“Oh, trust me, it is,” Jack said.
“All right, all right,” my dad said. “Get some sleep.”
“I would, if I weren’t scared of Sam crashing through the forest to find us,” Jack said. “ ‘July! July! Where are you?’ ”
“This is how dating someone works,” I said. “Which you would know, if you ever dated anyone.”
“Hey,” Jack said. “I had a girlfriend last spring.”
“For about five minutes.”
“Enough, July,” my dad said. “You need to get some sleep, too.”
“I would, if all these bugs would shut up,” I said. As if toprove my point, the cicadas screaming in the trees seemed to raise their pitch.
“You’ll feel better in the morning,” my mom said.
“I’d feel better if I had a camping cot,” I said. “Like you and Dad.”
“Tell you what,” Dad said. “You work hard and support your family the way your mom and I do, and then you can buy yourselves cots, and then it will be your turn to lie in your own tent and feel really comfortable while your ungrateful kids whine at you.”
“I love you, Dad,” Jack said. “I love you, Mom.”
“Stop kissing up to them,” I said.
“I love you, July,” Jack said. I could tell he was grinning when he said it. “Somuch.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Stop it.” But I was smiling, too.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but I remember waking up in the middle of the night.
I was lying flat on my back, staring up at the tent, my camping pad not doing much to cushion me against the stones on the ground. A bug thudded against the side of the tent near my face, and I knew that eventually I was going to have to find a flashlight and stagger alone through the dark to a disgusting campground porta-potty. I shouldn’t have had so much lemonade with my tinfoil dinner.
Everyone else was asleep.
I looked up through the skylight at the stars.
I had the feeling again for a moment. The one I’d been trying to push away since I was eight. The cold lonely.
I kept staring at the stars. My back was on the dirt, where I would someday go again.
But I’m here now,I thought.
Aren’t I?
52.
now
It’s a baseball.
There, in the back, with the things that my dad has us keep on hand in the trunks of any cars we own: a first aid kit, bottled water, granola bars, a blanket. This one is blue-and-red plaid, a quilt my grandma made before she died.
I don’t think the baseball was here before I heard the door slam at Syd’s house. I would have noticed, right?
But why would Syd leave me a baseball?
Wait.
