Chapter Two

Here it was, bright and early on a crisp Sunday morning, a time when most normal girls were hard at work on their beauty sleep. Me? Not only couldn’t I sleep last night, since my traitorous mind kept rewinding to mental snapshots of Quattro, but then I had to go and download the pictures from yesterday’s photo safari. Quattro’s flaming orange Polarfleece added the missing vitality from all my previous shots of the Gum Wall. Stunned, I must have studied the series for a good hour. One photo was even portfolio worthy. Sleep was pretty much impossible after that, so I was awake when Dad switched on the overhead light, blinding me in my tiny bedroom.

“Good,” he said, “you’re up.”

“Dad,” I groaned, since awake didn’t mean alert.

He waggled a glass vial enticingly as if it contained a magical elixir. I knew better: The stoppered test tube was filled with bedbugs—ugly, crawling bloodsuckers he had scooped out of an apartment complex two days ago. “You mind hiding this?”

From down in the kitchen, I heard Auggie bark, high-pitched and happy, which meant that my mom was up, fixing the first of her three daily Americanos sweetened with both chocolate and vanilla syrup. Before Auggie could eat her own breakfast, though, she had to complete her sniff-and-search exercise. She yipped again, raring to work. I hadn’t been bragging emptily to Quattro yesterday: Auggie truly was the best canine bedbug patroller in the Northwest, a high-energy mutt we’d rescued from a pound two years ago.

“Hey, kiddo,” said Dad, leaning against the doorjamb, “I’m really sorry about missing our photo safari. Next weekend, we’ll go.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. He turned to leave. Given Dad’s spotty track record, I had my doubts. If it weren’t for his pictures hanging on our walls, I’d wonder if he actually looked for excuses not to photograph. His commitment to customers had trumped birthday parties, soccer play-offs, and even one of my cousins’ weddings. My brothers had a bet riding on Dad missing our long-awaited climb of Mount Rainier this summer and wanted me in on it. But I hadn’t answered any of Max’s texts since my breakup with Dom, and I wasn’t going to start now.

I yawned. Around four in the morning, I had done some serious online ogling of a professional-grade camera, the same one that my favorite National Geographic photographer had raved about in an interview. After three years of shooting senior portraits and children’s birthday parties, I could finally afford to buy the camera, but I still hadn’t. Couldn’t.

Afraid? I heard Quattro ask.

Frugal and discriminating, I retorted in my head now, as I swung my feet to the floor.

“Hide it in a really good spot. She’s been getting sloppy lately,” Dad called on his way downstairs.

As hard as I tried to ignore the bugs inside the glass vial, I couldn’t help looking. While you might think bedbugs are microscopic, allow me to educate you: They are not. Bedbugs aren’t just visible to the human eye; you could go mano a mano with one as it plunged its outstretched pincers into a particularly succulent patch of your skin. So that flimsy silk cloth, cut from one of Mom’s discarded scarves and clamped on top of the vial with a metal ring? That insubstantial barrier made me nervous, but Auggie needed to be able to sniff out their pheromones.

“Um, Dad, these are the dead ones,” I called, frowning, as I trotted down the staircase. Dad usually kept a decoy vial to test Auggie, since she was only rewarded for finding live bedbugs. This was the second time in a week Dad had made that mistake.

He dug into his fanny pack for the right vial, shaking his head as we swapped. He said, “Old age.”

I gripped the container tight because the worst thing I could do now was drop it. Do that, and bedbugs would infiltrate our home like an underground spy cell, lurking, lurking, lurking before attacking. Once entrenched, they were a pain to eradicate, even with a bedbug-sniffing dog.

While Mom took Auggie outside, I scouted the living room for a tough hiding place. Torrid romance novels—Mom’s version of Prozac—teetered precariously next to her armchair, a sign that she was under extreme pressure at work. I swear, she must have been stressed when she was pregnant. That was the only logical explanation for how she’d managed to persuade Dad to name us after her favorite characters: Ash and Max for the twins, Shana for me. Always the lifesaver, Dad had insisted on altering the spellings of our names in case word ever leaked out about their steamy origins.

