ME
Hey. Where are people?
TOBY
PALMER
I’m at the diner with Tom. I think Toby’s trying to say she’s at the museum until 5?
TOBY
BRI
Hey! I’m working the concession counter at the theater until six. You guys should come by!
Wait, what’s with the rainbow?
PALMER
Toby?
TOBY
BRI
I no longer understand anything that’s happening.
ME
Well, I need to get out. Meet you guys at the diner.
Sorry if this was a couple’s thing.
PALMER
Totally not! See you soon.
Tob, are they PAINTINGS? Is that what you’re trying to say?
TOBY
BRI
So I guess you guys aren’t coming by?
ME
Can’t right now. Will explain later.
• • •
I pulled open the door to the diner and scanned the room for Palmer and Tom, smoothing my hair down. Since I’d gotten into my car barefoot, I’d been relieved to find an old pair of flip-flops underneath the passenger seat. However relaxed the dress code was here, I had a feeling they probably weren’t kidding about the “no shoes” thing.
Not that the rest of my outfit was great, by any stretch of the imagination. I was still wearing Clark’s ASK ME ABOUT THE LUMINOSITY T-shirt and his sweatpants, and I’d now slept in both. A glance in my rearview mirror let me know that my hair had dried puffy on one side and flat on the other and that I had a pillow crease on one cheek. But if I could just hustle into our booth, I would be okay.
I spotted them, in our normal booth, and hustled over. “Hey,” I said, sliding across from Palmer and Tom, who were already sitting on the same side, Tom’s arm slung around Palmer’s shoulders.
“Whoa,” Palmer said, drawing back slightly from me, her expression surprised. “I mean,” she said, regrouping, “hi, Andie. Um . . . rough night?”
“Is it that bad?” I asked, tucking my hair behind my ears, slinking down farther in the booth. As I did, I caught the eye of a guy sitting across the restaurant and felt my stomach sink as he gave me a smile and a quick wave. It was Frank Porter, who I’d had a micro-crush on last year when I heard he broke up with his longtime girlfriend. But he came back to school in the fall so clearly besotted with Emily Hughes that I’d quashed my crush immediately. That still didn’t mean I wanted to look awful in front of him, though. He was sitting across from Matt Collins, who was saying something that made Frank laugh, and I turned my back on them.
“You just don’t look,” Palmer said diplomatically, “you know . . . like yourself.” She frowned at my T-shirt. “What are you even wearing?”
Tom looked at it and shook his head. “Like you know what the Luminosity is,” he scoffed. “Since when do you read fantasy?”
“Since when do you?” I asked, surprised.
“Um, since last year,” he said, raising an eyebrow at me. “Palmer told me I had to read something other than plays.”
“This is true,” Palmer said. She picked up a fry from the plate in front of her, then nudged it toward me. “Want one?”
“So what is the Luminosity?” I asked, relaxing back against the seat. This was what I’d wanted. I didn’t want to think about my dad or the fact that the longer I stayed away from home, the more in trouble I was getting. I wanted to lose myself in conversation and French fries and deal with things at home only when I was sure I could handle them.
“It’s a part of the novels of C. B. McCallister,” Tom said, his voice going slightly pompous and professory. “He’s a fantasy writer—”
“Oh, I know,” I said, looking down at the shirt, wondering if this was another fan thing of Clark’s.
“What do you mean you know?” Tom asked, frowning at me.
“Because I know him,” I said, basically just to see Tom’s jaw drop. “It’s Clark.”
“Wait, what?” Palmer asked, leaning forward.
“I’m sorry—Dogboy is C. B. McCallister?” Tom asked, his voice hitting a register I hadn’t heard since he’d been in A Little Night Music.
“Clark,” Palmer corrected him.
“I thought his name was Gertnz . . . something.”
“Me too,” I said, as I snagged a fry off the plate and dipped it into the ketchup. “It turns out I was mistaken.”
“I don’t understand,” Tom said, staring at me. “Why didn’t you tell us this?”
“I didn’t know until last night,” I said, reaching across the table to steal a sip of Palmer’s vanilla Coke. “I felt the same way you did. Only not as impressed, since I didn’t really know who that was.”
“I don’t either,” Palmer said, turning to Tom. “Who is that?”
“Only a master of the craft,” Tom said, his voice rising again. “He’s . . .” Tom stopped suddenly, his eyes widening at something behind me.
“What?” I asked, taking another fry. Palmer was looking behind me too and had gone very still.
“Um,” Palmer said, sitting up a little straighter, “Andie, your dad is here?”
I whipped around in my seat and saw my dad, standing by the hostess podium, his eyes searching the room, not looking any less mad. “Oh my god,” I said as anger, embarrassment, and fear all jostled to be my primary emotion at the moment. My dad met my eye across the restaurant and headed directly toward me. Even crossing a slightly run-down diner, he had the air of someone important, someone who knew what he was doing, and I watched a busboy step out of his path to let him pass. Both Tom and Palmer looked baffled, but I realized I had no way to tell them what had happened before he got here. “Sorry about this,” I muttered, knowing it was the best I could do under the circumstances.
