An Off Year Read Free

surprised to hear that she was friends with other parents, let alone discussed child rearing with them.
    â€œWell. You know, you should do something amazing if you’re taking time off, like write a book or learn to paint or something. . . . Listen, I need to get going. Maybe if you want, you can meet me here or later in Portugal,” she said in her cool, crisp voice. It sounded like a horrifying idea. Mom technically lived in Miami, but she was constantly traveling, for no particular reason, with no particular guy.
    â€œNo, thanks. Not now.”
    â€œWell, have fun,” she said. “Bye.” And then a click. Mom hung up first, always. I put the phone on the cradle, a waste of conversation. Obviously all of this wasn’t important enough to merit a trip back to flyover country. When Mom came for my high school graduation, all she did was show up for the ceremony, which isn’t a special family moment when it’s held in a twenty-thousand-seat stadium and you’re the five hundredth out of seven hundred people in your class to graduate. She stayed for a three-mimosa lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, and then she was off to catch a connection to Maui.
    With the phone put away and nobody talking to me, I had nothing left to do but check out the unpacking situation. The boxes I was supposed to unload had miraculously reappeared in the kitchen, stacked next to the stairs. Maybe if I waited long enough, whatever magical elves had transported them from the car to the kitchen would then spirit them up to my bedroom and back into the closet, where I could reorganize everything the way it was supposed to be. Right now my closet stood sad and empty, with a few skeletal hangers rattling around inside.
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    The kitchen radio played the White Sox game. Germaine and I didn’t care about baseball, but Dad and Josh liked to listen on summer nights while we ate dinner, with the lights off if it was a clear evening. If I were at school right now, I would probably be eating with my new roommate, or in some forced group out at some picnic or something. I wouldn’t be listening to baseball, or the neighbors’ kids playing, or the motorboats on the lake, or the mechanical sounds of the cicadas. The lightning bugs began to blink in the yard and the flagstones on the kitchen floor cooled as we ate hamburgers Josh had grilled out on the brick patio. Superhero lay under the table with his head on top of my bare feet. The night was lovely, but I felt like my being there was ruining it a little bit.
    Dad asked Josh about heading to school, if he had gas in the tank, if he was all packed up, what his friends had done over the summer. I watched them talk. Neither looked in my direction. Germaine stared at me, so I looked back and blinked, hard, sort of like I Dream of Jeannie ; maybe I could make her disappear. But she just kept staring, her narrow eyes a mixture of boredom and hostility. She looked kind of funny, giving me such a mean look while sitting in front of the happy, flowered lilac-and-green wallpaper, and when I started to smile, she rolled her eyes. Nice . She was in a snit because Dad had snapped at her earlier about her failure to volunteer to take on more household duties when she was home. Earlier I had made a point of offering to set the table, which Dad declined.
    After dinner, Josh helped me carry up the boxes, which I opened with a little paring knife from the kitchen. I finally felt a little regret. It seemed like such a waste of energy, all that packing and taping and carrying from the weeks before. We’d gone to an office supply store and bought boxes in three different sizes, shiny brown packing tape, and a roll of bubble wrap. There was much fun to be had with packing supplies: I had tried to get Superhero to walk across a sheet of the bubble wrap (to no avail) and liked repeatedly solving the puzzle of turning the flat pieces of cardboard into actual boxes with just a little