“Actually,” Sebastian says, “he’s probably not even our dad.”
“What the fuck.”
“It’s all there in the scripts, Lola. You should see all these other names. Our real dad could be anyone.”
Sebastian cannot possibly share any shred of her reality. He is a resident in some fun-house world. Of course they belong to their father! Look at the shape of their teeth, the straightness of their shoulders. Look at their hand gestures, the bend of their wrists. Were it not for her hair (and her eyes, and yes, her nose) she might consider herself Athena, springing fully formed from her father’s head. His dry humor, his academic mind. His tendency to suppress his feelings, his selflessness, his discipline. But more than every genetic marker, he raised them.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her cheeks are filling with a heat that might turn to tears. He is trying to take away the only parent they have.
“You’ll see, I’ll find him. If you think about it, we’re not even supposed to be here.”
In another universe, a bottle is spinning. The future is unraveling: her father, her brother, everyone spinning out from themselves, a family without gravity.Just friends?No. She raises the plastic cup to her mouth, sour amber liquid moving through her, fuzzy and quick. Behind her, Sebastian is ejecting onto an alien trajectory, placing an arm around Lisa DePaulo, slanting and tactile. Viola watches as the two of them stumble back up the stairs, and she is alone.
A nose slows to face her.
“Seb’s sister—it’s you.”
Lisa is holding his hand and leading him beyond the lights that slant through the sliding kitchen doors. A breeze wafts through the cool night, carrying weed and firepit ash. Muffled voices, the downbeat of a bass, these things pass through him. It is quieter here, stranger; the party exists on another plane.
“You’re like a little kangaroo,” Lisa is saying as she reaches into his pocket to pull out one of the beers he snagged on their way out.
“Exactly,” he says. Tonight she is wearing makeup and Sebastian finds her attractive in the ways that she intends to be found attractive: mascaraed lashes, streaks of bleach highlighting her hair, piercing blue eyes. “Though I guess I’m a mama kangaroo,” he says.
“What?”
“Only the moms have pouches, right?”
She shoves him cutely. “You’re dumb. Come on.”
They light out into the dark. He places a hand on her back, steers her around the side of the house. She responds to him easily; it is like pushing at an open door.
In a dark fold next to a coiled hose pipe, he’s placing his hand on thewall next to her and closing his eyes and kissing her up against the house with tongue. Out here he can hear nothing but the ocean smashing the rocks below. Lisa’s skin is the cool aquamarine of the glorious backlight shifting off of the pool.I am alive, he thinks as her lips pillow against his, as he opens his eyes to her closed ones, her face merging with his own, her hands tucking themselves into the pouch of his sweatshirt.I am alive!
But as the kissing continues, his mind slips away—wandering backward and forward, backward to Lola, forward to his new life, his new fantastical father. Maybe it isn’t real, but is it so wrong to wish it were?
Wait, he tells himself as he leans his hips into her hips,stay here!
“Let’s go in the pool,” he says.
“What?”
He heard a story once from Sadie about his mother jumping in the pool at a party his father brought her to, the first and only one to do so. It was startling how vividly he had imagined the scene, despite having no details beyond the headline; not where it was or what she was wearing or what Al had done in response. In his mind it was summer. She would have been wearing a sundress, holding a cocktail, bored out of her mind. Impossible to know where this convergence of images had come from. But now, as he is peeling off his shirt and jeans and holding Lisa’s hand and sayingReady?and diving into the water, he feels this vivid past meshing with the moment (Now!) like two images superimposed on each other, moving in perfect choreography.
Inside the closet is a single, full-length ski suit and a stack of board games. Clue. Risk. Sorry!. And a tower of other boy games involving large military conquests, capturing and dominating. The faint smell of golden retriever.
For a minute it seems no one will come. Maybe this is her humiliation; no one wants to go in with her at all. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Outside, whispered jostling and giggles.Why is it taking so long?She has finished the beer, and clarity is slipping away from her.She wonders whether time will pass differently in here, whether seven minutes will feel like seven years.
Finally, the door opens. A body crawls up next to her.
“Hi,” Zach says.
Oh no.
The hot heft of his skin, the cheap beer fuming through his pores.This is not where I want to be,she thinks. He kneels close and she is aware of the size of him, how alone they are.
“Don’t.”
“Why not.”
