“Oh hey, honey,” she says. “Thank goodness. I’m trying to figure out how to watch an old DVD.”
“A DVD,” I say, because she might as well be telling me she wants to retrieve a dinosaur from before the Ice Age. It’s so unlikely and so weird that I’m genuinely scared. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she says with a little laugh. “There are just some shake-ups happening with the city council, and so I surprisingly have a bit more time on my hands. Something has been bothering me, though, for weeks, so I wanted to confirm with the DVD.”
I look at her, then at the TV again. Is this somehow connected to the dream and the TV we didn’t watch at Jason’s on New Year’s?
No, it can’t be.
I take the remote from her and switch to the right channel for DVDs.
“The disc is already in there,” she says, so I press play, and I feel the world fall out beneath me as I see what DVD it is. My dad is wearing a burgundy suit.
Dad is laughing and mouthing something to someone we can’t see until the camera turns and pans to her. Mom is in a strapless white dress with tiny, intricate beading, grinning from ear to ear as she walks toward my father.
“It’s your wedding video,” I say, hardly able to get the words out over the lump in my throat.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it,” Mom admits, and I stay quiet instead of telling her how many times I’ve seen it. How often I used to watch it secretly in the early years, soon after the divorce. Zoom in on Dad’s expression when he’s watching Mom come up the aisle, freeze it on the moment right before they kiss, the way their eyes twinkle when they turn to face the crowd before they leave the church. Both their arms raised as though they’ve done something massive, accomplished something, been given something. I used to just stare at the amount of joy in their faces and wonder what it felt like to love somebody that much. Wonder what happens to all that joy and hope when love dies. Wonder what exactly makes one person stop loving the other, and whether it could have been prevented and how. How do you know if the thing you’ve found is really love, and if it is, how do you not let it die?
“Your dad’s sister swears we had this DJ that your dad and I loved there, but I have no memory of that,” Mom is explaining asI hand her the remote again. Instead of skipping to the reception, though, she lets it play from the very start.
I perch on the arm of the chair and watch with her. I’m expecting it to all look different now that I’m older. I’m expecting that knowing how things ended will make it look artificial and fake and temporary, but it doesn’t. They look happy. Their joy looks real. The hope is still on their faces.
Mom looks amazing, regal, poised. And Dad. Dad looks like Dad, with a questionable fade (involving an Afro-mohawk situation) that we’re still laughing about and pants that are slightly too short. He reads something during the reception that makes Mom cry, in a world before everything about him just made her impatient and sad and disappointed. Somehow, here, they match. They are right for each other and enough for each other.
It hurts to see my dad on-screen again, but I like to believe that he’s as happy where he is now as he was on his wedding day. It mattered to him that he was happy, mattered more than what people thought or believed about him.
We sit there for the whole ceremony and then the reception, talking casually about people I recognize and people I don’t. I ask questions, Mom reminisces, and for one moment in time, we go back to the past where everything was messy while being good.
I’m feeling content, softer, when I curl up on my bed and open up Instagram a couple of hours later.
And then I see the newest message from the anonymous account:I want my ring back.
Nineteen
The words aren’t, technically, a call for my demise and the demise of everyone I love, but they might as well be. They feel like a threat.
The most unnerving part is that literally anybody could be behind the DMs. Which is why I sit down with blank paper and markers and try to recall every odd interaction I’ve had in the last week. Everyone is a suspect. From the freshman who bumped into me from behind five days ago to Mr.Tan giving meanother98, when I can clearly argue for full marks, to Tyler vetoing my graduation speaker ideas to Penny wearing a similar jacket to the one I wore two weeks ago.
I end up with arrows going everywhere, infinite possible candidates for the person targeting me on Instagram.
Truthfully, it’s a little ridiculous. And hard to read.
“Okay, new plan,” I tell myself as I get up and light a lavender candle. It says on the box it came in that it’s supposed to encourage sleep. Or at least, peace and relaxation. Which is probably necessary for dreams.
The dreams have been like a magnifying glass, zooming in on things I never noticed and answering questions I never thought to ask. This last dream was different because there was no one moment or incident that was drawn out, so I have to believe that I was supposed to get something bigger from it. Something less specific, but I have no idea what it was.
Which all comes back to me needing as many dreams as I can get—to clarify things, to answer my original questions, to home in on things I’ve been ignorant of. I wonder if more dreams don’t just have to show me what happened with Jason. Maybe they can show me other things too. Maybe they can lead me to who I should be suspicious of, help me narrow down who might be out for my blood.
I try a bunch of dream-stimulating techniques I find online, including visualization and journaling and yoga. I suddenly can’t even nap, as though that’s ever been a problem for me.
Finally, after an entire afternoon of trying and failing to force a dream, there’s really only one place I can think to go.
Marcus’s dad’s car shop, The Fix, is on the upper north side of town. It’s attached to a single house, three cars lining the front of the shop, three others parked in a line beside the curb.
As I leave my car, dark streaks of grease are like a trail leading me up the long driveway. The air smells of engine oil and cigarette smoke, and rock music is playing in the background. There are leaves almost all colors of the rainbow littered on the ground. I’m wearing a puffer vest because it’s been raining the last couple of days. The weather has fully committed to chilly, stopped hopscotching between summer and fall.
I hear tinkering beneath a car deep in the garage; I imagine all of them are in varying states of disrepair. I’m not sure where to go, but then, as if summoned from the belly of a demonic whale, a body slides out from the bottom of the car where all the noise was coming from.