My gaze landed on the bulbous floor lamp that Mom had found at a recent garage sale. If I unscrewed the thick base, there might be room for the vial.…

“Okay, ready!” I called as I widened the front door, then retreated to the kitchen. Auggie darted into the living room, nose to the floor, with Mom holding her leash. In one minute flat, she parked herself in front of the lamp, head cocked to the side: That’s the best you can do?

Training done, Mom sang out Dad’s name—“Gregor!”—en route to the kitchen, where the table was already set with a neat stack of unopened bills and a platter of cookies for their biweekly budgeting ritual. Five years ago, on her fiftieth birthday, Mom had let her hair go silvery gray—why fight it? she had told her longtime hairdresser. But because her blue eyes sparkle as they did now, Mom is often mistaken for being years younger. “Guess what time it is?”

“Oh, baby!” Dad immediately drew to her side from where he was stretching in the hallway and planted a kiss on her lips.

“Dad! Shower!” I protested, waving my hand in front of my nose. “Mom, how can you stand it?”

Dad dropped his arm around Mom’s shoulders and answered, “True love.”

“Speaking of which…” Mom said a bit too casually. “Brian’s mother called last night.”

“You’re kidding.” I stopped midstride from going to the sink to get Dad and myself water. “About what?”

Mom’s mouth pursed. “To discuss her ‘concern’ and ‘dismay’ over your ‘pathology’ of abruptly ending relationships.”

“This,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself, “is a nightmare.”

“Just for the record,” Dad said, grabbing a cookie before Mom moved the platter out of his reach, “we’d be more ‘concerned’ and ‘dismayed’ if you stayed with that mama’s boy.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Mom crowed, proud of their riff on my love life. “Sine qua non, honey!”

“I’m so glad you find my life amusing,” I told them as I helped myself to a glass of water.

And my friends think my parents are cool? Really, Mom ought to have those Latin words tattooed on her ankle. It’s her sweet nothing to Dad and cautionary tale to my brothers and me to hold out for that one necessary condition, that absolutely essential quality that we couldn’t live without in a person. Without that sine qua non, says Mom, every relationship is doomed to fail, no matter how smart the girl is, how good looking the guy, how much attraction there might be in the beginning.

Dad’s phone rang, and I plucked the cookie out of his hand as he walked past me toward the porch to take the call.

“So, honey,” Mom said when we were alone in the kitchen, casting me a sidelong glance, “maybe you should spend some time thinking about your sine qua non?”

“Mom.”

“Or take a break from boys for a little while.”

“Mom.”

“A no-boy diet for a couple of months. Really, you should consider it.”

“Hang on,” I protested, taking a large bite of the cookie. “You’re the one who told me you’d shave my head if I got married before I’m thirty. So why should I get serious about anyone when I’m sixteen?”

With a rueful laugh, Mom said, “True, but maybe you’d go easier on their hearts if you knew what you wanted.”

“I was wrong about Brian’s mom. This is the nightmare.”

Not a moment too soon, Dad returned to the kitchen, grinning as he held out his cell phone toward me. “You want to see what’s really nightmarish?”

“No!” I rushed toward the stairs. “I don’t!”

History had taught me that whatever disgustingness my father was going to share would rattle around uncomfortably in my head for days. Given a different life, Dad would have been a photojournalist for National Geographic, but he’d settled for photographing vermin, their dwellings, and his favorite subject: their droppings.

Dad closed the distance between us. “A hundred pounds of fresh bat guano.”

“Dad, stop!”

“Odiferous piles…”

Luckily, his phone rang again before he could show me the mountain of bat dung, and I raced up the stairs, dodging the tall stacks of our library books, and retreated to my bathroom. As I stepped into the shower, more than water rained on me. So did Mom’s words. Deep down, I knew she was preaching the truth about her sine qua non theory, which she had discovered from one of her self-help reads. Adventure first attracted my parents to each other when she flew past Dad on Mount Si, both of them on training runs. Kindness clinched it for them on their first real date when Dad sealed her house from future rat invasion. But it was their sense of humor that made them last twenty-six years of happily ever after.

I turned the water even hotter. As much as I hated admitting it, Mom was right: After seven months—count them, seven—of frenetic dating since Dom broke up with me, I was striking out on the sine qua non front. How hard could it be to find a replacement guy—one guy, that’s all—who could make me fall even harder than I had for Dom? But no matter how fast I cycled through boys, no one came remotely close.

