Vanessa, Phoebe, and I all fell asleep on one of the double beds in a tangle of laptop cables and empty Doritos bags. When I woke up hours later, light was streaming through the curtains, someone’s knee was wedged into the back of my shoulder, and there was a Mountain Dew bottle resting against my forehead. I batted it away and scrambled into a sitting position, certain I was late to shop for coyote throats or something. But then yesterday came back to me in a horrible rush—the sabotage, the yelling, the accusations—and I remembered that my coyote-throat-shopping days were over forever. That rock-on-my-chest feeling started up again, and I fought for a deep breath.
This is what you wanted, I told myself. He can’t order you around anymore. You’re free.
The thing was, I didn’t really feel free. I just felt lonely.
I forced myself to retrieve my phone from where it had been lying on the carpet all night. There was one text from my dad, and despite everything that had happened yesterday, a tiny part of me still hoped it would contain an apology or at least a request to talk later. But all it said was, Please confirm you’re alive in there.
The tiny spark of hope flickered and died. Alive, I wrote, and then I turned the phone off and dropped it back on the floor. I extracted my laptop from under Vanessa’s foot, moved onto the other bed with my headphones, and started listening to yesterday’s interviews again. If I had learned one thing from my dad, it was that burying yourself in your work was a pretty effective coping strategy.
The other girls woke up half an hour later, when Vanessa rolled over and accidentally elbowed Phoebe in the stomach. Phoebe made us all coffee—Mountain Dew–free—and we dove right back into podcast-land without bothering to change out of our pajamas. We made pretty good progress for a couple of hours, piecing together clips and crafting our narrative, but soon all three of us were too hungry to think.
“Room service?” I suggested. “I don’t feel like moving.”
The moment I said it, I thought of my whole family curled up on a big hotel bed, eating our room service burgers, and suddenly I wasn’t very hungry anymore. I was relieved when Phoebe wrinkled her nose and said, “I’m not paying twenty bucks for a mediocre sandwich.”
“There’s a crepe kiosk in A-wing that’s not bad,” Vanessa said. “I can head down there and grab us some stuff, if you want. I have to turn in our Creativity Corner form anyway.”
Phoebe grabbed her jeans off the floor. “I’ll walk out with you. I need to take care of a couple of things, too. What do you feel like eating, Callie?”
“Eh, whatever,” I said. “I don’t really care. Get me something with cheese.”
Phoebe rolled her eyes on her way out of the room. “Well, obviously. We’re not monsters.”
They’d only been gone a few minutes before there was a knock on the door, and I left the interview tracks playing as I got up to answer it. “Sorry, I forgot to give you money,” I said as I pulled it open. “Let me get—”
But it wasn’t Phoebe or Vanessa. It was Jeremy.
“Oh!” My hands flew up to fix my messy ponytail, and then I realized I wasn’t wearing a bra, so I left my snarled hair alone and crossed my arms over my chest instead. “I, um— What are you—”
“Hey, I brought you these.” He held up a box of saltines and a bottle of ginger ale. “Are you feeling any better?”
“Am I … what?”
“Your dad told me you were sick. When we had dinner last night? I wanted to make sure you had everything you needed.”
He was such a freaking good person that it made me want to hit him and hug him at the same time. “I’m— Thank you,” I managed. “That’s so nice of you. But I’m actually not sick.”
“That’s weird. I could’ve sworn he said you couldn’t eat with us because you had a stomach bug. Maybe I misunderstood.”
“He didn’t even tell me you guys were having dinner. We aren’t really speaking right now.”
“Wait, what?”
“We had a huge fight.” I almost told Jeremy more, but then I remembered how he’d shut me down the other day. He had made it very clear that he wasn’t interested in our family drama. I waved my hand like I could erase the few words I’d already said. “Don’t worry about it. Do you want to come in for a second?”
Jeremy looked a bit bewildered, but he said, “Yeah, okay.”
He followed me inside and set the crackers and ginger ale on the desk, and I grabbed Vanessa’s hoodie from the back of the chair and wrapped it around myself. I was suddenly very aware of all the empty chip bags and soda bottles scattered around, and I gathered some of them up and crammed them into the tiny trash can. Soleil’s shirt was still crumpled in the corner, so I stuffed that in, too.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” said Scott’s voice from my laptop speakers. “It’s already weird because we’ve been friends for a long time, you know?”
“Sorry for the mess,” I said. “I didn’t eat all of these chips myself.”
“I wouldn’t judge you if you had. Doritos are the best. What are you listening to?”
“Well, I was,” said Scott. “But … well, it looks like she’s not gonna show up, so. I guess she’s not interested either way.”
“I’m working on a project with some friends,” I said.
“Cool. A radio thing?”
“Sort of. It’s for—”
And then my computer skipped to the next track, and my voice came out of the speakers. “So, my mom left my dad and me a little more than a year ago because she wanted to ‘start over’. It’s not like it was a total surprise or anything—”
I lunged for the laptop and slammed it shut, but it was too late. A crease appeared between Jeremy’s eyebrows. “Was that … you?”
“Um. Yeah.” And then, for no reason I could fathom, I said, “Sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing? Cal … did your parents split up?”
