Since You've Been Gone Read Free

when the house was built, almost impossible to cool in the summer. They were ensorcelled with the place.
    The house had originally been painted a bright purple, but had faded over the years to a pale lavender. It had a wide front porch, a widow’s walk at the very top of the house, too many windows to make any logical sense, and a turret room that was my parents’ study.
    I pulled up in front of the house and saw that my brother was sitting on the porch steps, perfectly still. This was surprising in itself. Beckett was ten, and constantly in motion, climbing up vertiginous things, practicing his ninja moves, and biking through our neighborhood’s streets with abandon, usually with his best friend Annabel Montpelier, the scourge of stroller-pushing mothers within a five-mile radius. “Hey,” I said as I got out of the car and walked toward the steps, suddenly worried that I had missed something big in the last two weeks while I’d sleepwalked through family meals, barely paying attention to what was happening around me. But maybe Beckett had just pushed my parents a little too far, and was having a time-out. I’d find out soon enough anyway, since I needed to talk to them about Sloane. “You okay?” I asked, climbing up the three porch steps.
    He looked up at me, then back down at his sneakers. “It’s happening again.”
    “Are you sure?” I crossed the porch to the door and pulled it open. I was hoping Beckett was wrong; after all, he’d only experienced this twice before. Maybe he was misreading the signs.
    Beckett followed behind me, stepping into what had originally been an entry parlor, but which we had turned into a mud-room, where we dropped jackets and scarves and keys and shoes. I walked into the house, squinting in the light that was always a little too dim. “Mom?” I called, crossing my fingers in my jean shorts pockets, hoping that Beckett had just gotten this wrong.
    But as my eyes adjusted, I could see, through the open door of the kitchen, an explosion of stuff from the warehouse store one town over. Piled all over the kitchen counters were massive quantities of food and supplies in bulk—instant mac and cheese, giant boxes of cereal, gallons of milk, a nearly obscene amount of mini micro cheesy bagels. As I took it in, I realized with a sinking feeling that Beckett had been totally correct. They were starting a new play.
    “Told you,” Beckett said with a sigh as he joined me.
    My parents were a playwriting team who worked during the school year at Stanwich College, the local university and the reason we had moved here. My mom taught playwriting in the theater department, and my dad taught critical analysis in the English department. They both spent the school year busy and stressed—especially when my mom was directing a play and my dad was dealing with his thesis students and midterms—but they relaxed when the school year ended. They might occasionally pull out an old script they’d put aside a few years earlier and tinker with it a little, but for the most part, they took these three months off. There was a pattern to our summers, so regular you could almost set your calendar to it. In June, my dad would decide that he had been too hemmed in by society and its arbitrary regulations, and declare that he was a man . Basically, this meant that he would grill everything we ate, even things that really shouldn’t be grilled, like lasagna, and would start growing a beard that would have him looking like a mountainman by the middle of July. My mother would take up some new hobby around the same time, declaring it her “creative outlet.” One year, we all ended up with lopsided scarves when she learned to knit, and another year we weren’t allowed to use any of the tables, as they’d all been taken over by jigsaw puzzles, and had to eat our grilled food off plates we held on our laps. And last year, she’d decided to grow a vegetable garden, but the only thing that seemed to flourish