The Unexpected Everything

“You two need a minute to confer?” my dad asked, looking between the two of us.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head, trying to get my bearings. Maybe his parents were divorced and this was his mother’s new name or something.

“Alexander Walker,” my dad said, reaching out and shaking Clark’s hand with his politician’s handshake—two pumps, lots of eye contact. Then he paused and turned to me. “That’s right, isn’t it? Walker?”

“Ha ha,” I said, trying to silently tell my dad this was not the time to try to be funny.

“Well, whoever you are, Clark, it’s nice to meet you.”

“You as well.” Clark looked at my dad for a beat longer, frowning slightly, before he turned back to me. “You look great,” he said quietly to me.

“Thanks.” I took a step toward the door, which was still open. “So we should go. . . .”

“Just a second,” my dad said, and I noticed his voice had dropped to his authoritative TV-spot timbre. “You two go to school together?”

Clark glanced at me, then turned back to my dad. “No, sir. We . . . uh—don’t.”

My dad paused mid-nod. “But you’re going into senior year as well?”

“No, um . . .” Clark looked at me again. We hadn’t talked about it, but I had assumed that he was going to be an incoming freshman at a college somewhere in the fall, or maybe that he was going into his senior year at a different school from me. “I actually got my GED a few years ago,” Clark said, looking from me to my dad as he spoke. “So I’m, uh, not in school.”

“You’re not?” I asked, not able to stop myself.

“I was going to mention it over dinner,” he explained.

“So . . . ,” my dad said, and I could practically feel him trying to regroup. “How do you two know each other, then?”

“Andie walks my dog,” Clark said, giving my dad a smile. My dad looked at me, not even trying to hide the utterly baffled look on his face, and I knew I was paying the price now for all the times I’d thought about telling him about my job and then had just chosen to avoid the subject entirely. “Well, not my dog, exactly,” Clark amended after a second. “But the dog who . . . lives in my house.” Now it was my turn to stare at Clark, but before I could say anything, he added, “Well, not my house, so to speak—”

“Bertie’s not your dog?” I asked, feeling my eyebrows fly up.

“Why are you walking his dog?” my dad asked.

“Andie’s a dog walker,” Clark said, then a moment later, and in the silence that followed, he seemed to read the room. “Was that supposed to be a secret?” he asked, leaning closer to me, his voice barely above a whisper.

“It’s my summer job,” I said to my dad, crossing and then uncrossing my arms.

“Since when?”

“A week and a half ago.”

“But you have no experience with dogs,” my dad said, still staring at me.

“I got trained,” I said quickly to Clark, “before I started.”

“You do a great job with Bertie,” Clark assured me. “She really does,” he added to my dad.

“Help me understand this,” my dad said, turning back to Clark. It didn’t seem like this positive report of my job performance had cleared anything up for him. “You’re not in school. But you’ll be going to college, I assume.”

“No, um . . . ,” Clark said, glancing once at me before putting his hands in his pockets, then taking them out again. “I . . . well, I’m a writer. So I’ve been mostly focusing on that. I’m not sure college fits into my plans at the moment.”

“A writer,” my dad repeated, his voice flat. I was trying very hard not to look quite as thrown by all this as I felt. Clearly, the downside of having a theoretical crush on someone you knew nothing about was the crashing realization that you actually knew nothing about them.

“Yeah,” Clark said with a low, nervous laugh. “I write fantasy novels.”

“Wait, what?” I asked. All of this was moving too quickly, and I really felt like it would have been better to find this stuff out while sitting across from Clark in a restaurant somewhere, or while driving there in his car—not in front of my dad.

“Another thing I was going to mention later,” Clark said with another quick smile. I could see, though, that his cheeks were starting to get pink.

“Fantasy novels?” my dad repeated, his voice skeptical.

“Yeah,” Clark said with a shrug, his cheeks still flushed. “I mean, I’ve only written two so far, but . . .”

“And this is what you do,” my dad said, still sounding unimpressed. “Rather than going to college.”

“Well,” Clark said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “It is kind of a full-time job, especially after A Murder of Crows was published. . . .”

“Wait . . .” My dad stared at Clark like he was trying to understand what was happening. “I’ve heard of that. Wasn’t it a bestseller? Wasn’t it a movie?”

Clark nodded. “Two,” he said, then cleared his throat. “It was supposed to be a trilogy, but I’m a little bit behind on my newest book.” I suddenly flashed back to the old man waiting on line in the library with his thick paperback, complaining about the author who hadn’t finished his series. What had that writer’s name been? Wasn’t it something McCallister?