asks.
I look to my aunt, who’s been quiet. Her smile is tight, and I almost ask her why. I almost listen to my brain when it tells me not to get too comfortable. But I don’t want to ask my aunt if something is wrong. I don’t want to listen to my brain. I want to believe my parents. I want to think there’s nothing to worry about, and for one afternoon I want to go to lunch with them and celebrate me.
Chapter Seventeen
Lunch is almost real. For the better part of it, we talk, and my parents ask questions most parents ask their kids. They ask about my classes, and they tell me about work, and they discuss other family members with my aunt. It’s all what happens in other people’s lives, and I pretend. I let it envelop me, a comfortable blanket of another reality and another girl. I know it’s nothing but a stolen moment, yet I try to hold on to it anyway. Because it’s the life I should have had. The one that another me could have lived and complained about endlessly.
At the corner table there’s a girl around my age, and she rolls her eyes like she’s attached to a metronome. Someone at her table speaks, they pause and look at her, and her eyes move forward and back. It goes on like this for the entirety of our meal, and I wish for a moment I was that girl. That this normal was annoying to me.
But like everything that’s happened, it’s not real and it can’t last. The waitress asks if we want dessert, and my mom says we’ll all just have coffee, and while we wait, a lull fills the space between us. It’s a lull that’s on the other side of words you don’t want to hear, and I feel the words forming in it. The seconds move slowly but tangibly until my dad clears his throat.
“There’s one thing,” he says. “While we’re here.”
“David,” my aunt says, but it’s futile. He looks to my mom and she nods, and he clears his throat again. I almost tell them to save it. Whatever it is can wait, I want to say, but I don’t, and the lull expands until it breaks.
“You know we’re coming up to Scott’s birthday,” my father continues. “Just over a month and he’ll be twenty-one.”
“Okay,” I say. I try to hold on to the girl rolling her eyes or how I felt after the show or anything that’s happened here, but those things fade away while I remember him. I see my brother and how he never looked much older than me. I remember his hair and how it grew even longer in that last year and how he forgot to wash it sometimes. I want to think about the coffee that appears somehow through the memories, but I can’t, and I feel the talons tearing into my flesh.
“It’s just that … he’s going to have to be moved,” my mom explains.
“Moved where?” I ask.
“Well, where he is, it’s … He’s going to be too old soon to stay there.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
My parents look at each other, silently trying to find the right way to say it. My dad’s the one who does.
“They’re trying to decide on his placement. There are two options for him, but they want to speak with each of us. Get our take before making any decisions.”
“You can’t … No. You can’t ask me to do this,” I tell them. “How can you ask me to do this?”
My mom reaches across the table and rests her hand over mine. “You don’t have to, Alexia. We would never make you do it if you can’t. To be honest, I don’t even know if you should. We almost didn’t tell you. We weren’t going to tell you.”
“Why did you?”
“We had to. We at least had to mention it. To offer you a choice. Heath says … He told us that if you felt we’d kept it from you, it wouldn’t allow you control over what you process. He said it would be denying you the opportunity to decide for yourself.”
“I hate Heath.”
“Do you really?” my mom asks. “Or are you just processing by venting?”
“Did he come up with that, too?” She doesn’t say anything, which means he did. “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to do this? Is this what you think is best?”
She sighs. “I don’t know, Alexia. Part of me wants to say no. I don’t think you should, and I don’t want to ask you to even consider it, because I know what it will do to you. I’m not sure anything good comes of it. At the same time, yes. I do want you to do it, because he’s my son. He’s still my son. And if there’s anything we can do … If there’s a chance for him…”
I hear her voice breaking, and I picture them. I picture my mom sitting at their new kitchen table—since they got rid of our old furniture when they moved. I imagine her waiting for me to call when I get home from school every day, wondering about me, feeling me slipping away from her as I live my life without them. I can see the way she picks at the wood on the edge of the table when she’s nervous. She’ll do it for hours, too, and then she sits in the cafeteria with her colleagues in the psych department, wondering why I have so much trouble coping.
“You couldn’t have waited?” I ask. “I’m going to a party tonight. I’m supposed to be going to a party. Why couldn’t you wait?”
“We weren’t thinking,” my dad says. “Lexi, when they called … It was sudden. We only found out last night, and we were already planning on coming, and we…”
“You were thinking of Scott,” I say. He nods. “That’s not fair, you know. It’s not okay that you couldn’t think of me today and save this. My whole life is defined by him already. Couldn’t I have had one day?”
