WHEN I TURNED ELEVEN, my dad gave me the best birthday present ever. It was a cream-colored cashmere sweater, and it looked spectacular on me. Everyone said so. I still had my kid-body, and life, like my wardrobe, was simpler. But I loved nice clothes back then, too, and, honestly, it was like that sweater was made for me.

Aside from the sweater, he also gave me an album full of family pictures, which frankly seemed a bit quaint and rustic, since all our photos could be accessed on the computer in a nanosecond. If I’m totally one hundred percent honest, I barely glanced at it.

But lately I’ve been pulling out that album and studying it, like I’m a detective trying to solve a crime. I look for clues to try to figure out when it all went wrong. The thing is, I never find anything. It’s a heartbreakingly happy photo album. It’s called TO OUR BELOVED DAUGHTER, and it opens with a picture of my mom and dad when they were young and wrinkle-free and my mom has an enormous belly, which, of course, contains me. They are seriously good-looking and well-put-together, as long as you ignore my mom’s neon-orange Crocs. They were apparently all she could wear ’cause her feet got all swollen in the last two months of her pregnancy. (Personally, I don’t think that is a valid excuse. There is never a valid excuse for ugly shoes.)

In the next photo, Mom and Dad are lying together in a hospital bed, and I am in my dad’s arms, wrapped in a blanket. My mom looks exhausted, and I suspect this is pretty accurate, since she was in labor for thirty-one hours. She looks puffy and gross. If I were her, I would have deleted that photo immediately. I don’t look much better; my shriveled little face looks more gremlin than human.

But I regress. The point is, in that first photo—and even in the second photo, where my mom and I both look hideous—it is painfully obvious that my parents are head over heels in love. They beam at each other like they can’t believe their good luck.

And in all the photos that follow—the three of us on my first Halloween, me wearing a pumpkin costume; my first day of kindergarten; my first dance recital; the three of us on the beach in Maui; the three of us in ski gear up at Whistler; the three of us standing in front of the world’s biggest kielbasa outside some town in Alberta when we drove to the Rockies—they still look really happy.

We all look really happy.

Now, when I look at the album, I sometimes feel like I’m looking at…I don’t know, the life of a Russian spy or something. And my dad is the spy, and the people he works for have given him this whole fake identity, and my mom and I are just unsuspecting dupes who’ve become part of his cover.

But then other times I look at it and I think, No. What I’m looking at is real. ’Cause there’s no way he could fake it for that many years…could he?

My dad has reached out to me a lot. And once or twice, I’ve tried to reach back. But…I don’t know. I just can’t get past the lie.

I agonize a lot over whether or not I’m a gayist. I mean, on the one hand, we have an LGBT club at our school and I am totally cool with that, even if I’ve been known to call the president a Tragic behind his/her back because I can’t tell if he/she is a boy or a girl thanks to all the shapeless clothing he/she wears and his/her unhelpful name (Sam).

But on the other hand, when it hits close to home, it is a whole different story. I just can’t get over the fact that my dad would rather be with men than with Mom.

Meeting Michael just now made that whole part of it very real. I knew he was the guy who’d dropped my dad off this past weekend. The guy who’d leaned in for a kiss.

I felt so depressed all of a sudden. All the good feelings from the day just vanished—poof!—like that.

And then, to make things even worse, Spewart knocked on my door. I shoved the photo album under my covers.

“Go away.”

“Ashley, I said I’m sorry. Don’t you want to know how I became school mascot?”

“No, I do not. I truly do not care.”

“Oh. Okay. ’Cause actually it was Jared—”