the world is different. It’s a different I can feel more than see, as if something in the gravity of the earth has shifted.
There’s a short story by Ray Bradbury about a man who pays a company named Time Safari to go back in time for the privilege of shooting a dinosaur. He can only kill this specific dinosaur, which has been carefully marked, because it’s old and diseased and going to die no matter what. In killing it, the man won’t upset the balance of nature. He’s warned to stay on the path Time Safari has built. Never venture off the trails. If he kills anything else, no matter how small, it could throw off the future of the world.
And of course he goes off the path, and they almost leave him there, and when they get back to the present, it all looks just as it did when they left it. But not the same as they left it. And then—dun-dun-dun—the man finds a dead butterfly on the sole of his boot. And he knows he has changed everything.
What sort of world it was now, there was no telling.
That is how it feels in my room, in my house, in my life. Mom, Dad, Saz, sun, earth. Atmosphere. Stars. Floor. All gone.
THE WEEK OF GRADUATION
The days that follow are strange, like the aftermath of a natural disaster, when the world goes too still. My parents and I move carefully around each other, glass figures in a glass house, and when we are outside, we move even more carefully, so as not to give anything away to anyone we see.
My dad and I are rarely alone together. I tell Saz he needs to be at work early this week and ask if I can ride to school with her. She talks the entire way, but I like how the words fill the silence and the air and the hollows that have grown up inside of me.
At home, if my dad walks into a room and finds me by myself, I make up some excuse to walk out. I don’t know what to say to him right now: Please bring my dad back because I don’t recognize you, this person who’s decided to leave my mother and me. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t want to know you anymore. He seems to get this—or maybe he doesn’t know what to say to me, either—because he doesn’t push it. My mom, on the other hand, hovers. But the strange thing is that they are also acting weirdly normal. They run errands and we do our usual chores and we watch Netflix together and eat dinner together except for a night or two when Dad works late. But this is normal too.
As we ease into our everyday roles, I feel this tiny, delicate bud of hope growing in my chest. Maybe it won’t happen after all. Maybe this is some sort of midlife crisis that all dads go through. Maybe Mom will talk him out of it. Maybe it was all a mistake. I stare at the floor of my room until I tell myself that I can see it again and that it won’t break like thin ice if I walk on it.
Meanwhile, life goes on, and I try not to be shocked that it does. I go to school on Monday—my last Monday of high school—and wait for everyone to see that I’m Claude, but not Claude. The old Claude has been replaced by Robot Claude, who sits in class and walks through the halls and eats lunch and listens to her friends talk about sex and college or complain about their bodies. I’ve never realized how hard we are on our bodies. I think, Why are we so mean to ourselves? Why aren’t we happy with what we have? And then I say it aloud, and Alannis and Mara stare at me like I just told them they were monsters.
I get my period during lunch hour, which means I’m not pregnant with Shane Waller’s baby, but I barely feel it—the relief. I see Shane afterward, in calculus, and we don’t talk. He doesn’t even look at me, and it’s as if we’re strangers who didn’t go out for two months. It’s so fucking bizarre to me that one minute you can be naked with someone and the next it’s as if you never met, yet I’m so strangely okay with this that I wonder if I