A Blind Spot for Boys

by Justina Chen

“Dad,” I groaned, since awake didn’t mean alert.

  He waggled a glass vial enticingly as if it contained a magical elixir. I knew better: The stoppered test tube was filled with bedbugs—ugly, crawling bloodsuckers he had scooped out of an apartment complex two days ago. “You mind hiding this?”

  From down in the kitchen, I heard Auggie bark, high-pitched and happy, which meant that my mom was up, fixing the first of her three daily Americanos sweetened with both chocolate and vanilla syrup. Before Auggie could eat her own breakfast, though, she had to complete her sniff-and-search exercise. She yipped again, raring to work. I hadn’t been bragging emptily to Quattro yesterday: Auggie truly was the best canine bedbug patroller in the Northwest, a high-energy mutt we’d rescued from a pound two years ago.

  “Hey, kiddo,” said Dad, leaning against the doorjamb, “I’m really sorry about missing our photo safari. Next weekend, we’ll go.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. He turned to leave. Given Dad’s spotty track record, I had my doubts. If it weren’t for his pictures hanging on our walls, I’d wonder if he actually looked for excuses not to photograph. His commitment to customers had trumped birthday parties, soccer play-offs, and even one of my cousins’ weddings. My brothers had a bet riding on Dad missing our long-awaited climb of Mount Rainier this summer and wanted me in on it. But I hadn’t answered any of Max’s texts since my breakup with Dom, and I wasn’t going to start now.

  I yawned. Around four in the morning, I had done some serious online ogling of a professional-grade camera, the same one that my favorite National Geographic photographer had raved about in an interview. After three years of shooting senior portraits and children’s birthday parties, I could finally afford to buy the camera, but I still hadn’t. Couldn’t.

  Afraid? I heard Quattro ask.

  Frugal and discriminating, I retorted in my head now, as I swung my feet to the floor.

  “Hide it in a really good spot. She’s been getting sloppy lately,” Dad called on his way downstairs.

  As hard as I tried to ignore the bugs inside the glass vial, I couldn’t help looking. While you might think bedbugs are microscopic, allow me to educate you: They are not. Bedbugs aren’t just visible to the human eye; you could go mano a mano with one as it plunged its outstretched pincers into a particularly succulent patch of your skin. So that flimsy silk cloth, cut from one of Mom’s discarded scarves and clamped on top of the vial with a metal ring? That insubstantial barrier made me nervous, but Auggie needed to be able to sniff out their pheromones.

  “Um, Dad, these are the dead ones,” I called, frowning, as I trotted down the staircase. Dad usually kept a decoy vial to test Auggie, since she was only rewarded for finding live bedbugs. This was the second time in a week Dad had made that mistake.

  He dug into his fanny pack for the right vial, shaking his head as we swapped. He said, “Old age.”

  I gripped the container tight because the worst thing I could do now was drop it. Do that, and bedbugs would infiltrate our home like an underground spy cell, lurking, lurking, lurking before attacking. Once entrenched, they were a pain to eradicate, even with a bedbug-sniffing dog.

  While Mom took Auggie outside, I scouted the living room for a tough hiding place. Torrid romance novels—Mom’s version of Prozac—teetered precariously next to her armchair, a sign that she was under extreme pressure at work. I swear, she must have been stressed when she was pregnant. That was the only logical explanation for how she’d managed to persuade Dad to name us after her favorite characters: Ash and Max for the twins, Shana for me. Always the lifesaver, Dad had insisted on altering the spellings of our names in case word ever leaked out about their steamy origins.

  My gaze landed on the bulbous floor lamp that Mom had found at a recent garage sale. If I unscrewed the thick base, there might be room for the vial.…

  “Okay, ready!” I called as I widened the front door, then retreated to the kitchen. Auggie darted into the living room, nose to the floor, with Mom holding her leash. In one minute flat, she parked herself in front of the lamp, head cocked to the side: That’s the best you can do?

  Training done, Mom sang out Dad’s name—“Gregor!”—en route to the kitchen, where the table was already set with a neat stack of unopened bills and a platter of cookies for their biweekly budgeting ritual. Five years ago, on her fiftieth birthday, Mom had let her hair go silvery gray—why fight it? she had told her longtime hairdresser. But because her blue eyes sparkle as they did now, Mom is often mistaken for being years younger. “Guess what time it is?”

