I press my face against the glass, the froth of scarlet fury still bubbling in my throat. The rumbling of the floor beneath me rattles my legs, and I clutch my sports bag protectively to my chest. My mind churns with the rhythm of the engine, and I kick nervously at the bars beneath the seat in front of me. Trying to calm the violence in my mind, I check my watch. The hands inform me that it is 1:53AM, though I know that the stupid timepiece is fast by about six minutes. Either way, it has been about six hours since I began this mad quest. Even now, I am unsure of my precise destination, though I have a stable idea. The bus driver is eyeing me with increasing suspicion in the mirror. I try to keep my eyes off him, for my eyes are always the stool pigeons to my guilt. A man who has recently left the seat nearby has forgotten his newspaper, I realize. My boredom gets the better of me, and I reach across the aisle and seize it. The front page is chock-full of woe, and I absentmindedly lose myself in the tale of a young man murdered by a gang in a shopping mall. Only half of me is interested; the other half is still dwelling on my own sad events, all now past. An angry sort of depression befalls me whenever the last month crosses my mind, and I try to fight the thoughts away. With the sound of steam being released from a valve, the bus wails to a halt, and the doors are drawn open. I look over the edge of the seat, wondering which other nighthawks might require the bus at two o’clock. An aged man ambles up the steps, coughing into his hands before paying the toll. The next and only other newcomer is a girl about my age. She is African-American, with a long wool coat and a knapsack slung haphazardly over her shoulder. The older man, probably her grandfather, sits in the seat across from mine, and the girl follows. When they notice I am watching them, my eyes flick back to the newspaper. A sudden shudder and a moan beneath my feet tells me the bus has started up again. I sigh, folding up the paper. None of the stories can hold my attention. Remembering I have missed supper and have not eaten for thirteen hours, I withdraw a wallet from my pocket. It is not mine, but my mother’s. She does not know yet that I have it, or that I have her ATM code numbers memorized and could easily refill my supply. I count out five dollars; that should be enough to get me a few slices of pizza and a soda from Pizza Palace. Replacing the wallet and slipping the money into my jacket sleeve, I wait for the bus to approach a cluster of restaurants. “Are you done with that?” The voice startles me, and I look up. The girl across the aisle is looking at me. “The newspaper, I mean,” she adds. “Oh. Well, in that case, yes.” I lift the newspaper and hold it out across the aisle, and the girl takes it, thanks me, and flips through it to the film reviews. I hear her tell her grandfather that the new Spielberg movie sounds good, but the words make no sense to me. My brow is knit, and I have my head leaned against the window again. A crushing headache has overtaken me. About ten minutes later, a neon sign catches my eye, marking the Pizza Palace nearby. I hook my fingers on the stop line and pull. A small bell rings toward the front of the bus, and the driver pulls over. I collect my belongings, make my way up the aisle, and thank the driver as I exit. I have to bite my lip to hide my wince. The icy look on the driver’s face as he nods to me is all too familiar; I recognize it as the look in my parents’ eyes whenever they set their gaze on one another. It is 2:11 AM now. As I approach the Pizza Palace, I shudder in the cold of the night. I chose a bitter time to make this endeavor. Snow is falling, and I estimate that it is below zero outside. Around the outdoor vents, the snow is gray and slushy, but it is immaculate where I am standing. Reverting to a childish habit, I put out my tongue and catch a feather of crystal ice. The very air smells of snow, and there is a certain surreal aura about the wind as it whips the flakes around like debris in a cyclone. The blast of heat as I open the door to the restaurant is a shock after the chill I suffered outdoors. Like the bus, it is sparsely populated on the inside. I head up to the counter, ordering three slices of pepperoni pizza and a Coca-Cola. The cashier takes my money and her companion hands me my food, which I carry to the table farthest from the counter before seating myself. I barely taste my meal, but at least it does not disagree with me. The waiter gives me an odd look, but I ignore him. I head up to the counter, ordering three slices of pepperoni pizza and a Coca-Cola Reaching into my duffel, I extract a novel. This, I quickly discover, holds me about as well as the newspaper did. Nonetheless, I pretend to read it in hopes of masking my true thoughts to the two people at the counter. My true thoughts, I know, are nothing to share. The fiasco repeats itself in my mind, making me shiver. The sound of a fist upon the table . . . angry voices, inescapable even in the farthest-off corners of the house . . . those five words from my
Divorce
Welcome Home
