week, and I hadn’t gotten to spend time with him since I was little. My dad had a big fight with his family when I was younger, accusing my grandfather of destroying the environment, exploiting his workers, and enriching himself off of other people’s suffering. He’d been ex-communicated ever since.
I mean, my dad was right. That side of my family was crazy rich with Texas oil money, and my grandfather’s company was terrible. But originally, Eddie sided with my grandfather, so my dad lost contact with his whole family. He took the money he’d inherited up till that point and invested it in clean energy technology. Started his own company and did his best to make the world a better place ever since.
We were still crazy rich—turns out clean energy can be just as lucrative as fossil fuels—but my dad was trying to undo some of the damage his family had caused over the past couple centuries.
So when Eddie had gotten in touch with him a few months ago, saying he wanted to make amends, my dad had jumped at the chance. My mom was a little more skeptical and wondered if Eddie’s sudden desire to reconcile was financially motivated. But my dad missed his family, and had, as my mom put it, a stupidly big heart.
I must have had one too because I was excited to see my uncle again after all these years. But I never even got the chance.
We’d spent the first day of our trip at those fancy hot springs and mud baths. The second day, we’d gone dog-sledding, which I’d always thought was more of an Alaskan thing, but I guess some enterprising Icelander had realized Americans will pay money for anything if you can convince us it’s exclusive. The third day…
I squinted into my blindfold, not that it made a difference to the complete and total nothingness that I could see, and tried to remember the third day of the trip. Something about a cave—no, a volcano. That was it. We’d toured this dormant volcano, and then we were going to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah that evening.
My dad was a lapsed Catholic, and given the way things stood with his family, he’d happily embraced my mom’s traditions. Hanukkah wasn’t actually for another week or so, but since my sisters were available now, we’d decided to have our own version a little bit early.
We’d gone to the bar at an ice hotel after the volcano tour, and I’d innocently slipped a bit of hákarl—fermented shark meat, a national delicacy in Iceland, God knows why—into Letty’s glass before she’d taken her shot of brennivín, which led to her gagging and threatening to kill me in my sleep.
She’d even called me by my full name—Ariel Joseph Sachs-Vaughn—the way my mom used to when I was in trouble. It’s kind of a mouthful, and no one ever knows how to pronounce Ariel right anyway, so I’ve gone by Ari for as long as I can remember.
Since Letty did actually possess the ninja skills to carry out her threat, I’d apologized profusely and promised to make it up to her with my gift that night. A lie, of course. My gift to her was a creepy painting of a crying clown that I’d found at a Goodwill back in California and hidden in my luggage. But she didn’t need to know that yet.
My parents were still ridiculously in love, even after thirty years of marriage and kids, so they were canoodling like teenagers in a corner of the bar, and Letty and Leah had started up an old argument over who was really at fault in The Great Strawberry Lip Gloss Disappearance of 2004.
Spoiler—it was neither of their faults. I was actually the one who’d stolen it, at the tender age of seven, and I’d eaten half the tube before I realized it didn’t taste very good.
They were so engrossed that I ended up leaving them at the bar and heading back to the hotel where we were staying, by myself. I’d gotten maybe a hundred yards down the street before I’d stopped in my tracks, staring at the aurora borealis lighting up the sky. I’d been so wonderstruck that I hadn’t even realized someone was behind me until I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“I promise, no more shark meat,” I’d said, turning around to roll my eyes at Letty, who I figured was the most likely person to have followed me out of the bar,