Chapter 5
I feel it the moment forrest walks into english class on Monday.
The energy changes, the air gets thicker, and I’m aware of exactly where he is as he walks across the room, even though I’m on my phone, texting the group chat.
He’s like a black hole, sucking up all the energy I could be putting into my own life, ruining the one good thing I wanted for myself this year.
I don’t want to look at him, but it’s like a magnet is pulling at my face, forcing me to glance over.
He’s looking at me.
Our eyes meet, and I glance away instantly.
Why was he watching me? Was he watching me?
Was it just a coincidence? Maybe he’s pissed after what went down on Friday, and he’s plotting my presidential demise.
I very pointedly look anywhere but at him for the rest of class.
I don’t want another confrontation, and I have no idea what’s going through his head.
My stomach is howling by the time the bell finally rings for lunch, and the trek to my locker is like swimming upstream in rapids. I fight my way out of the current and spin my combination, then rummage through for my lunch.
“Hey,” someone says, too loud, right behind me.
I straighten up, right into the top of my locker. “Ow!” I clutch my head, backing away a few steps.
“Oh shit! Are you OK?”
I know that voice. I turn, still rubbing the top of my skull, and there he is. Forrest, a few feet away, looking right at me with a concerned expression. Of course he’d be the one to startle me like this.
“I’ll survive,” I say flatly. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want a repeat of our last few interactions, not today, when I’m already on edge. I haven’t texted Dad back yet, and his message keeps popping up in my brain, all the ways I could respond and what he might say back.
“Sorry,” Forrest says.
“What do you want?” The words come out harsher than I intended, but I let them hang in the air between us.
He shifts from foot to foot. “So . . . you know what happened in the meeting last week.”
“. . . Yeah.” All around us, people are jostling past, but we’re in our own awkward little bubble, one that feels far too small.
“I know we have different ideas about what the club should do,” he says.
“But we have a limited amount of time every week, and I don’t wanna ruin it with us arguing and never getting anything done.
I was thinking maybe you and I could meet up before the meetings and talk about our ideas, just so we can, I don’t know .
. .” He shrugs. “Fight it out, or whatever, without fucking up club time.”
I stare at him. He stares back with a wary half smile, half grimace. Of all the things I expected him to say, this was not it. And I don’t exactly love the prospect of one-on-one hang time with the most annoying dude at Jefferson High every week. But . . . it’s not a bad idea.
It’s actually a pretty good one.
It’s what Anna said: an effort to collaborate.
And I don’t want this Friday to be a repeat of what hapsa pened last week. I want to actually get things done this year. Cool things. Important things. I can’t do that unless I get Forrest to see that my ideas are better.
“It doesn’t have to be a long meeting,” he says. “Like, maybe fifteen minutes after school one day or at lunch or whatever.”
“OK,” I say.
“What?”
“OK,” I repeat. “I’ll do it.”
“Cool.” He grins. “Later this week? I’ll just come find you?”
“Yeah. That sounds good.”
He nods. “Later, Co-President.” With the flash of a peace sign, he disappears into the swirling crowd.
It’s not like I mean to ghost Dad. I just .
. . don’t reply right away, and then it’s Tuesday and I still haven’t figured out whether I should call or text him back; he offered either one, but I should probably call him, and then we can just have whatever conversation we’re going to have all at once instead of dragging it out, but texting would be so much easier, because then we could drag it out.
I wouldn’t have to hear his voice, and I can plan what I’m going to say instead of trying to keep up with whatever comes out of his mouth in the moment.
So I get stuck on deciding the method, and without that, I can’t get to the content, and then it’s Wednesday, and I’m sitting in the hallway with my friends eating lunch, going over the options in my head for the millionth time.
Jayden’s elbow nudges mine. “What did that sandwich ever do to you?”
“What?” I look up from the half-eaten BLT in my hands.
“You’re glaring at that thing like it’s Forrest arguing with you in Queer Alliance,” he says.
That makes me laugh, a little. “I was just . . .” I’m about to lie, tell him I’m spacing out like I did with Shar, but I hesitate. It’s hard to admit I’m anxious, even now that I know what it is and so do my friends. Even though I know they wouldn’t judge me.
At least, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t.
But they know about my family. I can tell them this.
“My dad,” I say finally. “He texted me this weekend.”
