‘Noted.’ He clears his throat. ‘One more thing – I’ve been contacted by a social worker in Texas – and asked to pass along a request for you to return the call. Something to do with a court case? He said it involved confidential information that he couldn’t discuss with anyone but you. I don’t suppose you want to let your manager in on what that’s about, if you happen to know?’

The blood in my veins turns to ice, and my hand grips the gear shift as though it will keep me from being sucked out of the open window of my car. Brooke said she wouldn’t connect me, but clearly, she lied. This is my chance to tell George everything, but I’m immobilized. ‘Uh, I don’t know – I can give him a call and see what it’s about.’

His sigh reveals his suspicion that I’m withholding something critical. ‘I’ll email his information. Give me a call back if there’s something I need to … oversee.’

I go from fuming to dumbstruck when Brooke opens her door. Brooke is like my mother in a few ways – one of them being the fact that she always looks as though she could grab a bag and go straight to a club or some posh event without so much as checking the mirror.

My mother wears designer clothes around the house. She always has. Even when she’s drunk – when she was drunk, I correct myself, because it’s been so long since I’ve seen her that way – she was stylish and well groomed. A little off, but not by much.

It’s not that Brooke looks off.

She’s Brooke … from five years ago.

Her hair is pulled into a messy ponytail, tendrils escaping around her face. Thin gold hoops dangle from her ears, but she’s not wearing make-up. Her eyes are big and blue in her very young face.

When we were going out, she would occasionally dig through my dresser drawers and take a pair of jeans, and I was content to let her. She’d ditch whatever trendy pair she was wearing – shimmying out of them while I watched her, breathless – and pull mine on. They’d hang perfectly on her slim hips, fitting her the same way they fitted me when I had a boy’s body – the one I outgrew a couple of years ago.

‘Ahhh,’ she’d say, dropping on to my bed. ‘Much better.’

All I could think about was how to get her back out of them.

The worn jeans she’s currently wearing could be one of the three or four pairs she appropriated from me back then, though I’m fairly certain she either shredded them with a giant set of shears or burned them in some sorcerous ritual after we broke up. She’s barefoot – her toenails polished blood red – and wearing a plain, fitted white T-shirt.

Silent, she gestures for me to enter, and I follow her through a maze of boxes and into her living room. I don’t remember exactly what her place looked like when I was here last, because I’ve only been here once, and it’s been almost a year – but several things appear to be missing. And then there are the boxes.

Frowning curiously, I turn back to her. ‘Moving?’

She nods. ‘I’ll need two bedrooms. And most of my décor isn’t exactly child-friendly.’

She says this as though it’s normal for such sentences to be said between us. Or for the phrase child-friendly to come from her mouth, ever.

She perches in a black leather chair and I take its twin – these make up the only furniture in the room, aside from a nearly empty bookcase.

I begin first, pre-empting whatever plan she had for the direction of this conversation. ‘My manager got a call for me from a social worker in Texas. He wouldn’t tell George what he wanted, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with you – or, you know, River.’

She takes a deep breath, staring at the interlocked hands in her lap, and a distinct feeling of unease creeps over me.

‘Yes, that’s why I asked you to come over.’ She sighs, and I think, Oh, no. ‘I had to tell them.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘That you’re his birth father.’

My jaw drops. ‘What do you mean you had to tell them –’

Her eyes flash up. ‘I had to fill out an eighteen-page questionnaire, Reid. It asked the most personal questions you could imagine, and Norman, my attorney, warned me to be utterly truthful, or I could risk a denial before we even got started.

‘So I told them about my home-wrecking mother, and my cheating father. The fact that I was illegitimate because my father was still technically married to Kathryn when I was born. The fact that my mother frequently slapped me across the face when I pissed her off, starting so young that I don’t remember the first time she did it. I had to reveal my sexual history and experience – all of it. My relationships with my stepfathers and stepmothers and my experience with children – which is of course zero.’

I shake my head. ‘You keep saying you had to, but that’s not true, Brooke – no one is forcing you to do this.’

She narrows her clear blue eyes and they blaze. ‘We are done discussing the decisions I’m making concerning my child, Reid Alexander.’ Backlit by the wall of windows behind her, pale blonde hair haloing her head, she looks like an angel spoiling for a fight.

‘You’re making decisions for me, Brooke – why can’t you see that?’

‘I don’t have a choice.’

‘You do –’

‘Fine! Then I’m choosing our son.’

My jaw clenches and I stand, hands fisted at my sides. ‘You’ve called me his birth father. Now you’re calling him my son – like I have some sort of connection with him. I don’t. I didn’t think he was mine when you turned up pregnant, and you knew it. We’d been broken up for weeks by then. I never felt anything about him one way or the other, Brooke, and I don’t now, and if that makes me a heartless bastard, then so be it –’

‘No, Reid – that’s you making him a bastard.’

