“Yeah. Because I am sure.”
I lean over to him and put my palms on his smooth cheeks. “That’s how I know you’re still a boy. Because you’re so sure.”
He frowns back at me. “Why are you saying it like it’s a bad thing?”
I let go. “You’re always so sure of everything about yourself. You’ve never been not sure.”
“Well, I’m sure of this one thing,” he says, staring straight ahead. “I’m sure I’d never be the kind of dad my dad is, no matter how old I am.”
I go quiet, feeling guilty for teasing him and bringing up bad feelings. I want to ask if his dad is still reaching out to make amends, but the closed-up look on Peter’s face stops me. I just wish he and his dad could fix things between them before he goes to college. Because right now, Peter is still a boy, and deep down, I think all boys want to know their dads, no matter what kind of men they are.
* * *
After school, we go through the drive-thru, and Peter’s already tearing into his sandwich before we’re out of the parking lot. Between bites of fried chicken sandwich, he says, “Did you mean it when you said before that you couldn’t picture marrying me?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“I mean, you kind of said that. You said I’m still a boy and you couldn’t marry a boy.”
Now I’ve gone and hurt his feelings. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I couldn’t picture marrying anybody right now. We’re both still babies. How could we have a baby?” Without thinking, I say, “Anyway, my dad gave me a whole birth-control kit for college, so we don’t even have to worry about it.”
Peter nearly chokes on his sandwich. “A birth-control kit?”
“Sure. Condoms and . . .” Dental dams. “Peter, do you know what a dental dam is?”
“A what? Is that what dentists use to keep your mouth open when they clean it?”
I giggle. “No. It’s for oral sex. And here I thought you were this big expert and you were going to be the one to teach me everything at college!”
My heart speeds up as I wait for him to make a joke about the two of us finally having sex at college, but he doesn’t. He frowns and says, “I don’t like the thought of your dad thinking we’re doing it when we’re not.”
“He just wants us to be careful is all. He’s a professional, remember?” I pat him on the knee. “Either way, I’m not getting pregnant, so it’s fine.”
He crumples up his napkin and tosses it in the paper bag, his eyes still on the road. “Your parents met in college, didn’t they?”
I’m surprised he remembers. I don’t remember telling him that. “Yeah.”
“So how old were they? Eighteen? Nineteen?” Peter’s headed somewhere with this line of questioning.
“Twenty, I think.”
His face dims but just slightly. “Okay, twenty. I’m eighteen and you’ll be eighteen next month. Twenty is just two years older. So what difference does two years make in the grand scheme of things?” He beams a smile at me. “Your parents met at twenty; we met at—”
“Twelve,” I supply.
Peter frowns, annoyed that I’ve messed up his argument. “Okay, so we met when were kids, but we didn’t get together until we were seventeen—”
“I was sixteen.”
“We didn’t get together for real until we were both basically seventeen. Which is basically the same thing as eighteen, which is basically the same thing as twenty.” He has the self-satisfied look of a lawyer who has just delivered a winning closing statement.
“That’s a very long and twisty line of logic,” I say. “Have you ever thought about being a lawyer?”
“No, but now I’m thinking maybe?”
“UVA has a great law school,” I say, and I get a sudden pang, because college is one thing, but law school? That’s so far away, and who knows what will happen between now and then? By then we’ll be such different people. Thinking of Peter in his twenties, I feel a sense of yearning for the man I may never get to meet. Right now, today, he’s still a boy, and I know him better than anybody, but what if it isn’t always this way? Already our paths are diverging, a little more every day, the closer we get to August.
18
TRINA PUT HER HOUSE ON the market a couple of weeks after she and Daddy got engaged. Kristen’s a real estate agent, and she told her that now was the time to sell, because everybody likes to buy in the springtime. It turns out she was right; a couple made an offer on it the very same week—sooner than any of us could have imagined. Daddy and Trina thought the house would sit on the market for at least a month, but now movers are unloading boxes at our house and everything’s careening forward at lightning speed.
There was never any big discussion about who was moving in with who—it was just understood that Trina was coming here. For one, our house is bigger, but also, it’s easier to move one person than four. You would think. For one person, Trina has a lot of stuff. Boxes and boxes of clothes and shoes, her exercise equipment, random pieces of furniture, a huge velvet upholstered headboard that I know my dad is horrified by.
“If it was me, I wouldn’t want to move into another woman’s house,” Chris says. She’s standing at my window, watching Trina direct the movers. She stopped by on her way to work to borrow a pair of my shoes.
“What other woman?” I ask her.
“Your mom! I would always feel like it was her house. Like, she picked the furniture, the wallpaper.”
“Actually Margot and I picked a lot of it,” I say. “I picked the dining room wallpaper; she picked the upstairs bathroom color.” I remember that Margot and Mommy and I sat down on the living room floor with all the wallpaper books and carpet samples and paint chips spread around us. We spent the whole afternoon going over every book with a fine-tooth comb, with Margot and me battling over which blue was the right blue for the upstairs bathroom we’d share. I thought robin’s-egg blue, and Margot thought sky blue. Mommy finally had us do rock, paper, scissors for it, and Margot won. I sulked over it until I beat her out with my wallpaper choice.
“I’m just saying. I feel like if I was Trina, I would want a fresh start,” Chris says.
“Well, that’s kind of impossible when her husband-to-be already has three kids.”
“You know what I mean. As fresh as possible.”
“They’re getting a new bed, at least. It’s coming tomorrow.”
Chris perks up at this. Flopping on my bed, she says, “Ew, is it weird to think about your dad having sex?”
I slap her on the leg. “I don’t think about that! So please don’t bring it up.”
Picking at the strings on her cutoffs, she says, “Trina does have a great body.”
“I’m not kidding, Chris!”
“I’m just saying, I would kill to have her body at her age.”
“She’s not that old.”
“Still.” Chris preens at me prettily. “If I open the window, can I smoke in here?”
“I think you know the answer to that question, Christina.”