by Emily Henry
“Oof.” Hannah tips her head back against the locker. “Maybe you’re wrong.”
“Maybe.” I don’t mention that Saul told me so. It’d be too hard to reference our private conversation on the Ferris wheel without broadcasting across my forehead: I HAVE A CRUSH ON MY SWORN ENEMY SLASH THE (EX-?) BOY OF YOUR DREAMS. “Hey,” I say, fumbling over a binder in my locker, “did you ever find out why Saul’s back, anyway?”
Hannah scrunches up her mouth. “Nope. Just that he’s here for the foreseeable future.”
“I thought you would’ve done some expert digging by now.”
“I know—a decade of Saulitis cured in one fateful night. Seeing him as the tragically beautiful stick-in-the-mud he really is freed me up to spend the last three days finishing my AP summer reading.”
“Speaking of which, why haven’t I seen you all day? Do they keep smart people in a separate wing now?”
Hannah’s top lip curls. “Practically. If I have to sit next to Stephen Niequist in one more class, I’ll freak. He’s gunning for my salutatorian slot.”
“Maybe you should flash him some boob, throw him off.”
“Stephen Niequist is not into boob.”
“Ah, see, I didn’t know that, because they keep us simpletons in a separate pen.”
“Oh please. You’re in the simpleton pen by choice.”
“Your misplaced confidence in me is charming, Han.”
“And the fact that you won’t even apply for the same schools as me is decidedly not.”
“I’m not going to college,” I remind her. I’m as incapable as I am uninterested. Instead I’m going to do what Dad and his dad and his dad’s dad did: travel, see the world, rest up in Five Fingers, repeat.
“Anyway,” Hannah says, “this doesn’t matter in the scheme of things right now. How are you doing? Did any more of the”—she glances around furtively, then lowers her voice—“you-know-whats happen?”
I sink my teeth into my lip, fighting the drop in my chest. I know she’s trying to help, but right now I almost regret telling her about what happened.
The weight of loss is so familiar to me by now that I’ve become a master at misdirecting myself: pinching my hand, biting my lip, grinding the heel of my shoe into the top of my other foot—any physical sensation to distract from the nonphysical pain.
I don’t want to talk about this.
“No, no more hallucinations of my dead father,” I murmur.
She squeezes my arm apologetically. She’s sorry it happened in the first place. I’m sorry it hasn’t happened again since.
“What class do you have next?” she asks, expertly steering me from the grief ledge.
“Creative writing.”
“Hey, good for you, taking an elective instead of a study hall.”
“I already have two study halls this semester. They wouldn’t let me take any more.”
Hannah laughs as the warning bell rings. “That’s it, babe. Aim for the stars. I’ll see you later.”
“Probably not,” I call after her. “Unless—wait, are you in my seventh-period Would you like fries with that?”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.”
I straighten my books again and turn toward 204, the classroom listed on the schedule taped to my binder. Creative writing is always held in the same space: a cozy offshoot of the library’s second floor with three walls and a ceiling comprising mostly windows. Originally, it was a greenhouse where some of the science classes would go for site-specific lessons, but most of the time it was basically treated as a vitamin D–rich alternative to the official teacher’s lounge.
In Michigan, especially this far north, you take all the sunlight you can get, no matter the temperature outside. If you wait for warmth to enjoy the outdoors, Dad used to say, the sun might die before you get there.
It’s almost funny, in a tragic way, that the fiery thing at the center of my universe did die and that I, a girl whose name is synonymous with summer, am expected to live without it.
A handful of kids are already seated in the blue Herman Miller scoop chairs lining the rectangular arrangement of tables. I take an open spot along the wall so I can look out the window at the pine trees beyond, though it will probably mean squinting into the sun most days. I recognize a few kids, most notably the Stephen Niequest, who plops down immediately to my left and opens a calculus textbook for some light reading until the bell rings and the final stragglers hurry in.