“You’ve had years,” my mom says. “For years we’ve worried about what you need. But he turns twenty-one next month, Alexia. We had to tell you. We needed you to know what was happening. To give you time and…”
She starts to cry. Right here in the middle of the restaurant, and she’s sobbing so loudly that the girl stops rolling her eyes for a moment to stare.
I feel like shit. I hate my mom. I hate my father, and I hate my aunt for not saying anything this whole time. I hate Scott, and I hate the girl at the other table. I hate everyone else, and I hate myself because of it.
Because I don’t actually hate any of them.
I hate that I don’t hate Scott. I hate that he needs me and my parents need me and I shouldn’t go and I can’t go, but at the same time I want to go. I hate that if I don’t go, I�
�ll always blame myself.
Even though I don’t have anything here—not really—I hate the idea of losing it. I don’t want to lose worrying about what kids say about me at drama club or being annoyed by Chloe staring at me for looking at Ryan a certain way. I don’t want to lose my pretend relationship with Ryan or falling asleep thinking about Marcus’s eyes but being too scared to talk to him again because of how I feel. I don’t want to lose any of that, because as petty and meaningless and empty as it all is, it’s the most real I’ve felt in ages.
I kind of love the silly drama about Ryan and worrying whether Rory will lose it if someone forgets a line. I love pep rallies and how annoying they are. I love leaving class and going into the auditorium and knowing there’s a group of people waiting there, people who kind of like me but also kind of think I’m weird. I like all the irritating and awful parts of being Lexi Lawlor, and I don’t want to have to live the reality of me instead.
“I made friends here,” I tell my parents finally, after my mom’s sobs subside. “Sure, some kids don’t like me, but they don’t like the way I talk or the way I act or something I did. They don’t hate me for something I was or that someone else thought I was. They only know this person, and they don’t see—”
I stop talking because now I’m crying, too.
“You should call Heath,” my mom says, drying her eyes.
“Do you still see him?” He was supposed to be my therapist, but it’s not like being an adult makes you immune to needing some guidance.
“Not anymore,” she says. “Well, not because I need to.”
“But you do? See him, I mean?”
“He comes for dinner sometimes,” my dad says. “We really like him.”
I try picturing that. My mom adjusting the placemats because they’re slightly crooked, my dad fighting with the oven, and Heath, in his plaid shirt, stroking his beard and suggesting that my parents are using inanimate objects to demonstrate their need for control. He probably says it while sipping sangria or something and nodding to himself.
“Why do you like him?” I don’t mean to sound confrontational, which I’m sure Heath would say I’m being.
“He’s not just Heath the therapist, Alexia. Did you know he once backpacked across Iceland?” my mom asks.
“No, it never came up.”
“People are a lot more than we see.”
“Not Heath. Heath is my therapist. Our therapist if you still need to see him, too. He’s not a guy who backpacks anywhere. I don’t want to know that about him. I want him to be the person who exists to help me when I can’t adjust. When I need someone to talk to while I move all over New England. I don’t want to talk to an Icelandic backpacker about Scott and the trial and the words cut into my arms. I like keeping Heath in his place.”
My mom laughs, although nothing is funny. “You’re old enough to know that’s not real. You have to realize that … well, we’re all large. We all contain multitudes.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” she asks.
“Don’t start quoting Whitman at me. Don’t go running to poetry because you don’t want to talk.”
I realize I sound a little like Heath at the moment, but fuck him. Fuck everyone.
“You don’t have to go,” my dad says, reminding me what we’re talking about. What my “celebration lunch” is really about. “You can say no. It’s your choice.”
“But I do have to go, and you know it. You knew I would, and you knew what it would do, and you knew it would make it all impossible. You knew how I’d feel, and you knew today was the last show, and you knew that this would ruin things. I’m supposed to go to a party tonight, and now I have to decide if I can handle that, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all going to end up like it always does anyway, isn’t it?”
“We’re sorry,” my dad says.
“Sorry isn’t good enough. You should have waited.”
“Alexia,” my mom says.
“Fine. I’ll go. And I’ll call Heath or whatever. I can see him when I come home for Thanksgiving. But…”
“What is it?” my dad asks.
“Can this thing with Scott wait until then? Can we pretend we didn’t have this conversation? Can you at least let me fake it for a little longer? Can you please give me that? A few weeks before it’s all over?”
My parents both nod.
Thanksgiving is in nineteen days.
Chapter Eighteen
After my parents leave, I have an hour before the party. I tell myself it’s all going to be okay. I tell myself I have to be okay. I have to go tonight. I need to be there for Ryan, because in nineteen days who knows what happens? I may as well enjoy what I have right now.
