I stood between him and the refrigerator, which was filled with beers. Somehow, he always knew exactly how many he had left: if he hadn’t, I would have taken some for me and Jay. “Are you drunk?” I asked.
“Of course not.” He rubbed at his forehead. “Why are you always home?”
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”
He pushed me away from in front of the fridge so that he could get a Sam Adams.
“Don’t touch me,” I said.
He looked through me for a second, and then he turned away. Now that he was sending me off to my mom, I’d become invisible to him. I wondered if he’d been acting like this when my mom decided to leave the family. If I were his wife, it would have pissed me off, but since I was his son, it mostly let me do what I wanted. And what I wanted right then was to yell at him. “You’re so stupid,” I said. “No wonder Mom got out of here.”
He drank calmly, his neck bobbing, and then said, “If you want the truth, Stacey was like a flash of lightning.” He waved his hands around, spilling a little from the bottle. “She won’t stick to things—just lights them up for a second.”
My mother’s first name had basically slipped from my vocabulary, and so it was strange to hear it coming out of my father’s mouth.
“She uses fate to get out of things,” he said. “This religious kind of fated future that lets her pretend nothing she does matters. You don’t know how she is.”
The room smelled like dry, crushed leaves and alcohol sweat, and I hated the sun for coming in through the blinds to illuminate the mess of our lives.
“What she decided had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t the one who changed.” He blinked rapidly.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “I was a baby.”
“Benny, don’t cry. I wanted a son so bad. You’ll be fine with your mom.”
“I’m not crying. Why does everybody keep saying that?”
“She’s ready to see you. And then you and me, we can have a little breathing room from each other. It will be good.”
I had this crazy idea like maybe my dad was so desperate to get away from me that he’d coerced some random woman into pretending to be my mother: it wasn’t like I would be able to tell the difference, not if he found a good actress. Or maybe this really was his way to give me a relationship with my mother, and there was a chance that things with her would turn out okay, that we would have a moment together like that final scene in The Importance of Being Earnest, when all the confusion melts away and we finally understand each other’s truths and all obstacles to love are overcome.
Just joshing.
“So you wanted me back then,” I said, “but you don’t want me now.”
He pulled at the beer. “I guess the truth is, you changed.” My dad shrugged as if to say that I’d become inexplicable, and I had to admit that I knew how he felt: sometimes, I seemed like a stranger from myself; it wasn’t fair that my dad could escape me, but I never could.
He said, “Teenagers are different than babies.”
I looked down at my arms, at the hair growing out of them that seemed to darken with each day. Fathers were the worst. Even if he plugged me in the face, I wouldn’t be able to feel any more terrible. Anything bad that happened to me from now on would be his fault because he’d given me up. “I’m sick of you. I’m glad I’m getting away.”
Finally he looked up and straight into my eyes. “Okay. It’s for the best.”
I hated him, I hated him, I hated him.
On Sunday, I met Toshi and Jay in New Veronia; the girls were supposed to show up right around six. Since Stella had turned me down so publicly, I’d asked Jessica, a freshman who lived a couple blocks from my house; Charlene, who sat beside me in math; and Danni, just because I’d run into her—literally, I’d jammed her with my book—in the hallway, but her visible bra straps had made me so nervous that I wasn’t even sure she’d been able to understand all the details of the invitation through my stammer.
The three of us shuffled around New Veronia, tossing sticks out of the clearing, checking the toilet, straightening our mattresses. Inside my room, I hung a pillowcase over the spot where I’d carved Stella’s name into the wood. I’d thought for sure she’d visit me there and think it was romantic.
When walking past the door to Jay’s room, I caught sight of the fluffy gray plume of Dave the squirrel’s tail. I started to head over to see if I could get Dave to chatter at me the way he sometimes did when he was in a conversational mood, and it took me several seconds to realize that Dave was dead.
“What the hell happened to Dave?” I said to Jay as I strode up, fast, to the log where he sat surrounded by whittled shavings.
Jay didn’t look up from the stick he was forming into a point. “Shot him.”
“Squirrels breed disease,” Toshi called from his spot beneath a tree.
“You shot Dave and nailed him above your door?” I could feel my features puckering around my nose, which made me look like a wuss, but I couldn’t help it.
Jay shrugged. “Looks neat. Besides, you can’t be sure that one was Dave. They’re all the same.”
I thought about prying down Dave and giving him a proper burial, maybe next to the dog that Toshi had killed, but I didn’t want to get dead squirrel smell all over my hands before the girls came, so instead I climbed up a tree just far enough to peek over the leaves to the blue suggestion of bay miles and miles away.
Six o’clock arrived with us three feeling a little wild from the anticipation, and I tried to draw Jessica, Charlene, and Danni closer with thought, sort of a kinetic exercise, but after a couple of hours had passed and still no girls had arrived, we started to realize that we’d been stood up, all of us, even Jay. Because I wasn’t the only one, I didn’t feel so much like dying of humiliation.
“What the fuck.” Jay kicked at the ground, sending up a spray of earth. “Those fucking bitches. Think they can do this to us.”
“Maybe they got lost,” Toshi said.
“No. I drew a map. We would have heard them yelling or giggling or something if they were out there. Soppy, this is your fault; you didn’t get the strawberry wine coolers.”
After the long, disappointing wait, I felt tight, like the chains of a swing that had been spun around and around. “Why do you people always call me that?” I asked. “It’s really not even funny. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Jay and Toshi exchanged a puzzled look. “You know why,” Jay said.
But I didn’t. I had no idea. All I knew was that Soppy had followed me through every grade since I’d moved to Delaware, it had been the access point for everyone to pick away at me, to keep me out, to bring me down. I hated Soppy. I grabbed a stick and stabbed at the ground between my feet, trying to unwind myself. “Why did you say that to Stella?” I asked Jay, the thing I’d been wanting to ask him all day. “You told her that I’m just trying to get in her pants?”
“It’s true.” Jay shrugged. “I know you invited her out here. Even though I told you not to. And there’s only one reason we built this whole place.”
I wanted to explain how I was connected to Stella on a level deeper than sex, how our conversations in the last few days had changed my life, had put me on a new trajectory, had let me see the truth about school, but I knew Jay wouldn’t get it. Anything heartfelt inspired his scorn. I said, “You’ve never wanted me to be with her. Probably it’s you who’s been sabotaging our relationship from the start.”