“Hello,” my dad said as he approached the table. He had his friendly candidate voice back, but I realized there was still real anger underneath it. “Palmer, how lovely to see you again so soon. And . . .” He hesitated for only a fraction of a second. “Harrison, as well.”
“Tom,” Tom said, half standing and extending a hand to my dad. Tom had always been a little dazzled by him, simply because he was on TV occasionally. Even though he was just being himself, and not acting, this didn’t seem to matter to Tom. “Or Harrison. That’s fine too. So nice to see you, sir.”
“You as well,” my dad said, shaking Tom’s hand and giving him a smile that crinkled his eyes in the corners, looking for all the world like he was just delighted to talk to him. But then he turned to me and it all fell away. “I need you to get back home,” he said, his voice low and not inviting any arguments. “Now.”
I swallowed hard and nodded—I knew when I was beaten. I’d known I’d have to go home and face the music eventually, I just thought I’d be doing it on my terms. “I should go,” I said quietly to Tom and Palmer, who both nodded. I could see Palmer was asking me silently if I was okay, and I just gave her a tiny nod. “See you guys soon.” I slid out of the booth.
“Well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” my dad said, his smile and friendly tone undercutting what he was saying. “Andie’s going to be grounded for a while.”
I felt my face get hot, and I had to look away from Palmer’s expression of sympathy, because it was making things worse. I just hoped nobody else in the diner had heard, especially Frank. It was embarrassing enough to be humiliated like this without the class president seeing it happen. “Bye,” I muttered to both of them, then walked toward the front door, keeping my head down, needing to get out of there as fast as possible.
My dad followed behind me down the steps while I looked straight ahead and tried to pretend this wasn’t happening. “Let’s go,” he said, pointing at his SUV, parked on the street next to the diner.
I stopped and looked at him. “But I drove here.”
“We’ll get your car later,” he said as he beeped open his SUV and started to walk to
ward it.
“But—” I started, about to say that I couldn’t just leave my car there. What if something happened to it? But I had run out of ways to stall. I went around to the passenger side of my dad’s car and got in.
I buckled in, and my dad started to drive. As he pulled onto the main road that would take us home, I realized it had been a long time since it had been just me and my dad in an enclosed space like this. No menus to hide behind, no way to make an excuse and slip away.
The embarrassment I’d felt at the diner was only growing as I replayed the scene in my mind—my dad showing up, announcing for everyone to hear that I was grounded, like I was still in middle school or something. My dad just showing up—
Something occurred to me, and I turned away from the window to look at my father. He was staring straight ahead at the road, his jaw set in a firm line, his hands clenching the wheel at ten and two. “How did you know where I was?”
“There’s a GPS device in the car,” he said. “It’s part of the security, in case it gets stolen.”
“Wait. What?” I asked, suddenly thinking about all the times I’d said I was somewhere that I very much was not. I’d expected my dad to say something like he’d followed me, or he’d somehow talked to one of my friends . . . not that he was tracking me.
“I’ve never used it before,” my dad said, hitting the turn signal harder than he needed to. “I only turned it on when you brought the car back this morning. This is absolutely unacceptable behavior, Andie.”
With that, it was like my brief calm in the diner had just been an intermission. All the anger from earlier was coming back, full force. My dad pulled into Stanwich Woods, nodding at Earl, who looked up from his magazine long enough to wave us in. I crossed my arms tightly over my chest as I looked out the window.
“Are you listening to me?” my dad asked sharply as he signaled and pulled into our driveway.
“Yeah,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Sure.”
“You can’t talk to me like that, Andie,” my dad said, and I could hear what I was feeling—the anger, the frustration—in his voice. “I am your father, and—”
“Oh, really?” I asked as my dad parked the car in the turnaround and killed the engine. I unclipped my seat belt and got out of the car, slamming the door, then turned back to my dad, who had followed me onto the driveway. I could feel the anger coursing through me like a drug, like I was about to set off the powder keg, with no idea what exactly was inside it. “You’re my father?” I asked, putting a snide, sarcastic spin on the words. “Really?”
My dad stood with his keys in his hand in front of the car, looking wrong-footed. Inside there was a part of me that was yelling to stop this, just make peace and go inside, but the louder part of me wasn’t listening, and I barreled on.
“Then tell me who I went to the prom with this year,” I said, my voice starting to shake. “How many times did I have to take the driving test before I passed it? Who was my history teacher last semester?” My voice broke on the word “history,” and I could feel the tears lurking behind my eyes, which somehow only made me angrier, my words coming out fast and out of control. “I haven’t had a father in five years. So you can’t just show up now and start acting like one.” I felt one tear fall, then another, and I brushed them away angrily, trying to hold myself together.
“You can’t . . . ,” my dad said, shaking his head. He glanced at the house, then turned back to me. “I was doing what I had to for our family.”
“What family?” I asked, and my father’s face crumpled for just a second before he recovered. I swallowed hard, knowing I’d gone too far but also knowing I wasn’t going to be able to stop this now. “I have done nothing but make sure I didn’t do anything to make you look bad. My whole life. I’ve been tiptoeing around, always thinking about how anything I do might affect you. And then you mess it all up. Do you know why I’m not in Baltimore?” I asked, my words coming faster and faster, taking on a life of their own, like a runaway train. “Dr. Rizzoli pulled my recommendation. Because of you. Do you know how much that wrecked things for me? And it’s like you don’t even care.” I stopped abruptly, drawing in a sharp breath.