Overheating, I shut the water off, cracked the bathroom door open for fresh air, and toweled dry. Downstairs, I heard Dad telling Mom, “Looks like Auggie didn’t find all the bedbugs at that new condo. I’ve got to go back.”

“But it’s Bill Day,” Mom protested.

“I know, but we can’t have them cancel the contract. Otherwise, Rainier will be a pipe dream.”

And there it was again—the sound of another grand plan cracking under the pressure of reality. Dom breaking up with me because of our “age difference.” Dad begging off yet another set of family plans. Legend has it, after Dad proposed, my parents committed to having fifty life-defining experiences and photo safaris before they turned fifty. Their Fifty by Fifty Manifesto was memorialized on a restaurant’s napkin that now hung on our kitchen wall. They’ve ticked off exactly one and a half: mountain biking through Zion to celebrate Mom’s fiftieth, and our plan to climb Mount Rainier this summer for Dad’s. If the five-year age difference hadn’t mattered for my parents, what were seven between me and Dom? At least, that’s what I had told myself.

I shut my bedroom door and stared at my computer.

Afraid?

I didn’t want to be the type of person who put her whole life on hold, waiting for perfect blue-sky conditions. So I opened the computer. The camera from my fantasy shopping expedition last night was still waiting in my cart at the online photography store. I had earned more than enough money, and the camera could be exactly what I needed to create the best portfolio possible.

I hit Buy.

An SOS text from my other best friend, Ginny, led to a twenty-minute therapy session. Before she and Reb graduated, it would have been the three of us at one of our homes, dissecting this boy problem, preferably over raw cookie dough. But now it was too hard to coordinate a three-way call, with Ginny in New York and Reb wherever she was traveling these days. My phone chirped again before I could squeeze into my favorite jeans, which I had grabbed off the floor. Another text from Ginny: So how do I get Chef Boy to notice me? Right on cue, my stomach growled. Call it Pavlovian, but whenever I talked to her, I got hungry. She was, after all, an incredible baker, perfecting her skills at the Culinary Institute of America. Starving, I’d have to hurry if I wanted a snack before collecting Quattro.

I texted back: Name a dish after him.

Done, I turned to my closet to continue my own flirtation prep. Even if you’re fishing catch-and-release style, you need the right bait. It took me a good five minutes to design an outfit that said casual yet shouted badass—skinny jeans, leather cuff, funky socks peeking over the top of motorcycle boots, all capped off with a boy’s snug-fitting button-down shirt.

As soon as I made it to the kitchen, Mom filled two mugs of steaming coffee and handed me mine.

“You’re the best!” I said, gratefully accepting the mug.

“Remember that,” she said while tucking a computer cord into her yellow tote bag, “because I need the car today.”

“Mom! I’m supposed to meet someone at ten.…”

“I’m sorry, hon, but your dad had to take the truck for an emergency, and”—she shut down the PowerPoint deck she’d spent the last week designing for a CEO at a tech company—“my own client’s having a conniption fit and needs me at the dress rehearsal after all.” She checked her watch. “If you don’t mind being about an hour early, I can drop you off, at least.”

To be honest, I was relieved, since this provided me with the perfect excuse for nixing the long drive to Portland with Quattro. I was still hashing out the logistics of getting downtown with Mom when the doorbell rang. She frowned; I shrugged. Neither of us expected anyone, but there was Reb, standing outside the front door. It’d have been weird to see anyone but Reb at nine on Sunday morning, but who knew what time zone she had just been in?

“What’re you doing here?” I asked, throwing my arms around her. Reb’s so tiny, I’m always half-afraid I’ll crush her, but from the way she squeezed me tight, I could tell she had packed on some serious muscles from lugging paint cans for her house-painting job.

“I got home a day early!”

The last time I saw Reb was two weeks ago. Juggling a part-time job and two internships during her gap year before college seriously ate into our time together. I said, “You’re free? Today?”

“But you’re not,” she guessed before greeting Mom: “Hey, Mrs. Wilde!” Then, lowering her voice so Mom wouldn’t overhear, Reb asked, “So who’s the new guy?”

“There’s no new guy.”

“Mmm hmm. So who’re you meeting, then?”

