“Oh, there it is,” I say, pointing to a piece on the very edge of the table with my spoon.
“Good eye,” she says and fits the piece into place. She takes her glasses off, sets them on the table, and leans back in her chair. It’s a bad sign. It’s a sign of a Big Conversation.
“So,” Mom says. “When Mina comes home, Dad and Alice are going to come over for dinner.” It comes out in a rush, like she’s ripping off a Band-Aid. She waits a second, maybe staring at my open mouth or the way my face is becoming red around the cheeks. “All of us together.” As if I needed the clarification.
“Mom. No.” Take one uncomfortable thing, Mina coming home, and smoosh it together with another uncomfortable thing, Dad and Alice coming over. It’s a recipe for disaster. “Dad doesn’t even come to Mina’s stuff on Wednesdays!”
Mom sighs. She rubs her forehead in her hands. “I know. It’s hard for him.”
“It’s hard for him? He’s a grown-up!” I’m exasperated now. A little bit of me is afraid I’m going to upend this puzzle if I’m not careful. “This is hard for me, too!”
Mom takes both of my hands in hers. “I know. I know. Your dad is a grown-up. And grown-ups sometimes have to face hard things. But it doesn’t make it less difficult. Or someone more ready.”
“But you’re facing it.”
“I am. But I don’t have a choice. She’s my daughter.”
She’s Dad’s daughter, too. But Dad, he can escape all this in his big block house with Alice. Out of sight, out of mind, while Mom and I are trapped here.
I never asked for this.
“I still don’t want them to come.” I pull my hands away and cross my arms over my chest. My eyes prickle and I can feel the tears building behind them. Bean raises her left eyebrow at me. Her tail beats once against the ground in solidarity. It’s nice to have someone on my side, even if she’s a dog.
“Evie feels like it could be a good first step. And Dad’s willing, so . . .” Of course Evie would say that. She’s not the one living here. My body tenses from my shoulders down to my stomach. “It’s a lot for Dad to come. I know that’s hard for you to understand.”
I feel like we’re right on the edge of something. Of Mom telling me a real truth—that sometimes people don’t act the way we think they should. That sometimes Dad doesn’t act like a dad at all. But I want to hear her say it. “Then explain it!”
Mom closes up. She gives me a sad smile. “We have to do what’s best for Mina.”
What about what’s best for me? I want to ask.
Instead I say, “Okay. Okay,” even though it’s not. I go upstairs to get ready for school.
When I get to school, I’m glad to see that the hallways are empty. It gives me the room I feel I need to breathe. I lean my head back against the cool metal of the locker.
Then, cutting through the quiet of the morning, there’s a sound. A cheer.
I’m curious, so I start walking in the direction of the sound and end up right in front of Ms. Arnold’s door. It’s open but there’s this homemade sign on it that says Bagel Bunch with a dancing bagel. I know Sara drew it; I can tell.
Maybe this is the club Ms. Arnold told me about. I guess it has a name now.
The sign’s definitely not written in her neat teacher handwriting, and it’s affixed with a piece of bright green tape. I peek around the door. Ms. Arnold’s sitting in one of the student desks and she’s taking a bite of a giant bagel. Blueberry, I think. In her other hand are four playing cards.
I lean a little closer so I can get a better look. There’s Anita and Hector and Lloyd and Sara. They’re smiling. Laughing. I watch as Sara nudges Anita on the shoulder and gives her a knowing glance. A friend glance. A me-and-Hazel glance.
It fills me with this sudden sadness and longing I didn’t know were there.
But before I can think on it, they lunge forward to the center of the circle and startle me out of my thoughts.
“Whoo-hoo!” I hear. “Yes!”
Suddenly, Hector’s up and dancing around the circle with a marker in his hand. Then he looks straight at me watching them from the door. “Hey! Hey, guys! It’s Em Murphy.”
“Emily,” Ms. Arnold says. She stands, not even caring that there’re crumbs all over her pants. I bet Dr. Franklinton-Morehouse would say she’s comfortable with who she is. Her smile turns to concern when she sees my red eyes and cheeks that have stayed blotchy. “Is everything all right? Why don’t you join us?”