  “Oh, baby!” Dad immediately drew to her side from where he was stretching in the hallway and planted a kiss on her lips.

  “Dad! Shower!” I protested, waving my hand in front of my nose. “Mom, how can you stand it?”

  Dad dropped his arm around Mom’s shoulders and answered, “True love.”

  “Speaking of which…” Mom said a bit too casually. “Brian’s mother called last night.”

  “You’re kidding.” I stopped midstride from going to the sink to get Dad and myself water. “About what?”

  Mom’s mouth pursed. “To discuss her ‘concern’ and ‘dismay’ over your ‘pathology’ of abruptly ending relationships.”

  “This,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself, “is a nightmare.”

  “Just for the record,” Dad said, grabbing a cookie before Mom moved the platter out of his reach, “we’d be more ‘concerned’ and ‘dismayed’ if you stayed with that mama’s boy.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Mom crowed, proud of their riff on my love life. “Sine qua non, honey!”

  “I’m so glad you find my life amusing,” I told them as I helped myself to a glass of water.

  And my friends think my parents are cool? Really, Mom ought to have those Latin words tattooed on her ankle. It’s her sweet nothing to Dad and cautionary tale to my brothers and me to hold out for that one necessary condition, that absolutely essential quality that we couldn’t live without in a person. Without that sine qua non, says Mom, every relationship is doomed to fail, no matter how smart the girl is, how good looking the guy, how much attraction there might be in the beginning.

  Dad’s phone rang, and I plucked the cookie out of his hand as he walked past me toward the porch to take the call.

  “So, honey,” Mom said when we were alone in the kitchen, casting me a sidelong glance, “maybe you should spend some time thinking about your sine qua non?”

  “Mom.”

  “Or take a break from boys for a little while.”

  “Mom.”

  “A no-boy diet for a couple of months. Really, you should consider it.”

  “Hang on,” I protested, taking a large bite of the cookie. “You’re the one who told me you’d shave my head if I got married before I’m thirty. So why should I get serious about anyone when I’m sixteen?”

  With a rueful laugh, Mom said, “True, but maybe you’d go easier on their hearts if you knew what you wanted.”

  “I was wrong about Brian’s mom. This is the nightmare.”

  Not a moment too soon, Dad returned to the kitchen, grinning as he held out his cell phone toward me. “You want to see what’s really nightmarish?”

  “No!” I rushed toward the stairs. “I don’t!”

  History had taught me that whatever disgustingness my father was going to share would rattle around uncomfortably in my head for days. Given a different life, Dad would have been a photojournalist for National Geographic, but he’d settled for photographing vermin, their dwellings, and his favorite subject: their droppings.

  Dad closed the distance between us. “A hundred pounds of fresh bat guano.”

  “Dad, stop!”

  “Odiferous piles…”

  Luckily, his phone rang again before he could show me the mountain of bat dung, and I raced up the stairs, dodging the tall stacks of our library books, and retreated to my bathroom. As I stepped into the shower, more than water rained on me. So did Mom’s w
ords. Deep down, I knew she was preaching the truth about her sine qua non theory, which she had discovered from one of her self-help reads. Adventure first attracted my parents to each other when she flew past Dad on Mount Si, both of them on training runs. Kindness clinched it for them on their first real date when Dad sealed her house from future rat invasion. But it was their sense of humor that made them last twenty-six years of happily ever after.

  I turned the water even hotter. As much as I hated admitting it, Mom was right: After seven months—count them, seven—of frenetic dating since Dom broke up with me, I was striking out on the sine qua non front. How hard could it be to find a replacement guy—one guy, that’s all—who could make me fall even harder than I had for Dom? But no matter how fast I cycled through boys, no one came remotely close.

  Overheating, I shut the water off, cracked the bathroom door open for fresh air, and toweled dry. Downstairs, I heard Dad telling Mom, “Looks like Auggie didn’t find all the bedbugs at that new condo. I’ve got to go back.”

  “But it’s Bill Day,” Mom protested.

