it. Maybe because my parents have asked me to be mute, and now I am.
Instead I say, “I think I should go home sooner than August. Like, in a week or two.”
Her smile wavers. “No.”
“Mom.”
“Claude.”
I stare at her and she stares back.
I say, “If the separation was his idea, he should have been the one to go.”
“My work is flexible. His isn’t.” She sighs, and suddenly she doesn’t look sad or tired or like she’s trying to make the best of things. She looks angry. “And I’m protecting him again.” She shakes her head at the ceiling and then turns her eyes back on me. “I never want to disparage your dad to you, but I’ve got to learn to stop doing that.”
“Probably.”
“Here’s the truth. I didn’t want to leave home either, not after we decided to separate. He didn’t tell me we had to leave, but I couldn’t stay, not in that house, and not in Mary Grove. I hope you can understand that.”
But August might be too late. Yvonne will replace me as Saz’s best friend, a best friend she can also sleep with, so guess what? Yvonne wins. And Wyatt will marry Lisa Yu and I will die here on Virginity Island.
Instead of saying any of this, I get up from the window seat and hug her. I whisper into her hair, “I hope the museum is everything you want it to be.”
* * *
—
Ten minutes later I’m alone except for Dandelion, warming himself in the sun that hits the dining room floor. It’s been nineteen hours since I’ve talked to Saz, and this is the longest we’ve ever gone, our whole lives, without hearing each other’s voices. I try to imagine what she’s doing. If she’s with Yvonne. I tell myself not to feel jealous, but I do, even though Yvonne isn’t me and I’m not Yvonne and we mean different things to her. I think of my dad in our house all alone except for our dog. I say to Dandelion, “You may not miss Bradbury, but I do.”
So it’s just me.
And my thoughts.
And so much silence.
I pick up a book, the latest Celeste Ng, a novel I’ve been saving for summer days just like this one. But the problem with reading is that it’s too easy to get distracted. I read the same words over and over, and it’s like reading air or clouds or something else intangible. I set the book down and look out the window. The trees are the kind that come alive when they think you’re not watching. I sit waiting for them to move, to give themselves away. They stay perfectly, unnervingly still except for the Spanish moss swaying in the breeze.
I get up and wander the living room, looking at the framed pictures, the shelves. Addy’s books are mostly beach reads, dog-eared with bent spines, spanning the past twenty years. I pull out The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort, which looks as if it hasn’t been opened since the 1970s, and flip through the pages. The illustrations make me think of police sketches, and there is hair everywhere. I’m so mesmerized I don’t even sit down. I just stand there reading.
Never blow into the vagina. This trick can cause air embolism and has caused sudden death.
“Oh my God,” I say to Dandelion. “You won’t believe this.” I keep flipping and reading. Each entry is funnier and more outdated than the next.
Vibrators are no substitute for a penis.
cassolette: French for perfume box. The natural perfume of a clean woman: her greatest sexual asset after her beauty.
I say to the book, “How about her brain?” But the book seems uninterested in this. Instead it advises women to protect and cherish that natural perfume as carefully as they do their looks. Two chapters later, the author sings the praises of the “well-gagged woman.”
And that’s it. I’m done with Dr. Alex Comfort. I slide the book back onto the shelf and hunt for the TV. There are famously no televisions on the island, and it takes me a minute to find where Addy has hidden hers. I study the DVD collection stacked beside it. I pull them out, one by one, and even though I’m a sucker for music and books and films from olden times, there’s nothing I want to watch, except maybe the last one, a movie Saz has mentioned to me more than once. It’s French, black-and-white.