That night, I watched most of The Middle After. Lila and I had seen it maybe six or eight times together. It was our favorite. We’d hold on to each other and scream when the car takes the curves too fast. I stopped before I got to that scene, though. Lila could be dramatic and unpredictable and needy, but I also just missed her sometimes. Like, I wanted her to sit beside me and watch The Middle After. I wanted to brag to her about how well I’d done in Algebra II even though I hated it, or tell her about Meredith and me hiking all the way up Mount Si. Normal things. Missing something you never had should have its own word. It’s a bigger missing than regular missing.
I brushed my teeth before bed, using the same half-empty tube of toothpaste from my last visit, gross. Max left my side to guard the front door. Poor guy. Dogs never get a day off.
Around one o’clock in the morning, he started to bark. I crept out of bed and tiptoed, in case a ghost or an intruder was coming down the hall to get me. I peeked out my bathroom window, which faced the street. It was just Lila home, finally. I saw Jake get out of his car. He opened her door for her. She got out too, and her white skirt and her platinum hair glowed under the streetlight.
And then Jake shoved her up against the car, and in two seconds, his hands were up her gold shirt. I didn’t want to see that. I got back into bed and put my pillow over my head. I wished so hard that I were home. I’d have rather stayed alone in the residence hall for the entire summer than be where I was right then. I longed for home so bad, it felt like an actual ache in my chest.
After a while, I heard her come in. Max’s toenails scurried around on the floor in excitement. “Be quiet! Be quiet!” she said, being way louder than he was.
A few moments later, she pushed open my door. It was an old routine of ours—Lila would return, wake me up, and tell me about her date, all giggly and talkative, like we were slumber party girlfriends. I wanted her to notice me so bad that I never cared if it was at two a.m. I wanted to be just like her—glittery, beautiful, adored.
But right then, I didn’t feel like being the audience. I lay very, very still so she’d think I was asleep. Even with my nose tucked down in the covers, I could smell the alcohol-restaurant fumes on her clothes. “Baby?” she whispered.
I pretended to breathe in the regular rhythm of sleep. Finally she went away.
I turned my pillow to the cool side. Probably, I’ll hate that booze-restaurant smell for the rest of my life.
In the morning, I woke up to the bam-bam-bam of hammering, and the neeyroom of an electric saw cutting through wood. I looked at the clock. Nine a.m. Outside, the fog lay along the sky in thick ribbons, but I could see the spots of blue that meant it would soon clear off. Good news, because it could be hours or even all day before the fog lifted.
Unless she was working, Lila always slept late. There were rules around this. Basically—don’t even touch her door before noon. When I was little, at Papa Chesterton’s and after, Edwina always made sure I never disturbed her.
I need my sleep, Lila would say. This is the kind of proclamation people make when they don’t intend to change, like I’m an emotional person and I’m just not organized and You know us Virgos—terrible with money. I wasn’t sure what I’d do for three whole hours, just waiting for her. But I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, so I knew she’d want me to be there when she woke up.
“What do you do every day?” I asked Max. “Do you have to hold it that long?”
I watched him trot around the front garden, lifting his leg on various bushes. I filled his bowl with clean water. I found his big bag of food in the pantry.
Then I changed my mind. I took that really nice chicken breast from the fridge, one most likely meant for Lila’s lunch. I removed a knife from that new set on the counter.
They were so sharp that I had to be extra careful. I chopped, tossed the chicken into Max’s bowl. “That’s for all your hard work being a guard last night. Also, because today is my birthday.”
My birthday. Spent hanging around the house until Lila woke up. Meanwhile, last night, back at home, IT was happening to everyone else.
No. No and no and no.
The world was supposed to be my oyster, even if I hated oysters. Let’s just say the world was my plate of fried shrimp, waiting for me and my fork. The world was all the stuff I was hungry for.
Max wolfed down the chicken, slopped water all over as he got a drink, looked up at me to see what we were going to do next.
“Hey, bud, I’m sorry.” I patted his head. “But unless you know how to ride a bike, I’m going to have to leave you behind. Because I’m out of here.”
I tucked a towel and a water bottle into my pack and went to the garage. The bike Lila got me last Christmas was still there, right where I left it. She thought I was crazy for wanting one. You can just hire a car if you want to go somewhere! she said. She couldn’t believe I’d want to pedal up those hills when I didn’t have to. But that’s what we did in Seattle, especially when you didn’t have a license. And on a bike, you could be right in the center of everything.
Lila had hidden it the garage. Every time I’d go by the door, she’d scream, Don’t go in there! She wheeled it back inside on Christmas morning, and she was so pleased with herself that it made me really happy too. She was busy and beautiful and famous, but she’d planned that surprise for me. My father gave me a check inside a card that he must have sent to all his employees. Happy Holidays, it said on the front. Inside was his signature: Jeff.
“Hey, I missed you,” I said. That bike was so pretty, with its metallic speckles. The tires were a little flat, though.
I hauled it to the front garden, along with the small repair kit that came with it. I leaned over and filled the tire using the air canister. When the tire was nice and fat, I stood straight again.
It was suddenly quiet. The hammering next door had stopped. I could hear a bird tweeting and a far-off lawn mower, but that was all. I looked over at the construction site. So far, the new house was only a poured foundation and the beginning bones of a structure. Last Christmas, an old mansion had stood there. It looked like a mini Roman temple, with enormous white columns and a huge entry, but it was gone now. The new one was going to be modern, you could tell. There were lots of right angles and huge spaces for windows, where the sea and the sky showed through the skeleton.
And then I spotted him. You know, for the first time. A guy in jeans and a T-shirt, with a leather tool belt around his waist, looking at me from where he stood, high up, in that outline of a house. When he saw me looking back, he grinned. And then he whistled his appreciation for my ass, which had been in the air.
He was, I don’t know, thirty? My first thought was, Ick. And then, A construction worker, what a cliché. And then, a whole bunch of thoughts that didn’t go together.
That morning, I’d turned sixteen.
It was a number that mattered to me. It didn’t matter so much to him.