I looked at the floor. “Yeah.”
“Oh my god,” Jeremy said. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrugged. “You said you didn’t want to hear about my family stuff.”
“I didn’t mean— Man, I had no idea you were going through that. Your dad didn’t mention anything about it.” Jeremy sat down on the edge of the bed. “So … where did she go, exactly?”
“Arizona. She moved in with her boyfriend. Paul. I guess they had already been together for, like, a while. Not that she told me. My family’s not super big on telling me things, as it turns out.”
“Do you still see her?”
“I didn’t want to for a while, but we’re back on pretty good terms now, so I see her during school breaks and four weeks during the summer. I wish it was more. I actually just found out the other day that she asked if she could take me for the whole summer, but my darling father said no without even asking me. He told her I refused to go and that she’d have to take us to court if she wanted more time with me.” I swallowed hard. “That’s what we fought about, actually. I mean, that and the fact that I totally ruined his demo yesterday. On purpose. And I told him I was going to go live with Mom full-time. So … yeah.”
Jeremy’s eyes widened, and I wondered for a second if he was going to reprimand me for being an awful person. But he just said, “Man, Callie. This all sucks so much.”
I nodded. When I’d told Phoebe what was going on with my family the other day, the words had come out just fine, riding a wave of anger and adrenaline. But now it felt like they were piling up in my throat, stopping my breath. “Just twenty more months until I turn eighteen, and then I don’t have to live with anyone. I can make it that long, right?”
“Hey,” Jeremy said, his voice so gentle it hurt. “Come here.”
I went over and sat next to him on the bed. He put a hand on my back, and it felt safe, like someone was anchoring me. My eyes filled up with tears, which I tried my best to blink away.
“They love you so much,” Jeremy said. “Both of them.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure I do. I basically lived at your house when you were little. I saw how you guys were together.”
“It’s not like that anymore.”
“Your dad couldn’t stop talking about you last night, about what an advanced taxidermist you are. He showed me like twelve pictures of the raccoon you mounted. It’s really good. He loves having you in the studio with him.”
I shook my head. “He only wants me there because I’m useful. I could send a raccoon-mounting robot in my place and he wouldn’t even notice the difference.” I sniffled hard. “It’s just … if he doesn’t even care about me, why is he trying to keep me from spending time with Mom? I don’t understand why he won’t let me go, you know? It’s like he’s just holding on to me out of spite.”
“He’s holding on to you because he wants to keep you close,” Jeremy said. “Remember how you said the other day that he was crazy controlling? He wouldn’t try so hard to keep you near him all the time if he didn’t want you around. He’s probably afraid he’s going to lose you like he lost your mom. It must’ve been a huge blow for him when she left so suddenly.”
“It wasn’t at all. It’s not like he paid any attention to her when she was there, so why should he care that she’s gone? He doesn’t even miss her.”
“I’m sure he does,” Jeremy said. “I bet he’s hurting a lot. Sometimes people don’t realize they have a good thing until it’s too late.”
I knew Dad was angry at Mom for abandoning us, but he’d never acted hurt. After she left, he stopped talking about her completely, like she had never existed at all. I had always assumed it meant he didn’t care, and the possibility that it might mean something else made my stomach turn over in an uncomfortable way.
“Well, that’s stupid,” I said. “He should’ve paid attention when it actually mattered, and then maybe she wouldn’t have left.” I reached for a tissue from the bedside table. “If I leave, too, maybe he’ll actually decide I’m worth something.”
“Or maybe he doesn’t want to let you leave because he knows exactly how much you’re worth already.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I shrugged.
“Listen, I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything, so take my opinion with a grain of salt,” Jeremy said. “But maybe you shouldn’t write him off completely? Try to understand his side of things a little bit? I know he’s not the most open person in the world, and he’s not very good at talking about his feelings. He obviously hasn’t made you feel very loved, and your anger at him sounds pretty justified. But I think it’s possible you two are kind of going through the same thing. So, just … think about that?”
I didn’t want to think about it. My fury was safe and uncomplicated, a lofty tower where I could lock myself away and judge him. I didn’t want to consider the possibility that all those times Dad and I stood next to each other at the prep table, passing tools back and forth, he was suffering in silence, like me.
But at the same time, I couldn’t completely dismiss what Jeremy was saying. The reason I’d kept assisting my dad all this time was because it was the one way I could bridge the vast distance between us. As long as there were raccoons to stuff and birds to flesh, there was a reason for us to communicate, and I needed that—I had already lost one parent, and I couldn’t lose the other, too. Maybe Dad was doing the same thing. After all, Mom had offered to pay for him to hire another assistant for the summer, and he’d turned her down. It was possible he really did want me, specifically.
And now I had snipped the few remaining threads holding us together.
“This sucks,” I said.
Jeremy gave my back a little rub. “I wish I could help.”
I reached for another tissue to wipe my blotchy face, and my eyes fell on the blue registration folder sitting on the night table. I hadn’t opened it since our first day here, but I knew there was a ticket to tonight’s awards banquet tucked into the right-hand pocket. And as nervous as it made me, I suddenly knew what I had to do.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’ve helped a lot already. But I think I can handle the rest on my own.”