Everyone knows this class is pretty much a blow-off elective, taken by seniors like me who can’t have a third study hall, but usually in classes like these, teachers still hand out detentions for tardiness—since, like, what else are you even getting graded on? Mrs. Strand is no exception, but, ironically, the moth-eaten woman isn’t here yet.
Other kids have started to murmur about it when a girl at the head of the table formation rises from her seat and claps once.
“Hello, class.” She rubs her manicured hands together, as if she’s trying to start a fire. “I’m Ms. deGeest, and I’ll be teaching creative writing this semester.”
Everyone looks around at one another, and if I had to guess, it’s because “Ms. deGeest” looks like sixteen-year-old Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.
“Are you kidding?” Drew Goodall calls from the back.
Ms. deGeest purses her lips and checks her student roster. “No, Andrew. Our satire unit’s not for a few weeks. I’m here because Mrs. Strand retired, and I was thrilled to get the opportunity to work with all of you.”
That elicits some chuckles, mostly from the group of boys surrounding Drew, who murmur variations of Can’t wait to work you either, baby.
Her eyes blaze a trail across the corner the catcalls came from. She makes a swift gesture, like she’s bisecting them with the edge of her hand. “You three. Office.”
The boys exchange confounded looks. “Seriously?”
“Make sure to memorize some of your classmates’ faces. You’ll need to get today’s assignment from someone later so that you’ll be ready tomorrow.” She doesn’t seem mad, just calm, her tone deadpan. It has to be an act—the Tough Guy persona they teach any Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who decides to go into education.
Drew and his friends volley a few unsure looks back and forth as they pick up their books and mosey toward the door. “Close the door on your way out,” Ms. deGeest says almost sweetly.
She has performed her first miracle: They obey. She faces the rest of us and claps once enthusiastically, and it’s like the whole thing never happened.
“Narrative,” she says. “All writing contains it. Even research papers have some semblance of story in them—conflict, resolution, specific evidence to build a thesis. A persuasive essay comes together through rhetoric, the tricks you use to suggest a narrative or outright portray one.” She selects a marker from the shelf beneath the board and quickly scribbles, For sale: baby shoes, never worn. “Anyone recognize this quote?”
“Hemingway,” Stephen says.
“Possibly,” deGeest answers. “That’s the legend, at least. Arthur C. Clarke, Ernest Hemingway, and John Robert Colombo were sitting around a table, eating lunch one day, when Hemingway bet them each a dollar that he could write a story in six words. When the money was on the table, he grabbed a napkin and wrote this line on it. Allegedly. But there had been a similar story in a 1910 edition of the Spokane Press. The week before there’d been an ad for a handmade baby bed and trousseau that had never been used. The Spokane piece homed in on the sadness of that statement, all the possibilities for why such an ad might exist.
“Today we’re going to talk about story, and tonight you’re going to write your own piece of flash fiction. Yours, however, will be one to five pages rather than six words.”
A groan travels throughout the room. It’s unanimous, an aural wave, until it reaches Stephen, who I suspect som
ehow already knew about the change in plans for this semester’s creative writing class. His owl-like hazel eyes are fixed on the middle distance, and I can practically see the dozens of ideas skating over them.
I don’t find myself disappointed about the homework either, though unlike Stephen I have no slew of concepts barraging my beautiful near-salutatorian brain. I have exactly one idea, exactly one story I want to write down: Dad’s.
• • •
That night, after dinner—and after the handful of minutes I spent staring into my room from the hallway, trying to summon my vision or hallucination or strangely vivid memory from last weekend—I sit at the kitchen table and start on my story.
Grayson and Shadow sprint circles around the downstairs, attacking each other with Nerf guns, and Mom and Toddy lie snuggled up on the couch, sipping wine and flirting in French.
French is Mom’s first language, but Dad never learned it, and so I didn’t either. I have all the touristy stuff down—Où sont les toilettes? Je veux aller à la plage. Donnez-moi tout ce que vous avez—but don’t have a firm enough grasp on the language to have full conversations. Sometimes it makes me mad that Dad didn’t learn, that they didn’t teach me. Mostly when Grayson or Shadow is screaming, À moi! T’as perdu! (I win! You lose!) at the end of a wrestling match or particularly bloody round of video games.