Our car, rusted red paint and all, squeaks into the driveway. It lurches to a stop, shoving Mom and me forward in our seats. The boxes in the back shift, slamming against the sides of the trunk. I shut my door with a bang and stand, staring at the ugly brown house directly in front of me. The paint is peeling, the shutters look like they are falling apart, and the lawn is overgrown with weeds. My mom comes up behind me. “Do you want to go in?” she asks. I glare at her in response. She should know as well as I do that I do not want to go in. Nonetheless, Mom sticks her key into the hole and turns the doorknob. She pushes on the door, but it won’t budge. After considerable shoving, Mom manages to get the blue door open. “Welcome home, sweetie.” She gestures grandly. Frowning, I look around. There is tile on the floor, but I can tell it is the fake sticker kind. It doesn’t look real and besides, some of the pieces are peeling off. One wall has splotches of different colored paints on it, like someone was using it to figure out what color to paint something. A moth-eaten rug sits in the middle of the entryway. We move into the living room, which is just as bad. Two small windows let in a dirty, grimy light, doing nothing more than illuminating the dust that covers the floor. There is a fake-crystal chandelier hanging in the center of the room, covered in cobwebs. “Welcome home, sweetie” After seeing the kitchen, my mother and I head upstairs. There are two bedrooms—one for me, one for her. Mom gets her own bathroom, but it’s tiny. As for me, I’ll have to use the one downstairs or borrow Mom’s. My mom puts her hand on my shoulder. “It needs a little work,” she says, “but once I get the diner off the ground, we can fix it up together.” I want to believe that we will. Mom heads back outside and walks over to the car, carefully pulling up the trunk door so as not to break it. “Come on, Lilly. Let’s start unloading.” * * * “So, Lilly, I hear that they’ll have a soccer team at your new school,” Mom offers. I don’t look up from my lo mein. I played on the soccer team at my old school, where Dad was the coach. I’m not going to join this one. That would be like betrayal. Besides, nothing at my new school is going to be like it was at my old school, anyway. But Mom doesn’t give up. “They also have an art club after school. Doesn’t that sound like fun?” I shrug. “I’m full,” I mumble, even though I’ve barely touched my takeout. I leave the kitchen and head for my room, which is in dismal condition. The movers haven’t come yet and probably won’t for a while, just because we couldn’t really afford to pay for good ones. So right now, my room is empty except for a sleeping bag and a pile of boxes in the corner. Sighing, I sit down on my sleeping bag. I think of my room at Dad’s house. He’s a radio DJ, so he plastered my walls with all sorts of album-cover posters and vintage records. There’s a phonograph in the corner on a really cool retro table. My bedspread is straight out of the 1970s, with records and boom boxes spinning across a red background. Above my bed is a light-up sign that flashes Lilly. I had been begging Dad for it since I could talk, and I finally got it last year when I turned eleven. And I have my own closet, unlike here. My room at Dad’s is my place, the place where I go when life gets too fast or too confusing. It’s a place where I can slow down and think. I walk over to the boxes and pull out Dad’s photo from the top of one. He’s smiling up from a sound booth at a party. His hair is tousled and sticking out at odd angles from underneath his baseball cap, which is on backwards. His T-shirt has a picture of a guitar on it. His tattoo, the one of the record that Mom always hated, sticks out from underneath the sleeve. I pick up the picture of Dad and put it next to my sleeping bag, because I don’t have a nightstand to put it on. Then I zipper myself in for the night. “Goodnight, Dad,” I whisper. * * * “Lilly!” my mom calls. I crawl out of my sleeping bag, sore from having slept on the floor. I throw on a sweatshirt and head downstairs. “Good morning, sunshine!” My mom smiles at me. “I made waffles for our first breakfast in the new house!” When I don’t say anything, Mom’s smile wavers the slightest bit. Nonetheless, she chirps, “My, my. Someone’s sleepy! Well, hon, you better wake up soon, because we’ve got a big day ahead of us!” We spend the day cleaning. When we’ve finished dusting and washing the inside of the house, Mom and I head outside, where we start working on the weeds that are abundant in the backyard. “So, Lilly. Are you looking forward to going to your new school tomorrow?” Mom asks, trying to make conversation. I pull harder at a weed, yanking it clean out of the ground. “It’s a very good school.” Mom smiles. “They’ve got a computer lab and a library, and they’re both really big. Can you believe that, honey?” I throw my weeds into a paper bag. “I’d love to go there if I were you. You’re really lucky.” Mom grins at me. I don’t look up at her. Instead, I focus all my attention on the spider crawling up the side of a weed, pretending to be utterly fascinated. “Are you nervous,
Love