“Holy shit.” Jayden grabs my hand, and I curl my fingers through his. Makayla and Anna stop their conversation at his exclamation and turn to us, and I repeat what I told Jayden.
“Have you replied?” Anna asks.
I shake my head.
“What did he say?” Makayla asks.
I open my phone and show them the message.
“He’s never gone to inpatient before. I don’t know what to think.
Maybe he’s really taking it seriously this time, but .
. .” I trail off. “Dad” and “taking it seriously” don’t really belong in the same sentence.
When I was a kid, he was always joking around, with sarcasm or bathroom humor or a prank—obvious ones, like switching the salt and sugar, but he loved to trick me other ways too, by pretending we were out of my favorite cereal when we weren’t, or convincing me that a random noise outside was actually a serial killer, or a rabid dog, or an escaped zoo animal.
“Psych!” he’d yell once I believed him, and I’d groan, or get mad. Either way, he’d laugh his ass off. Sometimes his jokes were funny, but a lot of the time they were just annoying. He acted like a kid, and I wanted him to grow up.
My throat constricts, tears stinging my eyes. “Can I hug you?” Jayden asks. I nod, and his arms encircle me, squeezing tightly.
“I’m sorry your dad is a butthole,” Anna says.
“Big butthole,” Jayden mumbles in my ear.
“Cavernous,” Makayla adds.
I snicker, and then we’re all laughing. The tightness in my chest loosens, and gratitude floods in—for the relief of tension, for the laughter, for my friends.
I had a couple friends scattered across elementary and middle school, but I was shy and anxious and rarely saw them outside of the school day.
First it was because I was afraid Dad would be drunk when they came over, and after the divorce, it was because the apartment Mom and I lived in was so run-down.
When I met Jayden, Anna, and Makayla, though, it was like I’d been a piece of a puzzle waiting under some cosmic couch for a giant hand to pick me up, and then one did and placed me with them and, together, we made a picture.
Literally and figuratively; the Polaroids of us on my wall at home are proof of that.
They’d all come here from different schools; Anna from another state entirely.
But we’d found each other. Our jokes, our interests, our personalities; everything aligns.
I hope nothing ever messes it up.
When Mom gets home that evening, I’m in my usual seat at the table, working through a math assignment. She sets her backpack on the coffee table, sits down on the couch with a groan to unlace her oxfords, then groans again as she pushes herself up to standing.
“How about we order some pizza tonight?” she asks, shuffling past me toward her room.
I give her a thumbs-up. Shar goes to an Al-Anon meeting every Wednesday night, so it’s just the two of us, and Mom’s not much of a cook. “Can we do mushrooms and olives?”
“You got it.” She vanishes into the back hallway. From the cat tower next to the window, Earl Grey watches me, slow blinking when she catches my eye. That’s how I know she likes me, even if she hardly ever lets me touch her.
Mom reemerges, and gone is the tailored pantsuit of a high-level marketing executive at a company whose name I can never remember; instead, she just looks like my mom, in sweats and an old Green Day T-shirt.
She sits down across from me and taps away on her phone screen for a few minutes, then smiles at me.
“It’ll be here in twenty minutes. Working on homework? ”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good.” She watches me. Her brow is furrowed slightly.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“I . . . have some news,” she says. “Your dad called me. He went to inpatient rehab this summer. Court-ordered after a DUI, but it sounds like he took it seriously. Anyway, he’s been out for a few weeks, he has a job, and he wants to see you.”
I stare at her, all the pieces clicking into place.
Dad went to inpatient because he had to.
Because he finally got a DUI, after bragging for years about how he’d never been “nailed by the po-po,” as he put it.
And there’s that word again: seriously. Is he really taking it seriously, or is he just saying what he knows we want to hear?
And if I believe him, will he just mess it up again?
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Mom says gently.
I shake my head. “He already told me.”
Her mouth closes, head pulling back slightly. “He what?” Her voice is casual still, but I know that face; it’s the expression she gets when she’s angry but she doesn’t want you to know, when it’s just simmering under the surface.
“He texted me Sunday,” I say. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“No, no,” she says. “I’m not mad at you, sweetie. What did he say?”
She says she’s not mad, but she still looks that way, half smiling but it’s stiff, like petrified wood. “Um. Just what he told you, except the part about the DUI and the job.”