Toddy, who’s about as different from Dad as two friends could be, studied French in college and brushed up on it when he and Mom started dating. Sometimes they’ll pass through the room and stop to muss the boys’ hair, telling them to rangez votre chambre (clean your room). They’ll share a quick back and forth beyond that, but it’s lost on me.
It’s not that I feel excluded, exactly. It’s more like I thought that Mom’s life with Dad and me was supposed to be the better one. Like when we lost him, no one could possibly replace him or what he meant to us. And no one could, and Mom and Toddy both made sure I understood that.
But as I sit at the timeworn table beneath the pendant lamps Toddy installed, watching my half brothers, powered by sugar, surge through the house and hearing my parents laughing into each other’s necks and speaking a language I don’t understand, I can’t help but feel like Mom’s life wasn’t supposed to be this good without Dad. Like things should be noticeably worse, and in a lot of ways, they’re not. And it feels . . . wrong.
I know Dad would want Mom to be happy, for Toddy to take care of us. I’ve understood that since I was a kid, and their happy life hasn’t made me hurt this way in a long a time. Reliving that memory four nights ago has left me feeling like I just lost him all over again. And that makes me feel like none of us should be happy right now.
All the good things in the world shouldn’t make up for the best thing we had but lost.
But if I write down the things he told me, if I tell his stories and hold on to his memories, maybe it’s not too late to capture some small part of Dad.
Mom glides in from the living room, carrying her and Toddy’s empty wine glasses. She stops just in time for stocky Grayson to pound past her and into the hallway, followed by lanky Shadow, whose footsteps sound like snowfall by comparison—that’s the way he got his nickname, actually, his impressive quietness. Poor Grayson’s the only one of us without one, but then again, he got a pretty normal legal name, whereas I got a man’s, and for some reason Shadow got “Eustace.” I think shortly after they filled out the birth certificate, Mom realized that “Eustace” sounds like Crayola code for “vomit,” and he was such a quiet baby that he became Shadow. “Whatcha working on, June?” Mom asks, leaning over me.
“Hoooomework,” I say.
“Hoooomework,” Toddy calls from the couch. “Those jerks gave you homework on the first day, Junie?”
“Yeah, will you sue?”
“Course we will, honey.”
“Thanks.”
“I think it’s good you’re being challenged,” Mom says, setting the glasses in the blue-tiled sink Dad installed for her while he was between jobs. “It’ll prepare you for medical school.”
I snort, and she shoots me a disapproving glare. “Mom. What am I going to do at medical school? Like, is this homework going to prepare me to be the long-winded janitor there?”
She exhales and dodges the boys again to come sit at the table with me. “Baby, we can send you anywhere. You can do anything.”
“Anywhere?” I gasp. “Anything?”
“Dental school,” Toddy chimes in.
“Dentistry’s a great business.” Mom squeezes my hand in hers. I wonder if she and Ms. deGeest get their nails done at the same salon. “Toddy loves it, don’t you?”
“Yep.” He turns off the TV, stretches his arms over his head, and shuffles through the kitchen, stopping to kiss me on the head. “Night, Junior.”
“No one loves dentistry,” I mumble.
“They love the paycheck.” He plants a kiss on Mom’s cheek and ambles toward the stairs. “They love the hours, the vacation, and the fact that the worst news you have to deliver is that someone needs a root canal. What else is there to love?”
“What about gum cancer?” I ask. He waves me off.
Mom smiles at him like he’s giving his first presidential address, then shoots me another semi-worried look and squeezes my hand again. “He’s right, baby. Even if you didn’t love college, who knows? Maybe you’d meet someone. Dentists really do have way better hours than other kinds of physicians—and less baggage too.”
