CHAPTER THREE

Jake had invited me over to his house that afternoon to “watch sports.” Turned out, he really did want to watch sports, and it wasn’t some kind of code word for make out. He’d been so busy last football season that he’d missed quite a few televised games and had saved them on his DVR.

He’d been a little standoffish at school all day, and I wondered if it was all the promatory anticipation in the air. Was he worried about how his promposal would stack up? When we had started dating, Jake had made one of the sweetest, grandest gestures imaginable. He had set up my favorite scene from Sixteen Candles to tell me he liked me.

Maybe he was worried about topping himself.

We sat together on the couch, his head in my lap. His dog, Scooby, sat on my other side and laid his own head next to Jake’s. I lazily ran my fingernails against Jake’s scalp while he yelled at the television. His dark brown hair lay in soft strands across my fingers, like silken threads. I liked being with him, but this game was really boring. Scooby let out a yawn, which I totally understood. We probably even watched football in the same way. We enjoyed being close to Jake, were vaguely aware of some motion on-screen, but no real comprehension was taking place.

Some part of me wondered if he was using the game as a way to avoid talking to me. It was a weird feeling I kept having. Like something wasn’t right.

But I’d been so concerned about Ella and Trent . . . maybe that was just bleeding over into the rest of my life? And I was seeing things that weren’t there?

I looked at my backpack, which I’d left on the closest armchair. It had my sketchpad and pencils in it. Maybe I could reach over and grab it, and Jake wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t paying attention.

“Oh, come on!” Jake shouted, throwing his free arm up in the air. That startled the dog, who got off the couch and curled up on the floor.

My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out of my pocket. There was a text from Ella. Curious, I clicked on it.

WAS THIS A SNEAK ATTACK? HAS DATE BEEN SECURED?

REPEAT, HAS DATE BEEN SECURED?

A few nights ago, Dad and Jennifer had made us watch some boring three-hour military movie where Ella and I amused ourselves by repeating the characters’ lingo. Just seeing her message made me smile, which I gathered was her intent.

That’s a negative. Repeat, negative. He has not asked yet.

He really did want to watch sports. Over.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket, not wanting to alert my boyfriend to the content of my discussion with Ella.

“Was that your sister?”

I needed to deflect his attention. I had discovered that if you said something sarcastically, whether it’s a truth or a lie, people tended to leave you alone and not follow up with further questions. “Possibly. Or maybe it was a text from my darling mother where she was trying to tell me how much she loved me, and it autocorrected to how much I constantly disappoint her.”

Jake gave me a “fine, don’t tell me” look before focusing on the football game again. This was the problem with having a boyfriend who knew you so well. My mom hadn’t been in touch for months. At my request. I had half expected her to reach out more just to spite me. But since my dad had stopped forcing her to interact with me with financial bribes, she had, presumably, happily moved on with her life.

“That’s a lot of violence over some change,” I said, wondering if I’d upset him by not telling him who I was texting.

“Change?” Jake repeated, turning his head to look at me. He didn’t seem angry.

“They flipped that coin at the beginning, and the entire game you’ve been yelling at them to get their quarter back.”

At that, Jake laughed and reached up to tug on my neck, pulling me down toward him. I let out a sigh of relief as his lips grazed mine, causing goose bumps to break out all along my forearms. We were definitely okay. We kissed softly, briefly, before the announcer started screaming, grabbing all Jake’s attention.

“No, no, no!” Whatever was happening was bad enough that he jumped to his feet, his hands balled up in his hair.

“Do you ever think you shouldn’t let games played by other people have so much hold over your personal happiness?”

He blinked at me slowly. “I don’t understand the question.”

“Right. I know I can’t fall asleep at night until I’ve found out what team had hurled what ball through what apparatus.”

Jake sat down next to me, a playful glint in his eye as he responded to my teasing. “You love the Dodgers as much as I do.”

True, but I loved giving him a hard time even more. “Baseball is civilized and makes sense. This is just . . .” I held my hand out toward the massive flat-screen. “Dudes tackling other dudes for fun.”

“You know, guys aren’t the only people we like to tackle.”

“Oh?” My pulse kicked into overdrive given the predatory look in his gorgeous eyes.

Without warning, he playfully knocked me back, pinning me against the couch.

I did not mind one bit.

He kissed me then, long and hard and with an unhurried deliberation. Waves of heat spiraled through me with each movement of his mouth.

When he finally stopped, I struggled to catch my breath. “I hope you don’t do that with the opposing team,” I murmured.

Jake pressed a soft kiss against my cheek. “Most definitely not.” He lifted up his arm and checked his watch. “My parents will be home in half an hour. I should turn off the game, and we should . . .” He used his lips to finish his sentence.

If he paused his game, he’d make me watch the rest later. “Maybe leave the game on. Muted.”

His eyes narrowed at me. “Do you know how much I’ll miss in half an hour?”

“Yep. Fifteen seconds of actual game time.”