“Yes, Emily,” Hector says. He’s walking around with his arms out like he’s a zombie. “Join us. We’ve come to eat your brains.”
Anita swats him on the arm. “Hector!” she says and walks to the door. She grabs my hand and squeezes. It’s nice. Reassuring, like it’s squeezing some of the sadness away through sheer force. “He means bagels. They’re really good. We play cards, too, but it didn’t all fit on the sign.”
“I could draw the bagel with cards in his hand,” Sara suggests.
Hector raises his marker. “Yes, brilliant. You should do that with my winning marker. We ran out of spoons,” he says, as if that will make any sense to me.
“It’s our first meeting,” Lloyd says. “We’re BREAKFAST ENTHUSIASTS.” He says it like he’s some kind of superhero and thrusts his bagel high in the air. His sleeve dangles off his arm. They’re always huge. Hand-me-down shirts, I guess. Mina’s in the same grade as one of his brothers, and I know he has a few more.
There’s cream cheese on the cuffs of them now, but no one seems to be paying any attention to that. Hector bumps Lloyd’s bagel with his own. “Breakfast!”
“Breakfast!” they cheer together.
“There won’t be bagels every week,” Ms. Arnold says. “Just today.”
“But maybe every Tuesday.” Lloyd says this with his mouth practically full, so it comes out a little garbled.
Ms. Arnold laughs and pats him on the shoulder. “We’ll see what we can do. Teacher budget, remember?”
“Um, thanks,” I say, backing up slowly from the door.
“You should join,” Sara says. She finishes up drawing the cards in the bagel’s hand. She smiles her shy smile. I look at the rest of them—Anita resetting the cards, Hector now in a deep conversation with Lloyd about zombies and brains and Bigfoot maybe (from the words I can hear), and Sara who holds the marker still.
But I picture the T chart in my notebook. I’m not sure that member of the Bagel Bunch is part of the After.
I shake my head.
I turn to leave, when Ms. Arnold catches me by the shoulder. “Really, Emily. Are you sure you’re okay? I’m worried about you.”
I swallow hard. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
Hector yells something about our project as I walk out the door. Something about the movement of zombies.
All day long, I try to think about other things besides Mina coming home and all of us together for dinner. But problems are like sunburns, I think. You can forget about it for a little while, but an unfortunate shift of a T-shirt and suddenly you’re in pain again. It’s always there.
After school, I just want to see my best friend. Not at our lunch table, where Lucy’s always a step away. Not in the hallway that’s crowded and loud. Just me and her alone. Hazel’s house isn’t too far, but I grab the CD player from my desk anyway. I need to hear what Dr. Franklinton-Morehouse has to say. Maybe he has some guidance for me.
“Greetings,” he says. “I am so glad to be able to continue with you on this journey to self-discovery and being the best you that you can be. Today I want to talk to you about some actionable steps you can take. The first: you must be willing to change.”
He chuckles. “Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’ve bought the CDs, of course you’re willing to change. But consider this. What if a person makes it a goal to eat more vegetables? They go to the grocery. They purchase carrots and eggplants and celery and lettuce. Then they let them sit in their refrigerator, uneaten. See, the intenti
on was there, but the follow-up was not. Intention and follow-up. Peanut butter and jelly. You must have both.”
“So here is my challenge: you must do something you don’t want to do. Picture your life as a balloon. Think about what people do before they blow one up. That’s right! They stretch it. This, in turn, allows more air to be let in; for the shape of the balloon to grow bigger than they thought possible.”
“Stretch yourself today,” he says. “Be the balloon.”
Hazel is lying on her bed, her arms down by her sides, her hair fanned out around her head like a mermaid. Her eyes are closed.
Big Norm the gerbil scritch-scritches in his glass case—oblivious to it all. He’s making a giant pile of cedar shavings in the corner. A castle. He’s king of his own tiny animal kingdom. He doesn’t have to worry about a thing. I give him a little carrot piece from his treat dish next to the case. I love how he holds it in his little hands.
