Mason raises his eyebrows then he grins. “Oh, Brogan wasn’t talking. She was just babbling.” He makes a “blah blah blah” motion with his hand to show how she was going on and on.
“Still,” I say. “She was makingnoise.”
“That’s for sure,” he agrees. “And honestly? The cookies weren’t all that good.”
Mason is still smiling at me, and it’s getting a little hard to stay angry at him. But I’m really trying.
“How do you stand it?” I ask him.
“Stand what?”
“Girls like Brogan.”
He shrugs.
“You probably like it,” I acknowledge. “I mean, who wouldn’t want an attractive girl baking cookies for him?”
He shrugs again. “She’s not my type, actually.”
Not his type? What didthatmean? As irritating as Brogan is, she’s objectively very attractive. Who doesn’t like strawberry-blond hair and legs that are like six feet long? Her legs are longer than my entire body.
Mason reaches into his backpack and pulls out a small package of Oreo cookies. He holds them out to me.
“Wouldyoulike a cookie, Sasha?”
“Home-baked?” I ask.
“I had them cooking in the vending machine all day,” he says with a grin.
I smile despite myself. Damn Mason for being so charming. I want to continue to hate him, but it’s surprisingly difficult. I stand up to take a cookie from him, and a piece of paper sticking out from the pile of study materials in front of him catches my eye. It’s a copy of our last anatomy quiz, with a grade of one hundred circled at the top.
That’s how I discover Mason is 20205.
And that’s when things go horribly wrong.
78
I hate visitingmy mother these days.
It takes me about two hours to make the drive from DeWitt, Connecticut, to Brooklyn—two hours I can’t spare—but I still go. I do it more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. Dad would want me to check up on her, to see how she’s doing. She’s not so young anymore, after all. So that’s why I do it.
But I’ll never stop being angry at her for the way Dad died.
Fine, he was on life support after that bout of pneumonia that spread into his bloodstream. Yes, he had a chronic, degenerative disease. But I still can’t help but feel his life got cut short. If she’d just waited a little longer, he might have pulled through. She didn’t evenaskme if I was okay with it. She just decided to take him off the ventilator, and that was it. Dad wouldn’t have wanted to die.
As far as I’m concerned, she killed him.
When I visit my mother about a month into the semester, I notice the apartment hasn’t changed much since my father died. Mom preserved it in roughly the state it’s been in since I was in high school. The furniture is scuffed and secondhand and just hanging together by a thread. The walls are desperately in needof a paint job, but we can’t afford it, and I don’t have time to do it myself. The refrigerator is still making that loud whirring noise.
I immediately start cleaning the tiny apartment. Ever since Dad died, Mom has let housekeeping fall to the wayside, and my sisters are too busy with their own families to help her out. I do three loads of laundry in the basement, wash the dishes by hand (we’ve never been able to afford a dishwasher), and vacuum the carpet.
“You don’t have to do all this, Sasha,” Mom says as she watches me fold her clothes.
She speaks to me in Russian, even though my parents were pretty strict about always speaking English around the house when I was growing up. It’s like since Dad died, she just gave up on everything, even English.
“It’s fine,” I mumble.
She watches me for another minute in silence. My mother and I have never had much to say to one another. I was always more of a daddy’s girl.