“A guy,” I mumbled.

“What was that? Did you say ‘a guy’? As in ‘a new guy’?”

“Sorry, I can’t believe it, but I have to run,” I said when Mom tapped her watch. “Mom’s driving me to my non-date.”

Without missing a beat, Reb told my mom, “I can drive Shana.” A few minutes later, Mom sailed out the door, shoving a bag of cookies at us, and as soon as she was gone, Reb wriggled her fingers at me. “Where’s your camera? Come on, show me the goods.”

“I hope you’re hungry, because I am,” I deflected as my stomach rumbled again. In the kitchen, I plated the rest of the cookies Mom had baked yesterday, an excellent first effort at replicating one of Ginny’s tried-and-true recipes. The cookie defense held Reb off for a good ten minutes, but then she brushed her hands together and settled down for some juicy girl talk.

“The Boy,” she reminded me, as she leaned forward at the table.

“Fine,” I sighed and powered the camera on, advancing to my favorite photo of Quattro. I wasn’t expecting the excited little flutter in my stomach at his expression: searing. He stared straight into the camera as though daring me to look away. When I angled the camera toward Reb, her lips curved into a smirk. “Well, hello, New Guy. What time’s the date?”

“This isn’t a date,” I told her, and glanced at the clock. Time had sped up the way it always did when we were together. It was now nine thirty. I sprang to my feet. “Oh, shoot, we gotta go.”

I quickly ushered Reb outside as I grabbed my messenger bag and tucked the camera back in safely. After locking the front door, we dashed through my pocket neighborhood of fifteen storybook-size cottages, built on a plot of communal property adjacent to wetlands. My family had transplanted here after the twins left for college, seven years ago, downsizing so my parents could afford two tuitions and a mortgage. As we exited the gate to the street where Reb had parked her minivan, she asked, “And you met this mystery man how?”

“When he ruined my picture at the Gum Wall.” I supplied the details about yesterday’s fiasco as we settled into the minivan. Few people aside from Reb and Ginny could understand my frustration about losing the perfect shot for my portfolio. But after discussing a novel together every month for the past four years in our mom-and-me book club, we Bookster Babes knew virtually everything there was to know about one another, from smoking pot (why kill my few brain cells?) to self-starvation (Ginny’s coconut chocolate-chip cookies; need we say more?) to sex. (Reb just lost her virginity to her longtime boyfriend, Ginny had come close, and I was the Virgin Queen.) Maybe I’d surreptitiously read one too many of Mom’s relationship books—and I’d definitely heard one too many of Mom’s sine qua non lectures—but I was holding out for true love. Anything less than that just seemed to make sex meaningless. And I, for one, refused to be meaningless.

Still, not even my besties knew about Dom. At least, I didn’t think they did.

Hands on the steering wheel, Reb asked, “Where to?”

“The Four Seasons.”

“Fancy.”

“He’s in town to scope out UW.”

She waggled her eyebrows at me and put the minivan into drive. “An older man, huh?”

Don’t you think you should have told me you were underage? I blushed at the memory of Dom’s parting words, answering now more defensively than I intended: “He’s just a year older.”

At my combative tone, Reb’s eyebrows furrowed. “What’s up with you?”

“Sorry, just a little sensitive, I guess,” I apologized, as I dug out the cookies my mom had pushed on us, handing one to Reb as a peace offering. “So Brian had his mother call mine yesterday.”

“She did not call your mom.”

After a therapeutic bite of butterscotch cookie, I gestured with the remnants. “She actually told my mom I was a pathological heartbreaker! Like I had some kind of disease!”

“That’s just wrong, but…”

“What?”

“Okay, I’m not saying you’re pathological or anything,” Reb said carefully as she glanced over her shoulder to change lanes, “but what’s with all these guys? I mean, it’s like you’ve become some kind of Ellis Island: Give me your jocks and your losers.”

“Reb, not you, too,” I said. One analysis of my love life a day was more than enough.

“Well, what about that guy Doug? The one who used more product in his hair than I ever had.”

“Or ever would.” I shrugged. Three dates in a row full of excuses for why he was perpetually late, and it was good-bye, Doug.

“And what about that control freak? Mr. Texter Guy?”

