True (True Believers #1)(8)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“It’s just . . . no. The answer is just no.”

Kylie had dropped her sweatpants as well, and she stood in her pink bra and thong, hands on her hips. “This could be good for you. Now get dressed, we’re going out.”

“And the answer to that is no, too.” I pulled the covers more firmly up to my chest. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to lie in bed until Sunday morning.

She gave a cluck of disapproval. “Lame.”

“Yep.” I ate my crackers and watched them move around the room getting ready, transforming from Zumba enthusiasts to sexy partyers, cle**age out, miniskirts on. When Jessica pulled out the false eyelashes, I knew they weren’t playing. This was a commitment. They were in the mood for an all-nighter—strobe-lights-flashing, vodka-flowing, booty-grinding kind of adventure, and I wasn’t going to see them until after a post-partying Denny’s chow down on ham and eggs at five a.m. Guys would be flirted with but not allowed to touch, and it would be a girl-power night out on the town.

Then I said something stupid. “Is Tyler going with you?”

“See!” Kylie said in total rapture. “You do like him!” She spritzed a cloud of perfume in my direction.

Coughing, I sputtered, not even sure why I had asked. “I’m just worried that he might come back here and camp out at my feet again.”

“Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes.

Then they air-kissed me, waved, and were off, the door slamming behind them, leaving me alone in a dorm room littered with discarded boobie tops and hair products. The feathered mirror above Jessica’s bed fluttered from the draft, and I was left alone with my thoughts and the pretentiousness of Hemingway and Tennessee Williams awaiting me.

Plus a strange yearning for something I didn’t understand and wanted to ignore.

Resolutely, I got up to shower and tried not to listen for a knock at the door.

Chapter Three

My dad pushed up his glasses and smiled at me through the computer screen. He was sitting in the family room of our house, and he was wearing a Cincinnati Bengals jersey, which looked incongruous (and too big) on him. He had never been a sports lover and was definitely the science nerd, preferring to stargaze than head down to Cincinnati for a baseball or football game. So he looked a bit like a middle-aged man wearing a costume, but I knew that his girlfriend Susan was big into football and he was trying to be open to new things.

He was my dad, but different. Altered.

Even the family room behind him looked different from when I had left home at the end of the summer and Susan had moved in. The house hadn’t changed for twelve years after my mother died, the same plaid furniture and oak kitchen table in the exact same spots where she had placed them, a border with faded red apples circled the breakfast nook. The pictures were frozen in the early two thousands, me with gap-toothed grins and as a chubby baby splashing in a bathtub. There was the requisite engagement portrait of my parents with big hair, her hand lay carefully over his in a phenomenally cheesy pose, and their wedding photo, all framed in the same honey oak color as the dinette set. My father had never added another picture to the gallery, and I seemed to have stopped growing at the age of eight.

There was only the past and never the present.

But Susan had replaced the plaid sofa with a nice neutral, modern one that Dad was perched on, and she had painted the existing coffee table and all the picture frames a crisp black. So there were the same photos, with large sweaters and overalls below faces that no longer existed, and while they were same, the framing was different.

Altered.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. There was no question that the old furniture was dated and ugly, but the more there was of Susan, the less there was of my mom.

Susan herself popped up behind Dad, leaning over the back of the new couch. “Hey, Rory, how are you?” she said, her voice pleasant and neutral.

“I’m fine. I’m just freaking out over this inorganic chemistry exam I have,” I told her. I did like Susan, though I didn’t necessarily feel close to her. But she had been dating my dad for three years and she had never tried too hard. She hadn’t forced herself on me or cheerfully suggested shopping trips or bonding spa appointments. She had stood back and let me adjust to her presence, and she wasn’t fake.

It was clear that she cared about my dad and that was cool. I appreciated it and appreciated even more that her being in his life didn’t really affect mine. She had moved in right after I had left for school this year, and I hadn’t been home for a weekend yet. I knew my dad was stressing about the whole thing, sure I was going to collapse into juvenile angst over his girlfriend, but while I kept waiting to resent it, so far I didn’t seem to really care. If she turned my bedroom into a sports museum, though, we were going to have to throw down.

“Oh, God, I can’t help you with that. That’s your dad’s area.” Susan was a high school English teacher and cheerleading coach.

For real. My dad, the chemical engineer who got excited about breakthroughs in biodegradable plastics, with a cheerleading coach.

“But I’m sure you’ll ace it. You always do.”

Usually there was truth to that statement, but I had just wasted an entire Saturday sleeping off the worst hangover of my life. “I’m going to try,” I said. “But I think Hemingway is going to have to take a backseat. I can’t read and study at the same time and my classes for my major are more important. What are you guys up to?”

“We’re having some people over for the game later,” my dad said, and he sounded proud.

“That’s cool,” I told him, and I meant it. He was even more socially awkward than I was, tending to bore the snot out of people with his theories on making plastics from plant materials and the solution to the economic crisis. Without my mom to guide him through the maze of small talk, he had gotten very limited in what he did outside of work and driving me to school and science camps.

After Mom had died, my dad hadn’t been able to handle the Girl Scout meetings, sleepovers, playdates, and sending birthday treats to school. Between the grief and his naturally introverted personality, it had been beyond his scope of ability, and he didn’t return phone calls from the other moms and forgot to fill out field-trip forms. Eventually I stopped getting invited to parties, and I was dropped off the rosters of all my grade school clubs, so that by the time middle school rolled around, it was just dad and me in a house that never changed.