“Why are you talking to me, not her?” he countered. I rolled my eyes and shifted to face away from him.
“?‘Why are you talking to me, not her?’?” I echoed in an excessively whiny voice. “That’s you.”
He snorted. “Uncanny.”
All annoyance evaporated at once. I could make him laugh again, and maybe things wouldn’t be so bad.
“Hey,” I said. He looked over, and even though I couldn’t see his eyes, I felt the weight of them pressing in on me. “Canyou swim?”
“Yes.” He smiled. My breath snagged in my throat. “I’m the kind of person who almost drowns and makes a point to become a really good swimmer.”
“He’s not that good,” Phoebe murmured from the back seat. “He held his nose when he jumped in the pool.”
In the battle between horror that Phoebe was awake and delight over this new revelation, delight won out. I fell into hysterics.
“I did not,” Dex said indignantly.
“You totally did.”
I bonked my head into the window, giggling. “We should get him one of those nose plugs kids use when they’re learning to swim.”
Phoebe snorted, and then laughed outright. “Some floaties for his wittle arms.”
“Maybe we’ll get a kiddie pool for you to practice in.”
“Hilarious,” he said flatly. “You know, some people don’t know how to swim, and they would find this incredibly insulting. And obnoxious.”
Phoebe and I lost our shit.
I didn’t intend to take my sister to a gay bar in Chicago. It’s just that intention means very little when teenagers are involved.
“It’s not the best thing in the world,” Arden said, raising her voice over the pulsing music. Elbows on the table, I had my phone clamped to one ear, my hand over the other to hear my best friend reassure me that I wasn’t the worst guardian on the planet. But with two women on the dance floor dry humping to Celine Dion as Phoebe sat beside me looking on with wide-eyed elation, Arden’s words lacked a certain gravitas. “But is it the worst? No.”
“It’s not great,” I maintained. Over at the bar, Dex waited for our drinks, arms crossed, expression stony. I counted a dozen sets of eyes locked on him.
“Maybe not. But is Phoebe happy?”
“Yes.”
“Is she drinking?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see the problem.”
The problem wasn’t necessarily the gay bar, but my inability to guide Phoebe in a way that mattered. She took hold of the wheel in our dad’s hospital room and had been steering ever since; I may have been her official guardian as far as the state was concerned, yet I had less power over Phoebe than TikTok. She played me, every day. Worse, I let her. When we got to the hotel and she began lamenting about how bored she was, and how the sun hadn’t even set yet, and we were the most boring people on earth for having nothing to do in a city like this, I gave in. She wasn’t wrong, exactly, but that’s not why I threw on my sneakers and led her down the hall to Dex’s room to inform him we were heading out.
She hadn’t hinted at it and I hadn’t asked, but I knew in my gut Phoebe had heard me talking to Dex. How I believed I fucked up, that she hated me, that she had a right to. Our dad wasn’t perfect, and he probably messed up millions of times. He never said it out loud, though. Not within earshot. I didn’t have it together like him. I slipped up, admitting my faults and fears in front of Phoebe and proceeded to do nothing to fix them. The mortification burned.
I might not have Phoebe’s respect, but I could win her over by letting her do whatever she wanted. And tonight, she wanted this.
“No, yeah,” I said, swapping my phone to my other ear. Beside me, Phoebe was scrolling through the restaurant’s app that connected to the speakers, picking songs to add to the queue. “That’s what matters, I guess.”
“You’re not bad at this,” Arden insisted. I made a face. At the bar, a large man covered in tattoos sidled up to Dex, and several people drooped in visible disappointment.
“I’m notgoodat it.”
“Well, you’ve been doing it less than a year. Nobody who’s had their first kid for under a year is good at it.”