I frowned, trying to remember. “Oh, you mean Stephen? Yeah, he was a mistake.” After two dates, he thought he had the right to monopolize my calendar. So I voted him off mine.

“And Brian obviously lived in some kind of self-sustaining ecosystem of him, himself, and his mom,” Reb said.

At that, we both laughed the way she, Ginny, and I do on late summer nights in Reb’s treehouse, raucous and loud, when we’re hyper from too much sugar and too little sleep.

“They’re all nice guys,” I said.

“Yeah, and they’re all pretty good looking and can form complete sentences, but, Shana, no.” Reb slowed when we hit the traffic going into downtown Seattle. “The longest you’ve been with anyone in the last—what? year?—has been a week.”

“Two weeks.”

Her hands clenched around the steering wheel like she was strangling someone. Then, she turned her gaze from the road to peer closely at me before looking away. “I’m not sure what happened, but when you’re ready to talk…”

As used to Reb’s spot-on insights as I was—after all, the women in her family had uncanny premonitions—I felt flustered and embarrassed. I clasped my hands together. According to my friends, I was the quote-unquote idiot savant of boys. Little did they know the truth: I was pure idiot. Eight dates over one summer with Dom back when I was almost sixteen shouldn’t have slayed me. I knew that. I was Little Miss Rah-Rah Independence on the outside, chanting about seeing the world before settling down, but I had harbored a secret fantasy of me and Dom. He wasn’t just older and wiser, and he didn’t just have to-die-for biceps and superhero shoulders. He was turning his Big Plans for his life into reality, halfway done with business school and had already seen a huge chunk of the world. In other words, he was everything high school boys were not and he was everything I thought I wanted. I could so easily picture him in the future with his jet-setting career, and me with mine. It was a match made in sine qua non heaven.

Or so I thought.

I fidgeted with my seat belt, then switched the subject abruptly: “What’re you up to this week?”

Reb’s primary job was helping her grandmother lead tours to sacred places around the world, like Bhutan, where the gross national product is measured in happiness. I was envious—can you imagine the photos Reb could make in locales that most people never visit? But she was content with the camera feature on her cell phone. It killed me.

Reb took her eye off the traffic to stare at me. “Oh, my gosh, you know that treehouse builder I like?”

I laughed. “You mean, the one you’re obsessed with?”

“Well, a new resort in Bend asked him to build a treehouse restaurant. Zip lining will be the only way to get in. And he wants me to join his team.”

“That’s so cool! So when are you starting?”

“In a few weeks, right after Machu Picchu,” Reb said as she merged onto the exit ramp that would deposit us a few blocks from Quattro’s hotel.

“Oh, just Machu Picchu,” I teased with a careless wave.

She gasped so abruptly, I thought we were about to smash into the car in front of us. Instead, Reb reached over to grab my arm. “You should come! There’re two spots left. You could take one of them. You’d be saving me.”

“Reb.” I gasped as her boa constrictor grip squeezed tighter. “My arm. Losing circulation.”

“Oh, sorry.” She released me. “Only two hundred people can be on the trail, you know. And all the trail passes have been sold out for the season. What do you think? It’d be an adventure.”

Adventure. I could practically hear Quattro’s echoing challenge: I thought photographers leaned into adventure. I sighed. “I really can’t. Midterms. I can’t even stand the thought of studying for them twice.”

Nearing Quattro’s hotel, I stole a surreptitious look at myself in the side mirror. Miraculously, my lip gloss was still in place.

“Okay, I know this is going to sound like whining,” Reb said, glancing at me with an anxious expression, “but the trip’s going to be rough. Grandma Stesha is really worried about some of the people who’re going on it.”

Who wouldn’t be? Her grandmother’s tours attracted a certain type of clientele, the kind who believed in fairies and water sprites, crystals and auras. Reb had told me once that Stesha was a rock star in spirituality circles, with some clients signing up for a new Dreamwalks trip every single year. So I guessed, “Repeat customers demanding to see impossible star alignments or something?”

“No. A couple of grievers.”

Grieving. Now, that I understood. Time might heal all wounds, but here it was, mid-March. Seven months and three days after Dom broke up with me, I was still waiting.

