Afternoons were made for watching old sitcoms, so I was watching reruns of The Cosby Show. It was the episode when Theo gets thrown out of his apartment for “surfing” on the floors because his dad told him he used to do that in college. Sometimes I compared my family to the Cosbys because my parents were in the law and medical fields, just like Theo’s parents. That was pretty much where the comparisons stopped. With Mom gone, I had a hard time feeling like the Cosbys.
Jenna came home around 4:00—pretty early for her. She usually went over to Josh’s house, so having her home for dinner was always iffy. “Hey,” she mumbled as she walked in the door. “Any word?” She waited anxiously for my reply. I shook my head slowly, worried how she might react.
“You haven’t heard anything either?” I already knew the answer.
“What do you think?” she said as she stormed upstairs to her room.
Before Mom left, some afternoons Jenna and she would sit down at the kitchen table, eat ice cream, and talk. I guessed they talked about girl stuff—boys, hair, make-up, and other really girl stuff that I didn’t want to even think about. I was sure Jenna missed that. Dad tried to pick up the slack at times, but Jenna didn’t go for it. It just wasn’t the same to her.
When Cosby was over, I went back upstairs to my dad’s office and sat down at his computer again. I went on to my Hotmail account and saw that I had two new messages. Nothing from Mom. One was from a dating website. As a prank, Seth had signed me up to get emails from “sexy local singles” about two years earlier, and I still got a few responses. Every once in a while I would take a look at them, purely out of curiosity of course, but this time I hit delete without opening it. I didn’t want to bother with that when the other message had the address: nthomas@email.com. “I was curious. Nthomas?” I had no idea who that could be. Then suddenly I had a glimpse of Nicole standing at her locker at school. “Why would Nicole Thomas be emailing me and how did she get my address?” I said out loud as I clicked on the message.
Tim, i hope you don’t mind i got your email from seth. i friended you on facebook but you havent responded at all so maybe you havent checked it lately? i just wanted to let you know that im real sorry your mom had to go to iraq. i should have said something to you earlier but i wasnt sure what to say you know? i thought about it today in social studies. i’ll see you in school i guess. nicole
I read the message over and over. I decided I should send her a reply. I thought about what to say for ten or fifteen minutes. I wanted to make sure I wrote the right thing. After much thought, this is what I came up with:
Nicole, thanks for the emaiL I will see you at school tomorrow. im
Smooth. Very smooth.
I opened my facebook page for the first time in months and there was Nicole’s friend request. I joined facebook because it seemed like the thing to do. Everyone was on it, and it was really the only way to stay in the loop. But after my mom left, I started to lose interest. Some kids had hundreds and hundreds of friends. I had twelve, partly because I hadn’t looked at it forever, but mainly because I didn’t know that many people. It just didn’t seem to make sense to me anymore anyway. Purposely avoiding each other all day, only to go home, sit in front of a computer, and type your conversations on a keyboard? I miss talking to my mom.