Epilogue
The afternoon sun is almost too much to bear, a constant scratch against my skin, but I’m too excited about the huge windows to draw the blinds.
My dad keeps sending me looks about it, getting more aggravated the longer we struggle with an Ikea bookcase that just does not want to be put together.
But it’s my space—my little, brightly lit studio apartment—so I make the rules.
Dad hops up, all too happy for a break, at the sound of Annalisa trying to open the door. She comes in holding a precarious stack of flowerpots under each arm, grunting as she sets them down among the bins of my things even though I know damn well they’re not heavy for her.
“Are you seriously still fighting with that thing?” she says. “You’re telling me the chief and future chief can’t figure out one shelf?”
My dad chuckles, so I try to laugh too. It comes out wimpy.
Annalisa’s tone is dry as ever, but her eyes dance.
She looks different in sunlight. It’s been three months since she took the plunge and made the Trade, and sometimes I still have to stop and look.
Her face is softer, younger. The green of her eyes is sometimes so pale it’s startling. It suits her.
Unfortunately, she knows it too. For the hundredth time in as many days, I witness her taking out her phone and snapping a picture of herself, no doubt to send to Lara.
The door nearly hits her when it flies open. Mason strides in like he owns the place, looking exceptionally dorky in an overstuffed University of Oregon backpack.
“I come bearing gifts!” he announces. He studies the room. “Oh man, this is way nicer than my dorm.”
From his backpack, he procures a stuffed duck wearing a shirt with the words DUCK DAD in UO green and yellow, which he gives to my dad, and a thick bundle of bubble wrap for Annalisa.
“You excited to start school?” he asks her. She only hums, too busy wrestling with the bubble wrap for the usual panic-excitement-panic she descends into whenever someone brings up her looming first day.
The gift turns out to be a squirrel skull Mason found under a campus tree.
“I think an owl left it,” he says.
“Marry me,” she says.
“Heck no. Your girl’s strong as hell. I’m scared of her.”
“Not me?” I say indignantly.
Mason moseys over and kisses my cheek. “Never you, Sunshine.”
My gift is the pair of action figures that had decorated our shed, Will Smith and the roach-looking thing from Men in Black.
“. . . Do I have to take this?”
“Those are precious artifacts, asshole,” says Mason. “And I took your goose for my dorm, so . . .”
“You stole my goose?”
“This way we’ll always have a piece of each other!”
“We live across campus from each other, not the country.”
I put him to work bringing things up with Annalisa and leave my dad to battle the shelf. When Mason comes back and finds me at the kitchen counter, delicately placing a fig cutting into a cup of water, he says, “Shouldn’t you be helping?”
I already know where the fig will go once it propagates. My mom’s smiley-faced flowerpot is the perfect size and will look great by the corner table. It’s as empty now as it has been for the last ten years, but that will change soon.
“That’s what super strong and sexy boyfriends are for,” I say and watch Mason’s visible internal conflict between calling out the flattery and being flattered anyway. He examines his own arms flexing under the weight of the box he’s holding. I deal a fatal blow: “Looking good, baby.”
His vanity wins out, and he gets back to work with extra zeal.
A short while later, when my dad finally conquers the shelf and heads downstairs with Annalisa for the final boxes, Mason approaches me from behind while I’m making the bed. From his tentative steps, I know what he’s going to say before he opens his mouth.
“I’m getting to it,” I tell him.
“You’ve been ‘getting to it’ since we were still high schoolers,” Mason says dubiously. “Do you really want to move away with this hanging over your head?”
I yank the fitted sheet too hard, and the opposite corner comes loose. “No. Maybe?”
Mason hooks his chin over my shoulder. “He’ll understand.”
I nod. Mason is right. And if he’s not, at least I can hide out here in Eugene for a while.
I take a breath, steeling myself to pull my dad aside when he returns.
Only, the moment I hear him coming, I grab a stack of flowerpots and beeline for the little balcony instead.
I spend several minutes longer than necessary mulling over how I’ll arrange them.
When I finally poke my head back inside and call to my family, it’s to ask:
“Do you think these two would look better right next to each other or in opposite corners?”
“Sorry,” says Annalisa where she stands at the fridge, rearranging the blood packets she and I had packed into the freezer—poorly, if the fallen packets around her feet are anything to go by. “I’m busy doing your work.”
“Dad?” I try.