Once upon an almost-sixteenth birthday, my brother Max was going to miss my big day because he was moving to San Francisco for a new job at a PR agency and wouldn’t have the time or money to come home in seven weeks to celebrate. This, after being gone for two quarters in London already. So he promised we’d spend his last day in town together, only him and me, starting with a shot of espresso (so adult!) at a coffee shop near the university where he had just finished his MBA. I should have known better when he suggested I bring my computer “just in case.” After we ordered our drinks, Max gave me the first of my presents: a shapeless UW sweatshirt. I hadn’t even taken a sip of my espresso when he had to take an “important call.”

“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Max promised before he darted out of the coffee shop for a last-minute meeting with the professor who’d connected him to his job. “An hour and a half tops.”

Three hours later, Max hadn’t returned, and my coffee was long finished. Chilled from the overeager air-conditioning, I slipped on the sweatshirt. Still cold, I walked out into the hot July sun, lost in a fog of color, texture, and imagery from whittling a few weeks of photo safaris down to a single photo essay. Was the fall fashion trend in two months really going to be about long gloves, beanie hats, and boy trousers? Maybe it was going to be plaid paired with—

“You think you know everything!” a guy vented in the parking lot, his tone contemptuous. “You’re always the teacher!”

My eyes jerked from the blue sky to a heavyset guy as babyfaced as the petite blonde in front of him. The Yeller’s face was a bombastic red as he jabbed his index finger toward her. “You just can’t stop!”

“I was just—” she started to speak, shaking her head.

“Just! It’s always ‘just’ with you!”

Her lips clamped together. She wasn’t allowed a single sentence, except for “Yes, you’re right” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all you ever are. Sorry after the fact.” The Yeller’s next lacerating words were lost on me because I was staring at the wide-eyed girl who was caught in the hailstorm of her boyfriend’s you-you-you rage. About a year ago, the Booksters had read Reb’s pick, a novel about a girl who escaped an abusive relationship, each attack softened with a Judas kiss.

Then a black BMW screamed into the parking lot and jerked to an abrupt stop. A tall guy who filled out a black Gore-Tex jacket embroidered with UW CREW jumped from the car. He didn’t bother to shut the door but ran straight to the Yeller.

“Do you know what I’m going to do to you if you ever so much as look at my sister again?” His voice was lethal and quiet. “Do you?”

“Come on, Dom. It’s not what you think,” the girl protested.

Without a thought to my own safety, I crossed the parking lot to place my hand on the girl’s bony arm. She looked through me as if she were blind. How long had this gone on?

“Let me buy you a coffee,” I said. When she didn’t answer, I stared deep into those hurt-clouded eyes. “You need a mocha fix. Come on.”

“Go,” said Dom, his eyes focused on the Yeller. “Mona, go.”

As the door closed behind Mona and me, Dom met my eyes through the window as though we were a couple who acted in wordless synchronicity. I shivered then, not from the air-conditioning but with knowledge. I had been twice gifted on my birthday: the college sweatshirt that camouflaged the high school junior I’d be this fall and the college boy who made me feel seen.

“Anybody can be charming when you first meet him,” Reb said as we pulled up in front of the Four Seasons, the only minivan in the brick-paved entry.

My head jerked to her. How did she know about Dom? But then I realized she was talking about the boy of the moment. I said, “Quattro was hardly charming, unless you call almost running me over charming.”

“Where are you taking him?”

“I was thinking Oddfellows.” Coffee shop by day, restaurant by night, the place had a great vibe: cool without taking itself too seriously. Best of all, there wasn’t a whiff of romance about it.

“How’s about I go ahead and wait there for you?” she asked as a valet in a tidy chocolate-brown uniform started to hustle to her side of the car until he noticed me. So intent on her question, Reb didn’t notice him circling to my side first. “That way, if he turns out to be a total sociopath, I can be your personal extraction team.”

“You’re being paranoid,” I told her. The valet opened my door. I unbuckled my seat belt. “Thanks for the ride, Reb.”

“No, trust me,” she said firmly and leaned over the parking brake to peer into my face. “You can never be too sure of anyone.”

Reb should know: Her dad had up and left her family unexpectedly over the summer, not completely unlike Dom. I exhaled hard, as though I had been holding my breath.

“You’re on,” I told her, nodding. “Oddfellows in twenty-five minutes.”