My hands both go to the back of my neck and I pull my elbows in, biceps shielding my face like blinkers. Pacing between the dozens of boxes littering the floor, I count. One, two, three, four … I ache to throw something or break something or scream something. Five, six, seven. Eight, nine, ten.

I need to leave. But first: ‘What does the social worker want?’

She blanches like she’d forgotten about that, and then licks her lips. If her head was transparent, I’d see gears working furiously. ‘A couple of things. They want you to sign a form saying you willingly volunteer to relinquish your parental rights to him. That … shouldn’t be a problem for you, I gather. It’s like clearing a deed to a property, Norman says, so it can transfer easily to a new buyer.’ She swallows, the muscles in her throat strained. I get the feeling she wants to cry, but isn’t allowing herself to do it. So Brooke of her. Always calculating something.

‘They might also ask you about our relationship. And the break-up. And the pregnancy. And why I left your name off the birth record. And … they’re calling people for character references. For me.’

I laugh once, humourlessly, stuffing my hands into my front pockets. ‘Me? A guy who plea-bargained his way out of a DUI a few months ago as a character reference? I doubt anything I say will hold any weight one way or the other.’

She shrugs, her expression earnest. I can’t stand to look at her. Not when she looks so much like she did years ago. I conclude that she must have done this on purpose – but how would she know? How would she know that for months after our break-up, I woke up from dreams of her looking exactly like she does now?

‘Maybe not,’ she says. ‘But the worst thing would be if they believe I lied and said he wasn’t yours, or didn’t tell you about him at all. Will you just back me up on that, and sign the relinquishment papers? Even if you can’t say another positive word about me?’

She did tell me she was pregnant, and even if she let me believe he probably wasn’t mine, she never told me he wasn’t.

‘I’ll back up your story, because it’s true. But relinquishment papers? That’s a legal declaration, Brooke.’ I’m back to pacing. The stacks of boxes narrow the walls, constricting the paths between them, paralleling my emotions perfectly. ‘Fuck. My father will kill me if I sign a legal document without his expert guidance.’ I look back up at her and shake my head slowly. ‘I’m going to have to tell him. And may God have mercy on my soul.’

14

DORI

My schedule looks like a sampler platter instead of a meal. Every class I’m taking this semester is preceded by ‘Introduction to’, which theoretically makes sense, considering I’m a freshman, and therefore assumed to be a novice at everything. If I hadn’t tested out of reading and comprehension, quantitative reasoning and four semesters of Spanish, I suppose my schedule and I wouldn’t look quite so deficient in experience.

On a bench in upper Sproul, I wait with one member of my Intro to Sociology study group for the other two to arrive. The plan was to stake a spot somewhere outside to study, but that was before the sky became completely overcast and the temperature dropped ten degrees.

Claudia scowls down the plaza, looking for Raul and Afton. ‘Whose bright idea was it to study outdoors in February? I’m. Effing. Freezing.’

I shrug. ‘I’m sure they’ll agree to go inside. And it was nice out yesterday.’

‘Psshh,’ she says. ‘It was tolerable, at best. Have you ever noticed how all campus brochures have pictures of happy, smiling students taken on beautiful, blue-sky days? No matter where the campus is located – Oklahoma, North Dakota, Arizona – whatever. No one is ever huddling into their down-filled North Face jacket, cursing their chapped lips and flyaway hair. No one’s ever sloshing across campus in an ugly downpour with no umbrella, a soaked-through backpack, waterlogged shoes and jeans saturated to mid-thigh. No one’s got sweat-stained pits and perspiration-covered faces. Oh, no – they’re throwing a Frisbee or studying contentedly on a green lawn in perfect temperatures. They’re laughing on the way to the food court or chatting on the steps of the library.’

I smile. Claudia is one of those people who constantly complains, but she grumbles so humorously that I don’t care. She’s like a grumpy old lady in an eighteen-year-old body.

A couple of girls suddenly appear in front of us, gazing directly at me, as though I’m about to impart life-saving information. Claudia lifts an eyebrow and looks at me too.

‘Hey,’ the girl on the left says. ‘Um, we live in your building? And you were with a guy the other night …’

Uh-oh. I recognize them now – the elevator girls. Darn Reid and his winking.

I attempt to look blankly at them. Reid’s told me what his studio wants, but he’s also told me that he doesn’t care what I say or do – he says that if someone asks me about him, I can say whatever I’d like. But his premiere is tomorrow night, and I don’t particularly want to out myself right here, right now, with strangers. Along with Claudia, the world’s most acerbic Peace and Conflict Studies major ever.