They advanced a few steps into the house. No luggage. Maybe that meant this was nothing but a fever dream. Maybe—hope ran through me like a lightning bolt—maybeI was having a stroke!
“Is this all period?” my dad asked.
“Of course,” my mom said. “Vivienne always had a good eye.”
“Place must have cost a fortune.”
“She never missed a chance to show off either.”
“It’s gloomy. I keep waiting for a Brontë sister to levitate into view.”
“No wonder he’s been so depressed. You know he’s predisposed to depressive episodes. I told him to buy a SAD lamp.”
My dad made a considering noise. He paused to run his finger along a decorative table. “I’ll tell you what—he’s beenmakinghimself sick, locked up in this drafty old place.”
It’s not drafty, I wanted to say, but I still hadn’t recovered the power of speech.
“Holed up here,” my mom said. “That’s what wounded animals do, you know. They hide.”
I haven’t been hiding, I tried to say, but I was still in the process of (I hoped) having my first stroke.
“Eating God knows what,” my dad said. “Junk food. No exercise.”
No, I thought. No. No. Indira made sure everyone ate plenty of vegetables (you skipped them at your own peril), and I gotplentyof exercise because Bobby had told me—firmly—that I wasn’t allowed to put a mini-fridge and microwave in my bedroom. Even though it would have saved me about six thousand steps every day. (He also wouldn’t let me get a set of sheets for my bed that made it look like I was sleeping in a giant taco—presumably, I was the ground beef—but that had been a separate, uh, disagreement.)
“It’s going to be a nightmare to unload this place,” my mom said.
“In this market?”
“Should we think about keeping it?”
My dad made a considering noise. “We’ve talked about a vacation home.”
Bobby made a soft, unhappy noise.
“First things first,” my dad said, “we’ve got to get him straightened out.”
In the exact same tone of roll-up-your-sleeves-for-some-mind-bending-parenting, my mom said, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.” And then, standing approximately five feet from me, she screamed, “Dashiell!”
I just about jumped out of my socks.
“I’m right here!” I shouted back. “Quit shouting!”
“You are?”
“Don’t lurk, Dashiell,” my dad said.
“He used to do that when he was a child,” my mom said. “Remember?”
“I’m not lurking. I’m standing in plain sight. I’m—”
But then my mom swooped in for a hug. My dad was right behind her—we exchanged a manly handshake, and he even gripped my shoulder to convey his boundless parental love and affection.
I put up with about five seconds of it before squirming away and saying, “What are you doing here?”
They were close enough now that, even in the low light that filtered in from outside, I could make out the look they traded—it was a familiar one, a shared amusement with a hint of exasperation, a kind of incredulous disbelief that I didn’t understand something that should have been perfectly obvious. And it probablywasperfectly obvious—to them, in their tiny, two-person universe.
Bobby shifted next to me, and a little too late, I said, “This is Bobby. My boyfriend. Don’t talk to him. Actually, don’t even look at him. Bobby, same goes for you.”
