I hadn’t taken my photo editor job very seriously, but when our first issue came out and the photographs were terrible, I started to pay closer attention. I began stopping in at the Owl office after last period, partly for quality control and partly because I didn’t have anything better to do.
One day, after school, I was there with Emma Van Buskirk. We were putting the final touches on the next issue. We didn’t really know each other, but that night we talked for hours. We talked about the magazine, college, what kind of jobs we hoped to have someday. Eventually the janitor came and kicked us out. So then we went across the street to Wendy’s.
At Wendy’s we talked about less lofty things.
“You know what I heard?” Emma said, munching on her Wendy’s Caesar salad. “I heard Bennett and Hanna had a thing over the summer.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, playing dumb.
“You know those people. Is it true?”
“It could be.” I shrugged. “They seem pretty different though. On a social level.”
“Really?” said Emma. “I think they’re perfect. She’s a coke whore. And he’s got the coke.”
I looked at Emma. “Hanna’s not a coke whore,” I said.
She scoffed. “That’s not what I heard.”
“Who did you hear it from?”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Everyone. She’s always done coke. Her and Claude used to do it every day in the parking lot.”
This wasn’t even remotely true. But I wasn’t going to argue with Emma Van Buskirk. One thing about a big public high school, the people who weren’t popular, who’d never gone to a real party, who’d never had a girl or boyfriend: They had some pretty weird ideas about the people who did.
• • •
In October, my mother came to my room one night and asked if we could talk. I was like uh-oh. She sat on my bed in this certain way, like she had a big announcement. I thought: We’re going to have to move. That seemed inevitable. The two of us in that huge house, it didn’t make sense. But that wasn’t it. It was my father’s new girlfriend. She was pregnant. I was going to have a baby sister, or a half sister, or a stepsister, or whatever the proper terminology was.
Alexis Colby was the name of my father’s girlfriend. I found this out two weeks later when I met the two of them at one of my father’s downtown restaurants. That was where my dad lived now, in one of the brand-new high-rise apartment buildings in the center of downtown.
“It’s very convenient,” he was saying, while we waited for Alexis. “I can walk to the courthouse from my front door. It takes five minutes. And if it’s raining, the streetcar is right there.”
I nodded and studied my menu. It was hard to stay focused. Alexis Colby was twenty-eight. I hadn’t heard this detail before. My dad was fifty-one.
“The parking is not the best,” my father continued. “The spaces are quite small. Mine is marked compact, and though the Mercedes Coupe might technically be considered a compact . . .” He was babbling. He was nervous too, more nervous than I was. Which I found alarming. I wanted the waiter to come talk to us.
• • •
Alexis finally appeared. She had light brown hair, a pretty face. She was slim, athletic looking. Her pregnancy was not visible, not that I could see. She was dressed up, with makeup and lipstick—not slutty, just like you would be if you worked in a lawyer’s office.
My father stood up when she arrived. I had never seen him stand up for my mother. The situation was so strange, so surreal, I did nothing. I sat there. I watched my father kiss her cheek. He held her wrist for a moment. He was in love with her, I could see. Which was so weird.
Alexis took her seat. I averted my eyes. My father continued to smile and gush. When I dared to look up, Alexis smiled at me. It was a complicated smile. Shy, but also a little bit superior, I thought.
Alexis had attended the University of Arizona. That’s where she was from: Scottsdale, Arizona. It was very hot there. There were scorpions in her backyard, growing up. Once she graduated from college, she had trained briefly in homeopathic medicine. Then she was going to be a lifestyle counselor. Eventually she began working in her uncle’s law offices part-time. She liked the law. That’s how she ended up in my dad’s office. Now, though, she wasn’t so worried about work. She was thinking more about the pregnancy. She was overwhelmed by it. She was not like some of her friends, who had planned their entire lives around motherhood. She wasn’t sure she was ready for it. But she would manage. She was thinking of it as a journey, as one of life’s great adventures. When she said that, she reached over and held my father’s hand, which made me almost spit out the food in my mouth.