“What are you doing?” I ask, flopping down on Hazel’s giant beanbag chair. It’s perfectly molded to my shape from all the times I’ve sat there.
“Shh . . . ,” she says. Her eyes stay closed. “I’m visualizing.”
I think about the CDs. “I’m visualizing, too. Not right now, but earlier. What are you visualizing?”
“The game tomorrow. Coach says we should visualize success. Each play, each move. It should be like a movie in our mind.” She pops up at this, her face red from the sudden movement. “Pro athletes do this. Like the bobsled. The team will visualize the course. What about you?”
I open my mouth to tell her about the CDs, but I hesitate. I’m not sure why. Normally it’s so easy to tell Hazel everything. I clear my throat and try something else. “Mina’s coming home this week.”
“What?!” Hazel’s suddenly animated. “Em, oh my gosh. Why didn’t you tell me? Like, you should have come in this room and been like, ‘MINA’S COMING HOME THIS WEEK!! Ahh!’” She kicks her feet a little against the bed. “Are you so excited?”
“Yeah, but . . .” My stomach somersaults.
“But what?”
I shrug, the words stuck inside me.
“When do you think I can come see her? Soon, right?”
My hands start to sweat, so I just nod and change the subject. “Did you get that email from the forum?” Hazel joined the same time I did. She’s StarlightHaze. I think it’s pretty clever. More clever than UnicornGirl11. “Only thirty-one days till the movie!”
“I haven’t been on,” Hazel says. “I get home so late and then I have to eat dinner and then homework. You know . . .” She lets her voice trail off.
But I kind of don’t know at all.
“We’re still going together, though, right?”
Hazel stands and leans over Big Norm’s glass home. She brushes the sign we made for him with her hip. Big Norm is written in these sticker letters we got from the craft store. We drew him, too; he looks like a giant Oreo cookie with his black-and-white coloring. We even gave him heart eyes.
The edges of the paper are worn and the tape is yellowed but it’s still there.
“Yeah, about that—” Hazel starts.
“What?” I say. “Don’t you want to go anymore?” I swallow hard.
“I do,” Hazel says. “But Annemarie’s having her birthday party, and she’s doing a movie. I think we’ll be seeing the Unicorn Chronicles one.”
I blink rapidly and look at anything but Hazel. It’s then that I notice the poster on her wall, next to her dresser. It says Field Hockey Players Kick Grass in these white block letters with two field hockey sticks positioned together like hearts.
“Where’d your Nightshade poster go?” She used to have one in that very same spot with Nightshade and Starlight holding up their magnifying glasses to their eyeballs like they could see right through you. A team.
Hazel shrugs. “In my closet.” My stomach clenches. “I think. Anyways, you’re invited. It just won’t be me and you, though. That’s okay, right?”
I can’t stop staring at the new poster. “I didn’t get an invitation.” I cross my arms over my chest and know that everything’s coming out in a huff. This isn’t how I expected this to go at all.
“You just did. I’m telling you now,” she says sharply. “It’s not like last year when you’d get a card in the mail or something. People just ask.” I wonder when Hazel’s learned so much about everything. “And besides . . .” She comes over and shakes my shoulder in this good-natured kind of way. Her words are softer now. “They’re our friends.”
Your friends, I want to say.
There was this game we’d play in first grade on the playground called Circle Break. It’s a dumb name, but also self-explanatory, and we were in first grade so everything was kind of obvious. Everyone would stand in a circle with their hands held tight. One person would try to run at the group and break through the arms into the center.
I was never very good at it.
But I think about Dr. Franklinton-Morehouse’s words I heard on the way over. About trying things that are uncomfortable. Maybe he’s talking about dinner with Dad and Alice. Maybe he’s talking about the movie.
But what if that balloon stretches too far?
Still, I need to try.
“Yeah,” I say, knowing I need to do it. I try not to think about all the other years when it’s just been me and Hazel, or me and Mina and Hazel. “That’ll be great.”