Shaking his head, Jake did as I asked. He left the game on but turned off the sound. I knew that once the real kissing commenced, all brain functions would cease. While I was still desperate for him to launch his promposal, I also still wondered about his weird phone call and how he hadn’t driven me to school. How he’d missed Ella’s meeting. Or how he’d seemed distant the whole day. Why he’d spent the last two hours with me, in an empty house, watching a football game instead of doing something . . . more fun.

“Before we proceed, I wanted to thank you for taking me to the building last night.” Even if it had been a staph infection waiting to happen. “I’m glad you figured out what you want to do with your life.”

Jake trailed his fingers up my right arm, and my goose bumps became goose hills. “Me too. I’d been spending a lot of time lately trying to think of what I loved most. I didn’t want to go to school and flounder around with my classes and waste time. And since I can’t major in you . . .” His hand moved up to my hair, and he gently pushed a strand from my face, making me sigh happily.

“I don’t know,” I countered. “You’d still have a lot of classes to take. Like Things I Like 201 and Favorite Manga 312.”

His lips nibbled at my earlobe, and I had to close my eyes against the sensation onslaught. “I’m pretty sure I could test out of those classes.”

“O-oh?”

“Mm-hmm.” He brushed his lips against my cheek. “Especially the things you like.” He showed this to be true with another long, limb-drugging kiss. “In fact, I think I already have a PhD in Matilda Lowe.”

I had a really clever and witty response. But all I could think about was that my Jake had returned, proving his degree-worthy status to be true by kissing me into mindless oblivion. I had to stop making mountains out of molehills. People were allowed to have off days. Right now, we were ourselves, and we were fine.

Then his lips burned against my neck, and my brain turned completely off.

When I arrived home later, Ella arched a single eyebrow at me as she took in my appearance. With a smirk, she asked, “And just what have you been up to?”

“Shut up,” I tried to grumble, but couldn’t keep the perma-grin off my face.

She was carrying three sodas, and I followed her to see where she was going. She went into my dad’s poker room where she, my father, and Jennifer were playing Scrabble at his professional poker table. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d had his buddies over to play. Whatever free time he had he now devoted to us or to his girlfriend. And because he was a world-famous/celebrated/renowned artist, he didn’t have much free time to begin with.

“Hey, sweetie,” my dad said, tapping his finger while he waited for Jennifer to take her turn. “Or should I say, Miss Happy O’Smiles? Where’s the moody teenager who lives down the hall from me?”

“Ha-ha.” I smiled other times. I did. Nobody needed to make such a big deal about it.

He pushed out a chair for me at the table, and I sat down.

“Do you want to join in?”

“No thanks. I’m not interested in homework disguised as a board game.”

My dad smiled and rearranged a couple of his tiles. “How’s school?”

“Still there.”

Jennifer let out a frustrated sound. “I can’t move my vowels!”

“Does that mean you’re consonated?” Dad asked, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes so hard that I almost detached my retinas. He’d always been into stupid dad jokes, but since he’d started dating Jennifer, he’d taken his puns to a whole new terrible level. The kind that made me want to deny any genetic link between us whatsoever.

But even I had to admit that my father and my favorite art teacher were a match made in dork heaven.

“So you actually saw Bradley Debeer’s promposal?” Ella asked Jennifer.

“What’s a promposal?” my dad interrupted. He looked completely confused, which made sense given that he was generally clueless about most things in life since he spent so much time in his art studio. He rarely, if ever, got my and Ella’s cultural references.

“It’s an elaborately staged request to be someone’s date to the prom. The more creative and outlandish, the better,” Jennifer responded.

“Whatever happened to the good old days? Asking was never that complicated for us.”

I slid his bowl of pretzels toward me. “Was that back when you lit a bonfire on top of the hill and hoped your date could interpret your smoke signals?”

He gave me a disgruntled frown. “I’m not that old.”

“Ask him to tell you about how people used to beep him on his pager, and he’d have to call them back on a landline or a pay phone,” Jennifer said, her voice light and teasing.

“I don’t even know what any of those words mean.”

My dad added an “ING” to the “ANNOY” already on the board, giving me a pointed look. “I meant where your best friend asks her best friend if she would go to prom with you. No need to . . . what did that Brian kid do again?”

“Bradley,” Ella corrected him.

Jennifer laid down a single tile to pluralize a word. “He painted Van Gogh’s The Starry Night but turned the stars into the letters P, R, O, and M.”

Wow. That was some dedication.

“So did the girl agree to Van Gogh with him?” My father looked far too pleased with himself, and I refrained from groaning out loud from the pain he was causing my eardrums with his stupid jokes.

“She did,” Jennifer said.

Ella spelled out the word “SWIFT” from a “W” tile already on the board. “That’s not nearly as exciting as Pedro Franklin’s promposal. He used lighter fluid to spell out ‘Go to prom with me?” in the street in front of Jenna’s house.”

“This already sounds potentially bad,” I said.

“Yep. When he lit it on fire, it burned straight toward the driveway and caught both Pedro’s and Jenna’s dad’s cars on fire. Apparently, the bottle he was using had a slow leak. I don’t think Jenna will be going with him.”

