He sees my face fall before I even realize it’s falling. I don’t feel it. I just feel kind of numb.
“I mean … it’s not that big of a deal,” my dad says quickly. “Is it weird for you, though? Since she’s your teacher?”
“No. Uh, no.”
“She’s really nice. Or at least she was when I knew her. We took first-year seminar together.” My dad sucks in a breath through his teeth, then lets out a nervous laugh. “Well, never a dull moment, huh?”
I’m reeling as we walk out to rejoin everyone for cake, and I’m not sure why. Because Farrah’s not my mom? Or because it means that Beth or Steph is my mom? I try to figure out what I was hoping for, and that’s when I understand—maybe I’m not ready to know at all.
There’s a pit in my stomach a mile wide. It didn’t feel real before now. It felt like a game. Human geocaching. Something intangible enough that nobody could get hurt.
What if she had been my mother? What if we’d been having an entirely different conversation right now, one where my dad was the one reeling right now instead of me? One where I suddenly had to explain right on the heels of him telling me how well I was handling this that I actually went nuclear and started stalking three adult women I don’t know behind his back?
I don’t want to have that conversation. I don’t. I have to end this, somehow, before this gets out of control with Steph and—
“Beth? Beth Dunne?” my dad stammers.
I whip around and see my dad staring at Beth like he’s just seen a very friendly, cardigan-clad ghost. She’s carrying her purse slung over her shoulder, and it occurs to me unhelpfully that she’s probably here to pick up Chloe, and it occurs to me even less helpfully that I am officially fucked.
Then Beth’s eyes light up with unmistakable delight. “Cooper?”
Chloe detaches herself from Teddy, her face bewildered. “Mom?”
“Shit,” I mutter under my breath.
For a moment Beth and my dad are both so stunned that all they can do is stare at each other, until Beth finally reaches out and hugs him. There’s a split second where my dad goes completely stiff, and I see something flash in his face—an undefined kind of hurt, like he’s too surprised he’s even feeling it to let it happen—before he finally loosens and hugs her back so hard that something aches in me just watching them.
“You … you look great,” my dad stammers.
“You look just the same.” Beth says the words so fondly that even though they are objectively not a compliment, they sound like the kindest thing in the world.
My dad responds by staring at her moonily. I almost feel bad for being here, like we weren’t meant to see something so personal, even though literally all they’re doing is staring.
Chloe clears her throat loudly.
“Oh! I was just picking up my Chloe,” says Beth, stepping back and ushering Chloe forward. Chloe looks at me, chagrined.
“Is this your … This is my…” My dad reaches out for me with sloppy enthusiasm, putting his hand on my shoulder like he’s never felt a shoulder before. “We have daughters!”
“They’ve met,” says Beth, with a smile so wide I’m worried her face can’t contain it. Her eyes are legitimately watering from excitement. I don’t even have to look at my dad to know his already are, too—he’s got that Big Geek Energy radiating off him so hard right now that it’s bouncing off every wall in the club. “We’ve all met, I just—I never had any idea that…”
“How the heck do you two know each other?” Chloe blurts.
“Oh,” says my dad. “Uh, hi, I’m—” He extends his hand for her to shake and then shakes it way too hard, like there’s too much energy in him to be contained. “I’m Cooper, I uh … I went to school with your mom.”
“You were friends?”
Beth is still staring at my dad so intensely that he might be a piece of art in the Met instead of a thirty-seven-year-old man whose glasses keep sliding down his nose. “No, we were—” She blinks, stopping herself just in time. “Yes, we were friends.”
They’re talking to us without tearing their eyes off each other, like they can’t see anything beyond the feet of space between them. Chloe cocks her head, a clear Let’s leave them to it. And we should. But my feet are frozen in place. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment in the conversation it became clear, but it doesn’t make it any less true: Beth is obviously not my mom, either. She seems genuinely happy to see my dad, and my dad, for his part, looks like he just tripped on a stool and fell into his dweeby undergraduate self.
But he doesn’t seem like a man who just ran into the mom of the kid who got dumped on him almost seventeen years ago. Which can only mean …
“Okay, they definitely dated,” says Chloe.
I feel wobbly. “What makes you think that?”
“’Cause I read my mom’s journals from college, and she talked about a ‘Cooper’ she used to study with like, a lot.”
This temporarily snaps me back to reality. “Chloe!”
She shrugs. “If your dad just left his journal from college out in the open, wouldn’t you read it?”
Touché. I clear my throat. “Well.” I feel dizzy. Like I’m going to be sick. “Wow.”
“Yeah. Is it weird that I kind of ship it?” says Chloe. “I mean like, gross because it’s my mom. But also like, she wrote really bad poetry about him, so I’m pretty sure she was obsessed.”
I nod, and some part of me is absorbing this information, but not a helpful part of me. The helpful parts of me are too busy ringing every alarm bell in my system, my heart hammering, my palms breaking out into a sweat.
“Hey. If they did date and then like, get married, we’d be sisters.”
It’s the first time it occurs to me in a very real way that this means that we aren’t. I’m surprised by how tight my throat is, not even realizing how much I liked that possibility until it was off the table.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess we would be,” I manage. I need an escape route, but that’s the thing about your own surprise birthday party: you can’t exactly disappear from it. I never thought there’d come a day when I didn’t want to be the center of attention, but as I am learning in the past ten minutes, there’s a first time for everything. “I’m just gonna…”
“Cooper?”
This time it’s Farrah. She’s trailing behind Heather, who’s holding a cake full of lit candles and has just opened her mouth to start singing “Happy Birthday.” Within a second, the whole room has followed her lead—the room except for my dad, who is staring at Farrah, and Beth, who is staring at my dad staring at Farrah, and Teddy, who meets my eye and just about sums up the entire situation by mouthing the words Holy shit.
It’s like something out of a dissonant horror movie trailer, everyone cheerfully singing in six different keys that eventually resolve themselves, while I watch my ill-conceived summer plans get unraveled so fast that they’re strangling me in the process.
Then the singing stops. The cake is in front of me.