  “I know, but we can’t have them cancel the contract. Otherwise, Rainier will be a pipe dream.”

  And there it was again—the sound of another grand plan cracking under the pressure of reality. Dom breaking up with me because of our “age difference.” Dad begging off yet another set of family plans. Legend has it, after Dad proposed, my parents committed to having fifty life-defining experiences and photo safaris before they turned fifty. Their Fifty by Fifty Manifesto was memorialized on a restaurant’s napkin that now hung on our kitchen wall. They’ve ticked off exactly one and a half: mountain biking through Zion to celebrate Mom’s fiftieth, and our plan to climb Mount Rainier this summer for Dad’s. If the five-year age difference hadn’t mattered for my parents, what were seven between me and Dom? At least, that’s what I had told myself.

  I shut my bedroom door and stared at my computer.

  Afraid?

  I didn’t want to be the type of person who put her whole life on hold, waiting for perfect blue-sky conditions. So I opened the computer. The camera from my fantasy shopping expedition last night was still waiting in my cart at the online photography store. I had earned more than enough money, and the camera could be exactly what I needed to create the best portfolio possible.

  I hit Buy.

  An SOS text from my other best friend, Ginny, led to a twenty-minute therapy session. Before she and Reb graduated, it would have been the three of us at one of our homes, dissecting this boy problem, preferably over raw cookie dough. But now it was too hard to coordinate a three-way call, with Ginny in New York and Reb wherever she was traveling these days. My phone chirped again before I could squeeze into my favorite jeans, which I had grabbed off the floor. Another text from Ginny: So how do I get Chef Boy to notice me? Right on cue, my stomach growled. Call it Pavlovian, but whenever I talked to her, I got hungry. She was, after all, an incredible baker, perfecting her skills at the Culinary Institute of America. Starving, I’d have to hurry if I wanted a snack before collecting Quattro.

  I texted back: Name a dish after him.

  Done, I turned to my closet to continue my own flirtation prep. Even if you’re fishing catch-and-release style, you need the right bait. It took me a good five minutes to design an outfit that said casual yet shouted badass—skinny jeans, leather cuff, funky socks peeking over the top of motorcycle boots, all capped off with a boy’s snug-fitting button-down shirt.

  As soon as I made it to the kitchen, Mom filled two mugs of steaming coffee and handed me mine.

  “You’re the best!” I said, gratefully accepting the mug.

  “Remember that,” she said while tucking a computer cord into her yellow tote bag, “because I need the car today.”

  “Mom! I’m supposed to meet someone at ten.…”

  “I’m sorry, hon, but your dad had to take the truck for an emergency, and”—she shut down the PowerPoint deck she’d spent the last week designing for a CEO at a tech company—“my own client’s having a conniption fit and needs me at the dress rehearsal after all.” She checked her watch. “If you don’t mind being about an hour early, I can drop you off, at least.”

  To be honest, I was relieved, since this provided me with the perfect excuse for nixing the long drive to Portland with Quattro. I was still hashing out the logistics of getting downtown with Mom when the doorbell rang. She frowned; I shrugged. Neither of us expected anyone, but there was Reb, standing outside the front door. It’d have been weird to see anyone but Reb at nine on Sunday morning, but who knew what time zone she had just been in?

  “What’re you doing here?” I asked, throwing my arms around her. Reb’s so tiny, I’m always half-afraid I’ll crush her, but from the way she squeezed me tight, I could tell she had packed on some serious muscles from lugging paint cans for her house-painting job.

  “I got home a day early!”

  The last time I saw Reb was two weeks ago. Juggling a part-time job and two internships during her gap year before college seriously ate into our time together. I said, “You’re free? Today?”

  “But you’re not,” she guessed before greeting Mom: “Hey, Mrs. Wilde!” Then, lowering her voice so Mom wouldn’t overhear, Reb asked, “So who’s the new guy?”

  “There’s no new guy.”

  “Mmm hmm. So who’re you meeting, then?”

  “A guy,” I mumbled.

  “What was that? Did you say ‘a guy’? As in ‘a new guy’?”

  “Sorry, I can’t believe it, but I have to run,” I said when Mom tapped her watch. “Mom’s driving me to my non-date.”