He’s kneeling at the bookcase again, unscrewing a backward shelf. Equally unhelpful, he says, “Just don’t break them.”
“. . . Mason?”
Mason comes over to look long and hard. “Wouldn’t it be sick if you stacked them on top of each other?”
“My love,” I say as I usher him off the balcony, dropping a kiss on his cheek at the door, “I don’t know why I even asked you.”
Cella picks up my video call after several rings, except the face that appears on the screen isn’t hers but Blake’s.
“Hey, man!” Blake laughs at the face I make upon seeing him. “Looking dreamy as ever.”
“Put Cella on the phone.”
“Sure thing.” Blake runs a hand over his recently buzzed head. Judging by the sweat on his brow, he’s also performing Super Strong and Sexy Boyfriend duties. “Love and miss you too.”
I blow him a kiss through the screen.
They’ve been steady since April, but apparently they started seeing each other right after the school play.
Turns out, Blake’s liked her since sophomore year English but was too shy to say anything beyond, “I like your buttons,” before Mason came around and unintentionally lit a fire under his ass.
Imagining Blake as shy in any capacity is brain-breaking stuff.
Cella’s got her hair in tiny pigtail braids.
She immediately gives me an unsolicited tour—which is really just a single, slow panning shot—of her UCLA dorm room.
She demands a tour of my own apartment, which takes a slightly longer panning shot.
She rants about the heap of books she has to begin before the semester even starts, but she’d known what she was getting into, majoring in literature and minoring in theater.
Fifteen minutes go by before we get to my question.
Cella tells me to put the two pots in one corner with a third, bigger pot between them. It’s perfect.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,” I say. It comes out mushier than I’d intended. I know she’s going to tease me for it a second before she does by the scrunch to her smile.
She does tease me, enough that I threaten to end the call, but she follows it with: “Whatever you do, it’ll be amazing.”
She says it confidently even though I haven’t even decided what I’ll study yet, even though I finally have the chance I’ve always wanted—the chance to go somewhere, to change—and I don’t even know how to take it.
But she sounds so sure, and I trust her opinion more than anyone’s. So maybe it really will be amazing, if I can just be bold enough to ask for it.
Before he leaves, my dad reminds me for the umpteenth time not to let the blood stock in the freezer get too low.
“I know.”
“I know you know,” he concedes. “But can you blame me? How else can I make sure you’ll come visit.”
I roll my eyes. “Why is everyone acting like I’m moving to Europe? I’m an hour away.”
My dad shrugs with a self-deprecating laugh, but I see it in his shoulders, that helplessness he keeps trying to cover up. Now that I’m going off to college, the only immediate family he’ll have left in Salem is his sister.
“Of course I’ll come home,” I say, full of promise. I’m going to keep watching his telenovela with him. I’m going to help him teach Casper how to dance—and ask for his help teaching Casper to draw. I’m going to try to get him to start painting again.
I don’t want to have this weight on my chest when I do it.
“Mason, can you walk Annalisa to the car?”
Annalisa snorts. “I’ve made a hundred trips down there today. I doubt I’ll get lost.”
Mason holds his elbow out to her and says, “Kieran just doesn’t want us to see him cry. He’s already homesick.”
Annalisa coos. I give Mason a look that says both Thank you and You’ll pay for that.
“Oh, Mr. Callisto, my mom wanted me to ask if you can take another look at Mothman. His wool is starting to look patchy again.”
“I’ll give her a call,” says my dad. Then it’s just me and him. He waits expectantly, clearly having seen through that little charade.
“Dad . . .” I start, and then I can’t stop.
“I don’t mean to make things harder than they already are for you, and I know it’s my fault they’re even that hard in the first place—and I know I’m young, so maybe you’ll think this is just a whim, but I swear it’s not.
I’ve thought about it a lot, and . . . it’s not me.
I mean, I’m not you. I mean, I can’t do what you do, or I guess I don’t want to—or both?
Like, this is my choice, but it’s also just who I am.
I feel like I was made to go somewhere, or a lot of places, or just wander for a while.
I don’t want to keep coming back to the same neutral.
I don’t want neutral at all. That whole circulating existence, always returning to equilibrium, I get the appeal, but it’s just—it’s not for me.
Our house will always be my home. But I want to make my own home too.
I want to start something. Even though I’m your only heir, and that’s my fault, too, what I’m saying is . . .”
“Slow down,” says my dad.
I try and end up coming to a full stop, realizing I have already said everything. Probably twice.