except for the dippy white cutout of a person with that curlicue hairdo against Facebook’s blue-gray background. Alex Well has no friends. Not one. Nothing is filled in. Birthday, Hometown, Current City, Relationship Status, they’ve all been left blank. In his Info section there is no contact information, no groups he is a member of, no pages he follows. They are all blank.
The only information on his wall is a status update next to the curlicued photo that says:
11:56 A.M. AUGUST 12, 2009
Hello, Aubrey. Thank you more than I can say for coming this far. I used a fake name because I didn’t know how you would respond to seeing my real name. More than anything in the world, I would like to know you. Even if it is just this. Just messages on Facebook. I can think of a thousand reasons why you wouldn’t confirm this. But I hope you will. This is Martin, your dad.
I can’t say how long I sit on my bed staring at those three letters. D-A-D. The way, when you are standing on a skyscraper and you think you might—just accidentally—jump off, I start feeling like I might—just accidentally—hit the little “Respond to Friend Request” button. So I step away from the edge and slam the laptop shut.
I lift my gaze to the teddy bears that Mom and Dad (D-A-D!) stenciled along the top of the walls before I was even born. I love thinking of them doing that together. Me still inside Mom, listening to them laughing. Maybe Dad painted a dot on Mom’s nose like in those old movies when husbands thought their wives were just so cute.
So much is exploding inside of me that I feel like a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s in the microwave. Too much has happened all at once. I stagnated for years with nothing happening, and now, all in one day, too much is happening.
I open the laptop, go back to Facebook, back to “Alex Well’s” page. I stare at the little box next to a faceless cartoon that is now a faceless cartoon of my father, and read and reread “Respond to Friend Request” roughly a million times. Then, like she always does, Pretzels—who can’t hear anything, but somehow manages to hear the refrigerator opening and the garage door going up, grumbles—and starts struggling to her feet.
This is my signal that Mom is home. I quickly sign out of Facebook. She can’t know about the message. Thinking about my dad makes her so sad. And me going away to college next year is stressing her. I can tell by the way she stares at me so much more now that she’s imagining being here without me. If she knew about this? Dad contacting me? It would upset her so much.
A few seconds later, she rattles the knob of my door, yells when she can’t open it, “Why is this door locked!”
“Why do you never knock!”
“Open the door!”
“I’m taking a nap!”
“I need my laptop to see how many I’ve got registered for my class tomorrow!”
Amazingly, it appears that her Siamese twin, Dori, hasn’t told her yet about picking me up from school. I crack the door a few inches, just enough to hand the laptop out. “I don’t see why I can’t have my own laptop. They’re not that expensive.”
“That is a discretionary item.”
This is her way of saying that I have to use the money I made working as a counselor at Lark Hill. “I would except that I don’t want to go to school naked, and, P.S., most mothers don’t count clothes as ‘discretionary’ items. For your information, Parkhaven is not clothing-optional.”
She gives me Hurt Look Number 85. I hate Number 85, which translates to I am trying not to cry because I got totally screwed in the divorce and don’t make enough to buy us all the stuff we need. I am suddenly so sick of knowing what every twitch of her face means that I want to scream. I try to close the door, but she has her foot wedged into it.
“How was band camp?” she asks in her fake, ultracalm voice, which means that she wants to scream at me but she is such a superior being that she won’t descend to that level. My level.
“Fine.”
The foot does not move. “Did you reconnect with your band friends? Wren? Amelia? You haven’t seen them all summer.”
Great, now I am getting Anxious Look Number 113, which means Why don’t you have any friends? Exactly