But all the logic washes away with the stage makeup in the shower. Only a few hours ago, the entire future was open to me. I survived three shows onstage. I had friends. Last night, on the drive home with Ryan, we sang along to West Side Story because it’s a damn good play. Musical or not.
That feels like a lifetime ago, even if it’s been less than twenty-four hours. Last night life felt possible. I thought maybe life could be good.
But that’s the thing with life, isn’t it? It’s give and take. It gave me hope for the last couple of months. And now it’s taking that hope back.
“Are you going to be okay?” my aunt asks from the doorway as I brush my hair and put on lip gloss. It’s all pretend. I don’t care if I look kissable. But I was supposed to be there tonight and look like Ryan’s girlfriend. That made sense this afternoon, although now it’s like being an alien on a new planet. How did I let myself believe this kind of simplicity?
“I don’t know,” I admit. But I don’t have time to think about it as Ryan pulls into the driveway, his parents’ station wagon sputtering in the cold November night.
I grab my bag and jacket, then push past my aunt.
“Lexi,” she says. “Wait.”
“I have a party to go to.”
Ryan’s headlights blaze through the glass of the front door, flickering into a kaleidoscope of light. As I walk forward, my aunt says my name again, and the colors start to swirl.
Not now. Not tonight, I beg the universe. But since when did the universe give a fuck about me?
My eyes ache from staring into the glare of the headlights. Burning my retinas to replace the chill in the rest of me. I keep moving toward the door, telling the past to stay away, telling myself to focus and to remember this morning. To stay here and now. Heath’s a big fan of “mindfulness,” and I try. I try to use everything he’s taught me.
As soon as I’m outside, though, I know it’s not going to pass. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere.
The world takes on the haze it always does when the past refuses to let go, and I open the car door, my arms feeling like they’re on someone else’s body and I’m only hearing a story about what they’re doing.
I can see the night laid out before me. I’ll go to the party with Ryan, and everyone will talk about us until we come into a room. Chloe will stare at me, and I’ll play this game with her, like any of this is important. I’ll give her a million more reasons to hate me, reasons she’ll remember later, and it will be so much worse because of it.
Ryan and I will go into some room, and people will think we’re doing all kinds of things in there, and they’ll talk about those things that we aren’t really doing but they want to pretend we are. We’ll stay in there long enough for everyone to have a story. And then, after we leave Rory’s tonight, they’ll talk about me some more. They’ll wonder what he sees in me. Call me names. Talk about what makes me better or worse than Chloe, depending on where their loyalties lie.
They’ll talk about me later, and I’ll be at home with the imagined voices and taunts bouncing off all the things my parents need from me, too. I’ll be stuck with my parents’ version of me, and these impressions of Lexi Lawlor, and all my thoughts and everything Scott used to be. My head is already too cr
owded as it is, but I’ll have to add the whispered things they’ll be saying to that mess.
And somehow, in the middle of all that, I need to figure out what I’m supposed to say about my brother at the end of the month.
I can’t be all these people. I can’t balance all the thoughts and what everyone needs from me.
I can’t do any of it.
“I can’t go,” I tell Ryan, leaning into the car. “I’m sorry. My mom … I mean, my aunt … She needs me for something. About my mom.”
He blinks but nods slowly. “You all right?”
“Sure. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“What choice do I have, right?”
“Okay,” he says, and I know he’s trying to decide if he should stay. Should be a good boyfriend and comfort me. But he’s not really my boyfriend. And even if he were, this is so much bigger than him and us and drama club.
I shut the door and watch him drive away, but I don’t go inside. Instead I turn around and walk toward the broken swing set where I sat with Marcus a lifetime ago. I lie down in the frozen dirt and ruin the pretty pink dress I’ve never worn before. I bought it at a thrift shop with my aunt last week, something special to wear tonight. To a party. With people. Friends. All those things I almost forgot weren’t welcome in my life.
I used to be happy. I remember that so vividly, probably because I know what’s missing now. Maybe if my memories were the sort that haunted me because they were bad, it would be easier to let go. But things weren’t bad. They were amazing and wonderful … until they weren’t.
Before that one October day, there was the beach in Maine, where Scott taught me how to swim. Where our parents yelled at us to be careful, because we kept pretending the waves were washing us away. But it was always safe; nothing real happens to most kids.
Only months before it happened, Scott and I were still close. We knew it was probably his last true summer, though. Soon he’d be sixteen, and then he’d have to work and he’d probably drive and he’d be an adult. Meanwhile, at twelve, I was still taking on the lives of YouTube stars and fictional characters because everyone else was so much more interesting.