There was silence in the driveway—just the chirping of birds in a nearby tree—but it was like I could still hear the words I’d just said echoing between us, like I could still feel the reverberations.
My dad crossed in front of me to the door and unlocked it without saying a word, and I followed. We walked inside, and my dad hung up his keys, then stuck his hands in his pockets. I had no idea what happened now, but it was clear he didn’t either, which made me feel somehow even worse. Like there was nobody in charge, nobody even trying to steer this sinking boat of ours.
We looked at each other, and I swallowed hard. For just a moment I let myself think about what my mom would have said if she could have seen us, yelling at each other in the driveway. How disappointed she’d be in both of us—in what we’d allowed ourselves to become.
“It’s not just this summer,” I said, tears falling down my cheeks unchecked. “You moved me to this house without even telling me you were going to. I never got to say good-bye to the farmhouse. There’s none of Mom’s stuff around, we never talk about her or say what we miss—it’s like you want to pretend she was never here at all. It’s like she never even existed.” I was full-on crying, wiping my nose with the back of my hand and not even caring. I could barely see my dad any longer. He was just a fuzzy shape behind the tears I wasn’t even trying to blink away.
“And you said—you said in your book that we were so close. That you have to work at a relationship and that you’re proud of ours.” I took a shaky breath, knowing I was coming to the end of what I was going to be able to say. “But it’s not like that anymore. It’s not, and I don’t know why. I don’t know . . . what I did.”
My dad was staring down at the floor, his shoulders hunched. He nodded, just once, not looking at me, then turned and walked past me without a word. He walked to the end of the hallway, then opened the door to his study and went inside, closing the door behind him with a soft click.
I drew in a shaky breath, not sure what I was expecting but feeling somehow that being left alone, after all that, was so much worse than if he’d yelled at me.
On legs that felt wobbly, I walked slowly up the stairs to my room and headed directly for my bed, kicking off my flip-flops and pulling my quilt up over my shoulders. I curled into a ball and closed my eyes tightly, wishing harder than I ever had before that when I opened them, I’d be back in the farmhouse. My mom would be downstairs, and my dad, too, both of them waiting for me, and everything else that had happened had just been a nightmare, the worst kind of bad dream, but nothing that could possibly be true.
But when I opened them, I was back in my beige room, with everything broken in pieces around me. I closed my eyes again and pulled my covers over my head.
Chapter NINE
“Andie?” there was a double knock on my door, and before I even had time to respond, it cracked open an inch. “Can I come in?”
I looked up from where I was still curled on my bed. After a few hours I had made myself get up. I’d taken a long shower and finally changed out of Clark’s clothes and back into my own. Even though I’d left my phone on the kitchen counter, I hadn’t wanted to leave my room—I wasn’t sure what I’d be walking into downstairs. It was like I’d just broken every unspoken rule we’d had, and I had no idea where we went from here—or what it looked like. And maybe it looked just the same, which was somehow the worst possibility of all.
“Okay,” I said, as the door swung open all the way.
My dad didn’t come inside, though, just stayed in the doorway, standing on the threshold, his hands in his pockets. “Want to get some ice cream?”
• • •
At Paradise Ice Cream I looked across the table at my father. We were sitting at one of the wrought-iron tables on the patio with our ice cream—mint chocolate
chip for my dad, cookie dough in a waffle cone for me. We’d driven over here in almost silence, talking only about the logistics of where to go, if he could change lanes, if I could see a parking spot.
“How is it?” he asked, gesturing toward my waffle cone with his spoon.
“Pretty good,” I said, taking another bite. “Yours?”
“Not bad,” he said, scooping up another spoonful. We ate in silence for a moment, and I looked around the nearly deserted patio in the fading afternoon light. It seemed we’d picked a good time to come—it was a little after five. I knew from experience that around seven, post-dinnertime, the line would be out the door. But right now we had the place practically to ourselves. “So,” he said, taking another bite, then pushing his cup slightly away from him and looking right at me. “I thought we should talk about this afternoon.”
I looked at him and nodded, realizing that after years of knowing my father’s speeches by heart, being able to anticipate every turn of phrase, I had no idea what was about to come next.
“I’m sorry, Andie,” he said, his voice raw. “I truly am. I don’t think I realized . . .” His voice trailed off and he cleared his throat. “If I’d known how you felt, I would have made a change long ago. And of course I should have. It’s no excuse. But . . .” He sighed and looked out over the parking lot. In the grass along the side of the road, I could see fireflies begin to wink on and off, not many yet, not so you could take them for granted. “My life’s been about forward motion,” he said, his voice quieter now. “It has to be in government. You have to think about the next day, the next problem, and keep moving forward. And I’ve been so focused on trying to get back to where I was . . .” My dad let his voice fade as he looked out again, seeing something that I wasn’t. He shook his head, then looked at me. “I wish you’d told me about Daniel Rizzoli.”