room, I can see that her eyes are bloodshot and swollen. I swear that over the past year she’s shrunk.
I don’t know where she went, the person who was our mom for all those years. The busy, successful financial advisor, who was a decent mother until pushing Jordan became more important to my parents than anything else. She was always seemingly on board with my dad’s plans for him—all the early testing and the AP classes when he was a freshman and sophomore, all the night classes and the weekend activities to round out his college applications. Until my dad started talking about his grand plan to have Jordan apply to college our sophomore year. My mom dug her heels in and wouldn’t hear it. After that, I would hear harsh whispers from their bedroom as I came up the stairs at night, and I knew it was about Jordan and his future. I think Jordan did, too.
I’m digging my fingernails into the base of my thumb so hard I’m leaving marks.
My mom and I lock eyes, and she gives me a wobbly smile. The effort strips ten years off her life. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m sitting here in the same room as my mother, but it’s like we’re a thousand miles apart. I don’t know where her grief is—whether she still thinks about Jordan, whether she still cares. At his funeral, she could barely walk down the aisle to the front pew. But now she’s a shell and she’s hollow and it’s like my dad has almost fully eclipsed her, even though he’s almost never here.
Just as I open my mouth to say something—anything—to break this fucking god-awful silence, my dad walks back into the room.
“Joan, I’m serious, I’m done….” Voice firm, face beet red, he looks like a giant bull as he opens the fridge and pulls out a beer. My mom shrinks back against the counter, into herself, and a memory flashes into my head: my mom, years ago, driving Jordan and me to some summer enrichment camp, back when they’d sign both of us up for that stuff. We were all in the silliest moods that day, and I started making up my own lyrics to one of the songs on the radio, and Jordan joined in with his own version, and my mom laughed and laughed and laughed—so hard she started crying and had to pull over to the side of the road.
Now, I swear to god, I can see through her. She’s fading away.
My dad catches my eye, and for a split second he looks…ashamed? But then I blink, and the expression is gone, and there’s no way I really saw that, because if I know anything about my father, it’s that he never second-guesses himself. His lack of self-reflection is something Jordan and I always joked about.
My dad has stopped talking, and my mom’s sniffling again; the tension in the room is making me sick. They still haven’t spoken to me, but I don’t care.
I don’t.
I don’t.
I look at my phone and see that Lucy’s texted; she’s outside. My escape. My liberator. I try to force myself to stand, but the weight of everything presses down on my shoulders. I’m frozen.
My dad clears his throat like he’s going to speak, and all my energy slams back into my body at once. I bolt out of my seat, surprising us all, and start to babble. Gotta run, Lucy’s here, blahblahbblah—I don’t even know if I’m forming words or just making sounds. I can’t hear my voice over the heartbeat thumping in my ears. I grab my bag off the counter beside my mom, give her a smile that might actually be a grimace, and hightail it over to the kitchen door. As I pull it shut behind me, all I hear is a deafening, sickening silence.
* * *
—
Lucy’s taste in music is…eclectic, to say the least. More than half the time when I’m in her car, I have no idea what band is playing, what era they’re from, and whether anyone other than Lucy and the lead singer’s mom thinks they’re decent. I don’t care,