Since You've Been Gone Read Free Page A

was the zucchini, which then attracted the deer she subsequently declared war on. But by the end of August, we were all sick of charred food, and my dad was tired of getting strange looks when he went to the post office. My dad would shave, we’d start using the stove inside, and my mother would put aside her scarves or puzzles or zucchini. It was a strange routine, but it was ours, and I was used to it.
    But when they were writing, everything changed. It had happened only twice before. The summer I was eleven, they sent me to sleepaway camp—an experience that, while horrible for me, actually ended up providing them with the plot of their play. It had happened again when I was thirteen and Beckett was six. They’d gotten an idea for a new play one night, and then had basically disappeared into the dining room for the rest of the summer, buying food in bulk and emerging every few days to make sure that we were still alive. I knew that ignoring us wasn’t something either of them intended to do, but they’d been a playwriting team for years before they’d had us, and it was likethey just reverted back to their old habits, where they could live to write, and nothing mattered except the play.
    But I really didn’t want this to be happening right now—not when I needed them. “Mom!” I called again.
    My mother stepped out of the dining room and I noticed with a sinking feeling that she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt—writing clothes—and her curly hair was up in a knot on top of her head. “Emily?” my mom asked. She looked around. “Where’s your brother?”
    “Um, here,” Beckett said, waving at her from my side.
    “Oh, good,” my mother said. “We were just going to call you two. We need to have a family meeting.”
    “Wait,” I said quickly, taking a step forward. “Mom. I needed to talk to you and Dad. It’s about Sloane—”
    “Family meeting!” my dad boomed from inside the kitchen. His voice was deep, very loud, and it was the reason he was always getting assigned the eight a.m. classes—he was one of the few professors in the English department who could keep the freshmen awake. “Beckett! Emily!” he stepped out of the kitchen and blinked when he saw us. “Oh. That was fast.”
    “Dad,” I said, hoping I could somehow get in front of this. “I needed to talk to you guys.”
    “We need to talk to you, too,” my mother said. “Your father and I were chatting last night, and we somehow got on—Scott, how did we start talking about it?”
    “It was because your reading light burned out,” my dad said,taking a step closer to my mom. “And we started talking about electricity.”
    “Right,” my mother said, nodding. “Exactly. So we started talking about Edison, then Tesla, and then Edison and Tesla, and—”
    “We think we might have a play,” my dad finished, glancing into the dining room. I saw they already had their laptops set up across the table, facing each other. “We’re going to bounce around some ideas. It might be nothing.”
    I nodded, but I knew with a sinking feeling that it wasn’t nothing. My parents had done this enough that they knew when something was worth making a bulk supermarket run. I knew the signs well; they always downplayed ideas they truly saw promise in. But when they started talking excitedly about a new play, already seeing its potential before anything was written, I knew it would fizzle out in a few days.
    “So we might be working a bit,” my mother said, in what was sure to be the understatement of the summer. “We bought supplies,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the kitchen, where I could see the jumbo-size bags of frozen peas and microwave burritos were starting to melt. “And there’s always emergency money in the conch.” The conch shell had served as a prop during the Broadway production of Bug Juice , my parents’ most successful play, and now, in addition to being where we kept household cash, served as a bookend for a