i
DreOfTheDead: you are thoughtful and compassionate and brilliant and like no one ive ever met
DreOfTheDead: its part of why i like you
Shit. I stared at the last line. What if Dean read it like I was saying I liked him as more than a friend instead of as just a friend? I needed to clear it up without it seeming like I thought the first thing was even a possibility, which it clearly wasn’t, but I didn’t know what to say. And the longer I waited, the weirder it was going to get.
The garage door slammed shut, and I quickly closed Promethean and turned my phone facedown as my dad walked in carrying his suitcase. He looked like shit. His skin hung a little loose and he was losing weight. The election was eating away at him like a cancer.
“Hey, Dre.”
I flipped to a fresh page in my sketchbook and started working, ignoring my dad.
“Where’s your mom?”
Without looking at him, I said, “Mom’s in Atlanta. Where you sent her.”
“You’ve been alone here all evening?”
“I wasn’t supposed to be. My dad was supposed to take me to our first trapeze lesson tonight, and then we were gonna go to our favorite restaurant, but that deadbeat was a no-show.”
My dad swore under his breath. “Dre—”
“There’s pizza in the oven.” I shut my notebook, grabbed my phone, and stormed to my room, slamming the door behind me like I was thirteen again. I dug my backpack out of my closet and started tossing things in for the trip to Rhode Island. My plane was scheduled to take off at six in the morning, and there was no way I’d be awake enough that early to think about what I should bring.
“Planning on running away again?”
I hadn’t heard Dad open my door, but when I turned around, his head was sticking in.
“Again? I never ran away.”
Dad eased a little farther in. “When you were seven. You were angry with me then too because I didn’t buy you an elephant for your birthday. It was all you wanted. You even had a named picked out.”
“Fanty.”
“You expected he would fly and that you’d go on adventures.”
“I’m not running away,” I said. “I’m doing my tour of RISD tomorrow. Don’t worry, I didn’t expect you to remember that either.” I stuffed my tablet and my Switch in my bag, along with a couple of books because I couldn’t decide which I might want to read.
“You want ice cream?”
“It’s late, and my flight’s early.”
Dad checked his watch. “It’s barely after eight. Come on. We’re going for ice cream.”
It was pointless trying to argue with him, but that didn’t mean we had to talk. Too bad Dad couldn’t take the hint. He spent the entire drive telling me about a guy he sat beside on the plane who kept farting and waking himself up and then thinking the awful smell was coming from my dad. I refused to give my dad so much as a smile.
Since Dad’s guilt was buying, I got two scoops of coffee and one scoop of chocolate and had them smothered in fudge and caramel and sprinkles. We walked outside into the warm, dry air. It was kind of weird being home after traveling so much. I’d grown up in Carson City, so everything was familiar, but it also wasn’t in a way. After a while, all the shops and strip malls began to run together in my brain, making it difficult to tell one place from another. We could’ve been anywhere in the country.
“I’m sorry, Dre. This debate, and McMann being added—”
“Blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard all this.”
“You don’t understand what a real threat he is,” Dad said. “He’s got people worked up and scared. He’s got them blaming anyone and everyone for their problems. If I can’t prove during this debate how bad he would be for the country, he might have a real shot at winning.”
I didn’t spend much time sitting around watching the news, but I knew what a creep McMann was, mostly because Mel had spent hours telling me. There were the reports about shady business practices, money he’d paid to women to settle sexual harassment claims, deals with the government for his facial recognition technology. None of it stuck, though. People didn’t have time to digest one story about him before three more popped up. But at the moment, I didn’t give a shit about Jackson McMann.
“Whatever. It’s fine. Can we go home now?”
“I know I messed up, but—”
“No