ever really cared about him. Maybe Mr. Russo is right and I’m incapable of feeling.
Except that later that day I’m in the hallway outside the library when I see Wyatt Jones and Lisa Yu making out against her locker, and as I watch it happen, I can feel myself unraveling. Lisa is cooler than anyone has ever been on this earth. She is cooler than I can ever dream of being. And now she has her mouth suctioned to his. Not you, too, Wyatt Jones, I want to say. I need you to stay still, to remain the Wyatt you’ve always been. No changing. No leaving like everyone else.
Saz says, “Control your face, Hen. Look away! Look away!”
I blink at her because until this moment I didn’t know she was there. I say, “When did that happen?” And I mean Wyatt and Lisa. “Wyatt doesn’t like Lisa Yu. He likes me. Since when is she someone who gets to kiss him? That should be me making out with him, not her.” On and on. Even to my own ears, I sound like a complete and total baby.
Saz starts to sing the ice cream song, and I think, What is my normal reaction to Saz singing the ice cream song? I access my memory banks and make a face at her. She makes a face back, and I feel relieved because she thinks I’m being regular everyday Claude.
“Men suck,” she says. “That’s why I’m thankful I like women.”
That night my phone buzzes and it’s Shane. I stupidly think maybe he’s going to apologize for—what? Wanting to have sex with me? Not being the boy I wanted him to be? He’s sent a photo, and at first I’m not sure what exactly I’m looking at, but then I recognize it. Shane naked from the waist down, and the caption This is what you’re missing. Let me know if you change your mind.
There are a thousand things I could write back—Your dick is the last thing on my mind, for starters—but instead I just delete the whole thread. Goodbye, Shane Waller. I can’t remember what I ever saw in you.
* * *
—
The next morning before school, I sit on the rug in my room thinking back on the first year we lived here. My old bedroom in Rhode Island is now a hazy, fuzzy blur, but this room, even more than this house, is my home, my very first own space that I filled with me. My safe haven from everything—exams, teachers, breakups, fights with friends, the stress of the outside world. Until the day my dad walked in and took away the floor.
A knock on the door and my mom appears. She comes in and sits down next to me. Without thinking, we tilt our heads, letting them touch. We’ve been doing this since I was little.
I say, “When did you know? That you and Dad weren’t working?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Like, for a while? Or did you just find out?”
“Yes and no. I knew but didn’t know.”
My mom, who is never cryptic with me, is being cryptic for the first time in my life, and I feel my heart slow and quiet and grow very, very still because somehow this is worse than my dad sitting on my bed crying.
“Is this what you want or what he wants?”
She sighs. “Claude.”
“Mom.”
My mother never lies to me, and I’m hoping she’s not going to start now, even though, right or wrong, I already feel lied to.
“Is it what you want?” I say again.
“No,” she says, and I can tell this is the truth.
I’ve been waiting for them to change their minds and tell me they’ve decided to work it out. Instead she tells me about an island in Georgia where they send wives and children who are no longer loved, where there are no cars and no phone service, and where alligators and wild horses roam free. She tells me that we are being banished there. That as soon as I graduate, the two of us will be leaving this house, where we’ve lived for the past eight years, because my dad is sending us away.
What she really says is that we are spending the summer in Georgia on the island where my great-great-aunt Claudine Blackwood lived and died. Mom and I usually visit her family in Atlanta this time of year, so we’ve already got the perfect alibi for our friends in Mary Grove. We’ll stop in Atlanta like always and