  Without missing a beat, Reb told my mom, “I can drive Shana.” A few minutes later, Mom sailed out the door, shoving a bag of cookies at us, and as soon as she was gone, Reb wriggled her fingers at me. “Where’s your camera? Come on, show me the goods.”

  “I hope you’re hungry, because I am,” I deflected as my stomach rumbled again. In the kitchen, I plated the rest of the cookies Mom had baked yesterday, an excellent first effort at replicating one of Ginny’s tried-and-true recipes. The cookie defense held Reb off for a good ten minutes, but then she brushed her hands together and settled down for some juicy girl talk.

  “The Boy,” she reminded me, as she leaned forward at the table.

  “Fine,” I sighed and powered the camera on, advancing to my favorite photo of Quattro. I wasn’t expecting the excited little flutter in my stomach at his expression: searing. He stared straight into the camera as though daring me to look away. When I angled the camera toward Reb, her lips curved into a smirk. “Well, hello, New Guy. What time’s the date?”

  “This isn’t a date,” I told her, and glanced at the clock. Time had sped up the way it always did when we were together. It was now nine thirty. I sprang to my feet. “Oh, shoot, we gotta go.”

  I quickly ushered Reb outside as I grabbed my messenger bag and tucked the camera back in safely. After locking the front door, we dashed through my pocket neighborhood of fifteen storybook-size cottages, built on a plot of communal property adjacent to wetlands. My family had transplanted here after the twins left for college, seven years ago, downsizing so my parents could afford two tuitions and a mortgage. As we exited the gate to the street where Reb had parked her minivan, she asked, “And you met this mystery man how?”

  “When he ruined my picture at the Gum Wall.” I supplied the details about yesterday’s fiasco as we settled into the minivan. Few people aside from Reb and Ginny could understand my frustration about losing the perfect shot for my portfolio. But after discussing a novel together every month for the past four years in our mom-and-me book club, we Bookster Babes knew virtually everything there was to know about one another, from smoking pot (why kill my few brain cells?) to self-starvation (Ginny’s coconut chocolate-chip cookies; need we say more?) to sex. (Reb just lost her virginity to her longtime boyfriend, Ginny had come close, and I was the Virgin Queen.) Maybe I’d surreptitiously read one t
oo many of Mom’s relationship books—and I’d definitely heard one too many of Mom’s sine qua non lectures—but I was holding out for true love. Anything less than that just seemed to make sex meaningless. And I, for one, refused to be meaningless.

  Still, not even my besties knew about Dom. At least, I didn’t think they did.

  Hands on the steering wheel, Reb asked, “Where to?”

  “The Four Seasons.”

  “Fancy.”

  “He’s in town to scope out UW.”

  She waggled her eyebrows at me and put the minivan into drive. “An older man, huh?”

  Don’t you think you should have told me you were underage? I blushed at the memory of Dom’s parting words, answering now more defensively than I intended: “He’s just a year older.”

  At my combative tone, Reb’s eyebrows furrowed. “What’s up with you?”

  “Sorry, just a little sensitive, I guess,” I apologized, as I dug out the cookies my mom had pushed on us, handing one to Reb as a peace offering. “So Brian had his mother call mine yesterday.”

  “She did not call your mom.”

  After a therapeutic bite of butterscotch cookie, I gestured with the remnants. “She actually told my mom I was a pathological heartbreaker! Like I had some kind of disease!”

  “That’s just wrong, but…”

  “What?”

  “Okay, I’m not saying you’re pathological or anything,” Reb said carefully as she glanced over her shoulder to change lanes, “but what’s with all these guys? I mean, it’s like you’ve become some kind of Ellis Island: Give me your jocks and your losers.”

  “Reb, not you, too,” I said. One analysis of my love life a day was more than enough.

  “Well, what about that guy Doug? The one who used more product in his hair than I ever had.”

  “Or ever would.” I shrugged. Three dates in a row full of excuses for why he was perpetually late, and it was good-bye, Doug.

  “And what about that control freak? Mr. Texter Guy?”

  I frowned, trying to remember. “Oh, you mean Stephen? Yeah, he was a mistake.” After two dates, he thought he had the right to monopolize my calendar. So I voted him off mine.