“Great, Mom. I’ll keep that in mind. When I’m hitchhiking through Texas, I’ll think fondly of the dentist I could have married had I gone to college.”
She smiles, but it’s a sad one. For a moment the veil of perfect contentedness slips from her face and I see her heartbreak all over again, just the way it looked back in the days right after Dad died, when I was binging on comfort cereal and Easy Mac and she was eating nothing at all.
“I had dreams, you know,” she says softly, pushing her chair back to stand. She kisses me exactly where Toddy did. “I had them, and I waited too long to chase them.”
She turns and sweeps toward the hall, clearing her throat. “Boys! Bedtime!”
They groan and whine, but Toddy claps his hands three times in this faux-authoritative manner at the bottom of the stairs, and they run past Mom and pound up the steps. He’s always backing Mom up like this, the opposite of how Dad’s smile and quiet refusal to be reined in for the night would draw her out onto the grass to stare up at the stars. Tonight, the discrepancy grates at me.
I love Toddy, but I’m not like him. I’m not a sensible dentist in the making. I’m like Dad—hungry, he would say. So hungry you want to taste the sun and lap up the lake.
I’d never thought of Mom as hungry, but as I watch my family retreat down the hall, I wonder what she meant. I had dreams.
To me, her story has always felt like Jonathan Alroy O’Donnell’s: a part of some distant tapestry of fact turned legend. She moved to the states from her tiny hometown in France when she was sixteen to study ballet at Joffrey, and at eighteen she took a job with a professional company in Miami. There, she met Dad on one of his trips, when he walked into the bar where she waitressed part-time.
Jacks, according to lore, do not dance. And apart from the occasional waltz or twirl in the kitchen with Toddy, Mom doesn’t either. I asked her once, when I was small, why she stopped. She just looked at me, smiled, and said, With your daddy, life is the dance.
Thinking about it now, I wonder if her dream was simply to dance, or if it was just to have the life she thought she’d signed up for, the one that was torn down the middle ten years ago. Either way, I feel sick for having thought she wasn’t sad enough about Dad. She’s in love, she’s married, but her heart will always be a little bit broken, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
Toddy intercepts Mom again on the bottom step at the end of the
hall, and his voice drops into a whisper I strain to hear: “. . . know the Angert kid’s back?”
She glances my way, and I feign concentration on my laptop.
I catch only one word from her mouth as they turn and climb the stairs together: “Trouble.”
I quell the guilt burning up my stomach and focus on the blinking cursor on my screen. I close my eyes and let my mind drift away from Saul. I try instead to remember the story of how Jonathan Alroy O’Donnell discovered our hill, our heavenly slice of thin space. Then I let it all pour out of me, gushing like it can’t escape quickly enough.
When I look up from my work, it’s one A.M. All is silent, all is still, apart from the chirp of crickets and the moths dancing around the pendant lamp, grazing my hair and shoulders. At some point, the sheen of pink appeared against the wall across from me.
Feathers flutters softly. She watches me.
Ten
MS. DEGEEST cuts a slow trail around the table formation as she passes back our first assignment. She’s dressed in all black and gray: black shoes, gray skirt, black blouse, gray blazer, black earrings. She’s more formal than most teachers, in both dress and attitude, probably another attempt to look old enough to work here.
At lunch yesterday, the first words out of Hannah’s mouth were, “Tell me everything about creative writing, and don’t leave anything out.” Halfway through my rundown of what we’d read and written so far, she groaned and dropped her forehead against the table. “I can’t believe Stephen Niequest got to take that class and I’m in AP U.S. history that period. God, I’d better get into it next semester.”
“You realize it’s not AP, right?” I pointed out.
“Doesn’t matter. Colleges love well-roundedness.”
“You literally told me the exact opposite of that last year.”
“That was last year. Last year colleges wanted niche students, people with an intense focus on one itty-bitty thing. That’s why I spent all freaking year volunteering with the music branch of the Arts Council. Now they want well-roundedness.”