I can’t help but feel a little defensive. Of course it’s my house. “I think it’s just his old stuff. Maybe later.” I clear my throat. “Um, so you know what your mom was talking about out there, right?”
“About my dad and your dad?”
“And how my dad is gay now.” I force my shoulders straight as I say it, just in case Kiera agrees more with her dad than her mom.
“What do you meannow? Isn’t that the kind of thing where you’re that way the whole time?”
I hold my hands up and shrug, a little relieved by her reaction. “I’m not really sure how all this works.”
She doesn’t really have much to say to that, so she loops her fingers through the carpet and says, “I heard my parents arguing about it. Your dad,” she clarifies. “As if they didn’t already have enough to argue about.”
I prickle at that. It’s not my dad’s fault that her parents are fighting. “I’m sorry, I guess? Maybe if your dad wasn’t... Never mind.”
“Wasn’t what?” she asks, daring me to finish my sentence.
My throat dries up and sweat gathers between my fingers. This is definitely going as bad as I expected. “Wasn’t such a jerk,” I finish in a low voice.
Her gaze narrows in on me. Then she brushes me off with a wave of her hand. “Mom says it’s none of our business and that it shouldn’t change anything. Especially if your mom is so okay with it.”
“I wouldn’t say she’s okay with it, but she’s not mad at him.” I pull my knees up to my chest and hold them there while I think of the right way to explain. “She knows he doesn’t mean to hurt us, but it’s kind of hard, because I think it might be easier if they didn’t like each other so much and just got divorced for the usual reasons.”
“You wanna borrow my parents?” she asks. “They’ve got no problem blaming each other.”
I laugh. It’s the kind of thing that only kids with messed-up parents can laugh at, like some awful inside joke, but at least it’s a reminder that you’re not alone.
And then Kiera starts to laugh too.
I stand up, feeling suddenly better about the whole night. “You wanna watch some TV? My dad said we can order pizza.”
“Are you going to puke it all over the place?” she teases.
I roll my eyes. “Come on,” I say. “Can you not with the puke jokes?”
She cracks a smile. “That was my last one, I swear.”
We settle into the couch to watch an episode ofGirl Meets World, and it’s noAmerica’s Most Haunted, but it’ll do.
After the pizza comes, Dad joins us, and we all eat around the coffee table. Dad and I watch in confusion as Kiera pats down her slice with a napkin.
“What?” she asks when she catches us staring. “Grease makes you fat.”
I put my pizza back down on my plate. I hate when people say stuff like that. It makes me queasy and angry at the same time. It’s like she’s not even thinking before she talks. Or like she doesn’t evenseeme.
I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t the first time I wondered if part of the reason Kiera ditched me was because she was tired of being friends with the fat girl. I saw in one of Mom’s magazines once a diagram of all the different shapes women are supposed to be, and they didn’t really have anything that looked like my body, because no one inmagazines writes about girls who are shaped like oranges with Popsicle sticks for legs. I’m okay with who I am and what I look like, or at least I try to be. I just wish people, Kiera included, would feel the same way.
Dad takes a huge bite of pizza. “Around here neither of those words—grease or fat—are a bad thing.”
A warm glow radiates in my chest, and I feel immediately guilty for erasing Dad’s voice mail. It’s like there’s a bright neon sign above my head with an arrow pointing right on me.Worst Daughter of the Year.
Sometimes Dad just knows how to tell someone they’re wrong without making anyone feel weird. Like when the furniture delivery guys were bringing his coffee table in, and one of them made a pretty cheesy joke. The other guy said, “That’s so gay, man.”
Dad didn’t skip a beat when he said, “That joke was bad. Not gay.”
The guys were quiet at first, but just laughed it off. When I asked him what he meant by that, he just said, “Sometimes people use the wordgayto mean a negative thing, but there’s nothing wrong with the wordgayor the people who use it to identify themselves. Trust me. I’ve got plenty of issues—your mom would agree—but being gay isn’t one of them.”
It was as simple as that. Sometimes I think that about the wordfat. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
“Sorry,” Kiera says to Dad. She looks to me. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
