Amalee Read Free Page A

uncomfortable around my friends for a good reason. They made fun of me, too. Under Hally’s writing, Ellen wrote, “Is she a boy or girl???”
    I showed the note to Ellen and she said, “You took a piece of paper off the dirty floor, uncrumpled it, and read a personal note between me and Hally? It wasn’t about you. And it was PRIVATE.”
    From then on, when she and Hally passed notes, they wrote PRIVATE on them in big letters. There were no more sleepovers, and no more laughing together.
    On a good day, I said one thing that made them smile.
    After vacation, I asked Frances if she’d had a good time skiing, but by this time she expected the trick question she’d gotten from Ellen. She said, “What do you care?” I couldn’t blame her, but it made me feel like walking poison when it came to friends.
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    My dad’s friends, on the other hand, all wanted to be my friends, but that was because they loved my dad. Why was I so bad at making my own friends?
    Dad always said he was lucky to have the friends he did. He talked about how they helped him be a single dad and how they convinced him to keep me when he wasn’t so sure he should.
    When my dad was in his twenties, he lived with his girlfriend, my mother, because of me, their daughter. The story goes that they met at a restaurant where they worked. Then they had me. They got different shifts, hers at night and his during the day. They hardly saw each other, but they didn’t have to get baby-sitters.
    My mother, Sally, was unhappy. I knew this because Carolyn once said, “We all know Sal had that baby to make her parents angry.”
    Lovely. My mom had me as revenge.
    My dad and his other friends all jumped in and said, “Noooo, noooo, she loved you sooooo much.”
    But if my mom was unhappy, the next part of the story made more sense.
    One day she said, “I thought I could do this, but I can’t.”
    â€œThis” was me. She couldn’t handle it. Me. And so she left.
    Dad met with his friends. “This kid deserves a stable environment,” he said, and they said, “Yes!”
    And he said, “So I should put her up for adoption,” and his friends said, “No!”
    They told my dad that he could raise me, because they would help. Apparently, it ended with John saying, “David, this will be an adventure!”
    Well, I liked that story, because I liked the ending. I loved my dad. He was nice to everyone, including me. He taught philosophy at the State University of New York, New Paltz, or SUNY New Paltz, and he would have students over for holiday parties in December. They liked my dad, too.
    He and I always spoke sympathetically about my mother, as if she were a friend who had never figured out what she wanted. She died in a car accident soon after she left. Poor Sally. I really did feel sorry for her.
    I looked over now at my dad driving and wanted to get back into a conversation. I was sick of feeling so quiet and frowning all the time. I asked about his headache.
    â€œIt’s not good,” Dad admitted. “It’s in the back of my head and neck.”
    â€œI know those,” I said. “It feels like a robot has you in its pincer?”
    Dad laughed. “That’s exactly what kind of headache it is.”
    And that’s what a great dad he was. I knew he had to be mad at me for what I’d said to John, but he still laughed. And unlike Ellen or Hally or Lenore, he never called me “crazy.” None of his friends did, either. Of course, that’s because they were all pretty crazy themselves.
    But they had helped raise me. In some ways, I’d grown up with five parents. Sometimes I thought I had only one, but he was a very, very good one.

I was getting ready for school the Monday after the movie weekend, after I’d opened my mouth. I hadn’t laid out my clothes. Suddenly, I didn’t like any of my clothes. I thought of