warm and certain I was right.
“Don’t tell me that you wanted a petting zoo, Cricket.” He was smiling, but he looked kind of scared. His eyes searched mine as if to ask, “Are you joking?”
“You couldn’t pick something out for me, but you got Alexi a…a…farm festival?” My voice was shrill, loud. I could hear it, but I couldn’t stop it, like it was coming from a different person.
“I thought you liked the jeans.” He put a hand on my back. I recoiled from it like it was a hot iron.
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“Well, what is the point?” he asked.
“I wanted you to pick them out. Only you.”
“Well, Polly and I are a team now.”
A team? Barf. “You know, maybe if you’d done something like this for Mom she wouldn’t have gotten so depressed. But you never even tried.”
“Yes, I did,” he whispered.
“Not like this,” I said, pointing to the party outside. Tears sprang to my eyes. “You never tried this hard!”
“Oh, honey.” He opened his arms, but I took a quick step backward.
“Why didn’t you fight for her? Why didn’t you fight for us?” I pressed my fingertips to my chest so hard I left a red mark. Tears poured down my cheeks. I couldn’t catch my breath. Dad tried to hug me, but I sidestepped him, turned away, and gripped the counter. “I don’t even know why you love them. Polly’s not that great and Alexi isn’t even your kid. Who knows whose kid he really is.”
“Cricket, that’s enough,” Dad said. His voice was low and angry.
I turned around. Polly was standing there, covering her mouth.
“You need to leave,” Polly said. Dad wrapped his arms around her as if she were a little girl, as if she were his one and only daughter, as if she needed protection from some awful stranger who’d barged into their home.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said to Dad, pleading. My ears were ringing. “It’s not fair. I didn’t know she was there.”
“Go to your mom’s,” Dad said, shaking his head at me. “Just get your things and go to your mom’s.”
I grabbed my duffel bag and ran out the back door.
I was at the Claytons’ house in twenty minutes. Not the Nantucket house, but the real house. The Providence one. I knew where the key was hidden, under the stone mermaid in the backyard, and I knew the alarm code. I let myself in to the peacock-blue vestibule with the rustic coat rack and the dark wood table with the curvy silver bowl on it and the portrait of the woman with the green scarf.
I climbed the stairs, two at a time, and opened the door to Jules’s room, which was stuffy and hot, familiar and safe. I kicked off my shoes, threw off the quilted coverlet, and crawled under the sheets—the cool, beautiful sheets that Nina had brought back from Italy. Nina, I thought. Nina would’ve known what to say and how to make me feel better. She would’ve given me words to hold on to as the world swung around. “Nina,” I said aloud. “Please be a ghost, please be a ghost.” I kicked my legs against the mattress and waited for the lights to flash. I listened for the house to creek, for footsteps to land, or a window to fly open, for the stereo to blare. I waited for a chill to pass over me, for her presence to be made known, but there was nothing but silence. Dead, empty silence.
I’m eighteen, I told myself. This divorce stuff wasn’t supposed to bother me anymore. I was leaving for college next year. I’d even found a really nice guy for Mom. So why was I such a wreck? And why was this just sinking in? Why didn’t this happen right after the divorce? Or when Dad got remarried?
Zack. It was sinking in because I had fallen in love. This was the thing about feelings. They find each other. You let one in and others follow. I pulled the sheet over my head, curled myself into a cocoon, and let the tears fall until I was tired and ragged and my eyes were raw and my stomach muscles hurt. An hour passed, and then another, and then I fell asleep.
It was dusk when I woke up. The light switched on. Mom stood in the doorway.
“Cricket,” she said. She ran to the bed and opened her arms. “Oh, my sweetheart, I was so worried. Oh, my dear