Rebecca loved that dog. If anything happened to it, I think she’d probably convince her mother to sue the vet. She’d say they didn’t give her dog enough care or that they messed up the last time she took her dog for a checkup. I’m sorry to say that I hated my cousin Rebecca’s dog. I never told her this, but it’s true. From the moment I walked in the door the first time Aunt Jess, Rebecca’s mom, asked me to babysit Rebecca, that dog and I have hated each other. I hated the way it stared at you with a kind of smirk on its face. I hated the way Rebecca let its hair grow in front of its eyes, so that you could never tell if it was looking at you or not. The dog’s name was Lawyer, named after the job Rebecca’s father used to have before he and her mother got divorced. Aunt Jess complained that he was never home enough, but Rebecca and I didn’t blame her. As he became more successful, though, we began to see less and less of him. He was always rushing from one case to another, one court to the next. After Rebecca’s parents got divorced, her father went away to college to get a degree in Library Science, and became a librarian at a library in New York. He didn’t want to stay in California because he didn’t want to have to face Rebecca or her mom, or worse, the dog. It would remind him of his past job and past family, and Rebecca’s father just wasn’t strong enough to face his own problems. “I have news about my dad! He’s coming back!” said Rebecca, excitedly Rebecca asked me to come with her to walk Lawyer one day, and I accepted, not wanting to hurt her feelings. I could tell that Lawyer was uncomfortable with me around from the second he saw me. He growled and kept casting glances at me over his shoulder. Somehow Rebecca didn’t notice. “I have news about my dad! He’s coming back!” said Rebecca, excitedly, the moment we started out down her driveway. Her blue eyes glittered in the sun as the wind ruffled through her chestnut-brown hair, which she inherited from her father. Her blue windbreaker really brought out the blue in her eyes. “Really? When did he and your mother decide on this?” I asked, surprised. “Well, I kind of figured it out myself. He sent me a letter for my birthday and at the bottom he said he missed me! Isn’t that great? And so now he’s coming back for me and Lawyer, and my mom is gonna love him again! Isn’t that great, Alice?” I cringed. “Did he specifically say that he was coming back?” I asked her. “Oh, Alice, you don’t understand anything!” she said, laughing. “He’s not supposed to say that he’s coming back. It’s supposed to be a surprise!” “I see,” I said painfully. “And where is he going to stay? I didn’t know your mother forgave him.” “She didn’t have to. He got another job, Alice. He stopped being a lawyer a long time ago. He’s a library guy now,” said Rebecca, eyes twinkling. “Rebecca, what if he doesn’t come back? What if he just misses you but doesn’t want to face you or your mom?” Or your dog, I thought to myself. Rebecca’s expression changed to a serious one. “Alice, you’re not being funny anymore. Stop teasing, because Lawyer and I don’t want to hear it,” she said to me, with a warning tone in her voice. “I’m not teasing! But honestly, just because he misses you doesn’t mean he will come back. It’s only natural for him to miss a daughter like you, but he may not come back. Do you understand what I’m saying, Becca?” I said to her. “No, I don’t. He’s my dad, and he’s coming back because he loves me. You’re the one who doesn’t understand!” she shouted. With that, she tugged on Lawyer’s leash, turned around, and sprinted home with the dog at her heels. She tripped over her untied shoelaces, but luckily she didn’t fall. Slowly I began walking to my house, which was only two blocks away. When I got home, I called my mom at work and asked her what we needed from the grocery store. She got pretty annoyed at me for bothering her, because as soon as I called I realized that the list was right next to the phone. I grabbed the list and left. As I was walking to the store, I stopped by Rebecca’s house. If there’s one good thing about living in a small town, it’s that everything is real close to everything else. Aunt Jess told me that Rebecca was not in the mood for visitors, so I just followed her into the kitchen. “Do you know what’s up with Becca, hon?” she asked me. She turned on the tap for the sink and started scrubbing away at a pan. I sat down at the table and traced my finger over the hand-stitched tablecloth. It’s about two hundred years old, passed down to the oldest daughter in each generation since my great-great-great-grandparents came to America from Ireland. “Well, she thinks Uncle George is coming back,” I said. Aunt Jess’s hand slammed down on the counter at the mention of his name. “What?” she whispered. She spun around and faced me. “See, Uncle George sent Rebecca a birthday card and said that he missed her, and now she thinks that he’s coming back for her,” I said, not daring to look at Aunt Jess in the eyes. She turned off the water and sunk into a chair, holding her forehead in her hands. I think I saw a tear roll down her face, but I wasn’t sure. “She doesn’t deserve this,” Aunt Jess said softly. “Rebecca deserves two parents in the same house, not one. I wish he’d come