My father shook his head and mumbled something about “whole generation obsessed with being noticed thanks to their gratuitous self-promotion.”

I stood up. “Well, I’ve got some homework to finish.” Jake would call me in about an hour, and I wanted to be done with all my other stuff first.

“Your grandmother sent you a package,” my dad said as I leaned down to hug him good night. “It’s in the living room.”

I hadn’t even noticed it when I came in. My dad’s mom had passed away when I was little, but my maternal grandmother was this lovely, tiny Japanese woman that had inexplicably birthed my she-devil of a mother. My grandmother didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Japanese, and we had to rely on a translation app to communicate. She sent me gifts all the time. I pulled at the packing tape and got the box open. Inside was a beautiful, formal purple kimono with a garden scene in white and silver along the hem. It was good to know that she’d understood my last message to her about the prom. It was so sweet that she even matched the colors!

“That’s pretty,” Ella cooed as she perched on the couch next to me, running her fingertips along the silken edge of the kimono.

“Very pretty. I can’t wear it anywhere, but she really is the sweetest.” I’d have to send her a thank-you note before Jake called.

My dad’s laptop was next to the box, and I grabbed his computer, intending to send a note now before I forgot. By the time I got back to my room and waited for my computer to start up, it could slip my mind.

Not that that had ever happened to me before.

Okay, at least six times.

When I pushed open the screen, I saw a frozen video of my mother’s face. “What’s this?”

Ella gave me a confused but worried look.

My mother had left my dad and me when I was really little. She wanted to pursue an art career and felt that we were holding her back. My dad had had to bribe her to stay in my life, and we had Skyped with each other on a semiregular basis through the years. It was like biweekly torture having to talk to her, given that she didn’t actually love me and found everything I did insulting or annoying (to be a little fair, I did often try to insult and/or annoy her). I finally told my father I’d had enough, and he’d allowed it to stop. My guess was that it made both sides much happier.

I restarted the video. It was weird to see my mom again, to hear her voice. A voice that sounded happy instead of mad. I hadn’t even realized that she knew how to be not angry all the time. She was at a gallery that would be hosting an exhibit of her trash sculptures (sculptures made of actual trash—I wasn’t just insulting her) later in the week. The reporter asked about her influences, and she claimed herself as her primary inspiration. (Which caused massive eye rolls from me.)

“What does your family think about your show?” the reporter asked.

“My parents are thrilled, of course.”

The reporter looked confused and flipped through a little notebook. “I meant your husband.”

Pearl Li let out a little laugh, and I wondered if she’d strained a muscle thanks to disuse. “I’m not married.”

“But I thought I read that you have a husband and a daughter.”

“Your information is outdated. As I said, I’m not married.” A beat passed. Then two. “And I don’t have a daughter.”

Ella reached over and slammed the laptop shut before I could respond.

My heart actually hurt. Twinged and twisted in pain while tiny sharp knives stabbed my stomach. Hot, scalding tears filled my eyes. My reaction surprised me. “I’ve already written her off. So why does it upset me that she’s written me off?” My voice caught on the last word, and I was so close to full-on sobbing.

Ella put her arm around me. “Because no matter how horrible she is, she’s still your mom. She’s supposed to be the one person in the world who has your back no matter what.” She squeezed me. “But you have me, and I’ll always be here for you. You just say the word, and I’ll fly to New York and punch your stupid mother.”

I let out a bark that was half laughter, half sob and hugged Ella back. “Stupid, huh?” That was practically a swear word for my sister.

“Definitely stupid. And this probably won’t help anything,” she said in tentative tone, “but in our life story, some people are meant to be chapters, and some are meant to be little footnotes. That doesn’t make them leaving the story any less painful. Not every relationship can or should be fixed. And you’re so fabulous that anyone who doesn’t love you doesn’t deserve any of your tears. Now go get ready for bed so you can focus all your attention on your Jake phone call,” she instructed me, handing me the kimono and the box it had come in.

Nodding, I got up and headed to our shared bathroom, loving that she knew my routine so well. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas.

I climbed into my bed, thinking about my mom. I wondered if there was a time when she cared about me. Our personalities had never clicked, and I couldn’t remember ever getting along with her. We were like oil and that thing that always disappointed oil.

The little girl part of me felt lost and betrayed. The almost adult part of me knew that she was a selfish narcissist. And that I wasn’t the only one who knew it. I’d read the scathing reviews of her shows and her behavior at said shows. I wasn’t alone in my dislike of her as a person, and I wondered, for the millionth time, if my dad had been suffering from a psychotic break when he fell in love with her and married her.

I spent so much time moping that when I glanced at my phone, I realized that it was almost twenty minutes past when Jake normally called me. He called me every night before bed. Sometimes just to wish me sweet dreams, other times to chat. We spent so much time together both in school and after you’d think we’d run out of things to say, but we never did.

And Jake had never once been late before. He was scarily punctual, even when he was off at an away game for baseball.

Of course I could have just called him.

But that wasn’t the point. For the first time since we’d started dating, Jake hadn’t called.

And I worried what that meant.