WELCOME HOME, MINA
On the day Mina comes home, I spend half the afternoon in the nurse’s office because my stomach hurts so bad, and I feel light-headed and weak. He offers to call Mom and then Dad, but I don’t really want to see either of them right now, so I tell her they’re busy. I want a few final moments just to myself in the good quiet, and if that has to be while lying on the green cot under a disposable blanket in the clinic, that’s fine.
When the bus drops me off on my street, I take an extra-long time walking from the main road to the house. Dad’s car is already in the driveway. I wonder if maybe I should just keep walking. I could. People do that. I read about a guy who walked from California to New York with just his dog. It’s tempting. I could just grab Bean and go. Instead, I grab the mail out of the box and let myself in through the garage door.
Dad and Alice are in the kitchen. Alice is chopping a red pepper into thin slices and Dad is slicing chicken and looking at a recipe card that Mom must have left behind for him. Bean’s in the kitchen, too, sprawled out on the hardwood floor next to Alice’s feet. She doesn’t even get up. Traitor. I frown, even though I don’t entirely mean it.
Dad wipes his hands on Mom’s apron that he’s tied around his waist. He’s wearing a blue-and-white checkered shirt. That, combined with the beard he started to grow when he first moved out, makes him look like a lumberjack. A lumberjack in the middle of Ohio.
Ridiculous.
Mom calls it his midlife crisis. Not to me, though. To Aunt Bea on the phone.
“How’d you get in?” I ask, dropping my book bag next to the kitchen table.
“Button! Hello to you, too,” Dad says, as if all this—him and Alice cooking in our kitchen—is totally normal. “And the hide-a-key in the rock next to the front porch.” I make a mental note to change its location. If this isn’t Dad’s house anymore, he doesn’t need to know where the key is. I slip onto the stool at the counter.
“What are you making?” I ask.
“Chicken with sautéed vegetables and potatoes.” Alice is opening and closing the cabinets looking for something. I let her look for a minute. Finally she says, “Pot?”
“Bottom cabinet on the left,” I say.
“Ah,” she says, and pulls out what she’s looking for. “Got it!” She fills it with water from the sink.
Dad opens his mouth. I expect him to ask something about Mina. I dread him asking something about Mina. “So tell me about school,” Dad says instead. “How’s that going?”
I’m angry and relieved all at once. “Fine.”
&
nbsp; “Fine and . . .” He looks at me expectantly.
I sigh. “Uh—we’re starting these projects. With partners. About movement.”
“Very cool, Button. With Hazel?” he asks because I’ve always done my projects with her.
“With Hector.” Dad looks at me. “That kid from the bowling alley. In the turkey shirt.”
“Ahh, yes.” He doesn’t ask me how I feel about it. “You know, if you need an expert, movement is my specialty.” He starts shaking his hips and doing these dumb moves that I bet he thinks will make me laugh. Then he starts to whistle this happy tune. Like life in general is easy and breezy.
I can’t stand it.
“I made decorations,” I announce. “To welcome Mina home. I’m going to go get them.”
“That’s really nice, Em,” Alice says. She’s peeling a large potato over the trash can now. “I’d be happy to help you put them up. If you need help, that is.”
“I’m good.” The sound of Dad’s whistling follows me upstairs.
Up in my room, I pull out the decorations that I made back when I first thought Mina was going to come home. A few are crumpled, but I smooth them flat. They still look pretty good. There are music notes decorated with black glitter and letters that spell Hi Mina! punched out from my letter set. I didn’t have the right ones for Welcome Home. There are also some random hearts and stars and a rainbow because those things are cheerful and welcoming and say, “I’m happy you’re here.” Even if I’m not so certain about that myself.
I grab the tape out of my drawer and bring everything downstairs.
Alice is laying out one of Mom’s nice tablecloths on our kitchen table. We’d fit better around the dining room table, but that’s not an option anymore.
“Where’d Dad go?” I ask.
“I’m in here,” he answers from the dining room.
I stick a loop of tape on the back of a music note and go find him. Dad’s leaning over the puzzle Mom and I’ve been working on. He’s putting France into place.
I go up behind him and take the piece out and put it back into the pile. “Me and Mom have got this,” I snap. “We’ve been working on it together.”
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