“I hope not too!” Mom jokes. She gets up from her dresser and walks over, squeezing Dad’s shoulder as he flashes her an indignant look. “I’m just kidding, Peter. I’m sure you’ll look just as charming when you’regray.” She kisses his jaw, and then throws her arms around Jamie and Chase’s shoulders. “Now who’s hungry? There’s bacon! Dad’s favorite.”
As she guides them out of the room and toward the kitchen, they all brush past me, but I don’t follow. I stay with Dad instead as silence falls over us. “Feliz cumpleaños,” I tell him.Happy birthday. I know he’ll appreciate that, and I smile at him too. It’s been two weeks now since he made his promise. It’s been two weeks now since he’s kept it.
His gaze meets mine, gentle and happy. “Gracias,” he murmurs as a grin lights up his face. He loves it when I speak Spanish without him having to prompt me first. He’s been trying to teach Jamie and Chase too, but they just aren’t picking it up as quickly as I did. “You don’t think I’m old, right?” Dad asks, teasingly raising an eyebrow as he walks over.
“No,” I say. “Not yet.”
“But I’m now officially halfway to sixty!”
We both laugh and he spins me around, places both his hands on my shoulders, and walks me through to the kitchen. Mom has the TV on and there’s bacon cooking in a skillet, and she is swinging her hips back and forth, humming as she pours two cups of coffee. Chase is drumming at the table with two spoons, and Jamie is chugging milk from the carton. Gross.
“Open up your cards,” Mom says as she turns around and slides a cup of coffee into Dad’s hand. She takes a sip of her own and watches all of us with a sparkle in her eye as Dad and I sit down at the table, her hand resting on the back of Dad’s chair.
There’s a stack of cards on the table from us, from relatives, from friends. There’s also some gifts. Mom picked them out on our behalf, and she picked out the cards too. We signed them late last night.
“Open mine first,” Chase says eagerly, swiping one of the envelopesfrom the pile and thrusting it into Dad’s hands, almost knocking his coffee over.
“Sure,” Dad says, rolling his eyes. He sets the cup down on the table and opens Chase’s card, then Jamie’s, then mine. I watch him closely as his eyes run over the message I wrote. It’s short and it’s simple and it’s in Spanish.
I wrote:Feliz cumpleaños! Te amo, Papá.
Dad glances up from the card. The smile he gives me is wide and sincere, reaching his eyes, lighting them. My cheeks flush with color, and I don’t know why I’m embarrassed. Maybe it’s because I mean it for once. Maybe I’m not just saying it to keep him happy. I can’t look at him now, so I reach for the orange juice and pour myself a glass.
“I have something to tell you,” Mom tells Dad as he begins to open her card. He pauses, the envelope half torn in his hands, and glances curiously up at her. She leans over his shoulder, wrapping her arms around him from behind, and she buries her face into the crook of his neck. “We,” she murmurs, “are going to Vegas. Next weekend. Just us two, baby. Happy birthday.” She plants a kiss just below his ear.
“Vegas?” Dad repeats, his eyes widening. The pitch of his voice always increases when he’s surprised, and he reaches for Mom’s hands as he tilts his head back to look up at her. She’s still leaning over him, still grinning. Dad is blinking fast. “Ella, really? You didn’t…you didn’t need to do that.” He puckers his lips at her and she leans down to kiss him again, upside down, and he squeezes her hands. “You’re amazing.”
“Why can’t we come?” Jamie asks. He glares across the table at Mom and Dad, but they’re too busy smiling back at one another that I don’t even think they notice. I love how deeply they love each other.
“Because Vegas is very much twenty-one and over,” Mom tells him with a laugh, finally tearing her eyes away from Dad. She glances atJamie, then me, then Chase. “Sorry, guys, but you’ll be staying with your grandparents next weekend.”
“How about,” Dad says, “we all do something fun today first? Starting with ice cream.”
Chase releases a gasp of excitement and he looks at me, his smile young and innocent, half of his teeth missing. I smile back at him. Dad hasn’t taken us out for ice cream in forever. It means he’s happy. We’re happy.I’mhappy.
40
Present Day
I like my gym sessions with Dean. Working out is one of the rare things I do to distract myself that is actuallygoodfor me. It clears my head for a couple hours, and honestly, I like getting to hang with Dean alone a couple times a week. Out of all my friends, he’s the one I’m most comfortable around. We used to sneak into his garage when we were fourteen and use his dad’s equipment, but over a year ago we upgraded to a gym downtown. I’m trying to bulk up. When I was a kid, I was weak and never had the strength to fight back. That’s different now. These days, I can protect myself if I need to. It puts my mind at ease, I guess.
“Can I ask you something?” Dean says. He’s currently spotting me while I bench press, his hands under the barbell, gently supporting the extra weight he’s added so that I don’t end up crushing myself. I need the extra help, anyway, because my left wrist still plays up sometimes and is forever weaker than my right.
I look up at him, watching his concerned expression upside down, but I am straining too hard to even reply. My jaw is clenched too tight, so I only manage to give him a tiny nod as I push the weight up, my biceps tight and my skin sticky with sweat.
“What even happened to you at Rachael’s party?” Dean asks. “You totally blacked out. You weren’t…” He pauses to glance around the bustling gym, but there is no one within earshot of us. He lowers his voice anyway as he looks back down at me again, his eyes meeting mine. “You weren’t on anything, were you?”
His question annoys me, and it gives me the final burst of energy I need to raise the barbell back up into the rack above me. The metal clatters together as I blow out a breath of air and sit up, relaxing my arms. “No,” I say. Usually, I would lie to him, but this time I don’t need to. I’m telling him the truth. “I just drank too much.”
“Yeah, but waaay more than usual,” Dean says. “You passed out before it was even midnight. And you nearly sent Kyle Harrison to the hospital.”
“What? He couldn’t handle five beers?” I chuckle as I grab my towel from the floor and press it to my face, drying my forehead and my hair. My breathing is still heavy.
“Five beers in, like, three minutes,” Dean corrects. He tosses me my water, and I catch it with one hand. He leans back against the wall and folds his arms across his chest, staring down at me in disapproval. “Not many peoplecanhandle that. Not even you, apparently. Did you sleep at Tiffani’s place?”
I roll my eyes and take a swig of my water. “Unfortunately.”
“That doesn’t sound too good,” Dean says. He narrows his eyes at me, full of curiosity but also concern. He always looks at me like that. I think that a lot of the time, he’s still just trying to figure me out even after all these years. Sometimes, I wonder if he doesn’t really know who I am anymore. “Are you guys on bad terms or something?”
