What is all this? Some fling after my mother died? Someone before Joy? I pull out the letter.
Joy,
You don’t know me, but I thought you’d want to see this, woman to woman. Photos from our vacation last summer.
Good luck,
One of many
My fingers go numb. Last summer? He was here, working at the clinic, last summer. No, wait. There was a week he went to Los Angeles for a massage therapy conference. And came back with a shockingly dark tan . . . that he said he’d gotten after lying out by the hotel pool every afternoon.
“Oh, shit,” I whisper to myself.
My dad is having an affair.
3
* * *
It’s all I can think about. That evening, after Mom returns from seeing Grandma Esther in Oakland and lets me borrow her car, I’m sitting inside the Melita Hills Observatory’s dark auditorium for my monthly astronomy club meeting. Sometimes we head up to the roof with our telescopes, but this month, it’s an info-only gathering. And thanks to that Bahamas photo book, I’m paying zero attention to Dr. Viramontes, the retired Berkeley teacher who’s president of our local chapter. He’s addressing the group—a couple dozen people, mostly other retirees and a handful of students my age—while standing at a podium near the controls that turn the ceiling into a light show of the night sky. I lost what he was saying a quarter of an hour back, something about where we were going to be watching the Perseid meteor shower.
Instead, my mind is stuck on that photo of my dad kissing that woman.
He lied to my mom. He lied to me.
And he forced me to lie, telling my mom that the Mackenzies hadn’t received any of our mail, because no way was I handing over that ticking-bomb package of agony over to my mom. Not right now, when she’s full of cheer and sunshine, encouraging me to go on the camping trip with Reagan. Maybe not ever. I don’t know. This will tear our family apart.
I’ve never been in this kind of position, being forced to decide where I should hide photos of my dad two-timing my mom. Or three-timing. Four-timing? What did that woman mean by “one of many”? The photos are from last summer, and I doubt this woman would want to call him out to his wife if she were still seeing him. So when did the affair end, and how many others were there? Are there?
Does he just pick up random acupuncturists from alternative health conventions?
Are they all locals?
Do I know any of them?
Ugh. Considering all the possibilities hurts my brain. And what’s even weirder about the whole thing is that the strange woman in the photos looks a lot like my birth mother. I mean, clearly it’s not her, and this stranger is younger than my mother was when she died, but there’s an uncanny resemblance. And that just freaks me out.
My dad is having an affair with someone who looks like his dead first wife. That’s not normal.
What am I saying? None of this normal, no matter what she looks like. I think of Mom smiling this morning, completely oblivious to the fact that Dad’s cheated on her, and it makes my stomach hurt all over again.
Thank God the normal clinic receptionist came in to take over for me at lunch, because no way could I handle looking my dad in the eye.
My stomach is sick. My heart is sick. Everything about this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is that the Mackenzies know. Sunny and Mac saw what was inside the envelope. They had to. I mean, judging from the awkward way they acted, and all that business about meeting for coffee if we ever needed to talk? It’s hard for me to blame them for looking at the photo book. If they really did open it by accident, I’m sure curiosity got the better of them. It did for me.
Huge mistake.
Oh, God. Does Lennon know too?
“What’s wrong?”
I snap out of my thoughts and realize the meeting has ended. The person speaking to me is a brown-haired girl sitting at my side. I’ve known Avani Desai as long as Lennon and Reagan, when we first bonded over astronomy in seventh-grade science class, both acing a quiz about the planets. Avani and I used to carpool to Reagan’s house for sleepovers, staying up late to listen to music and gossip while her parents were asleep. But when I followed Reagan to the elite courtyard at school, Avani stayed behind, secure with her social status. I always envied her confidence. Now the only time I really talk with Avani is during astronomy club.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I tell her. No way am I bringing up the humiliation that is my father’s affair. “I’m just thinking about something.”
“Yeah, sort of figured,” she says with a brief smile, crossing her arms over a T-shirt silk-screened with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s face and the words NEIL BEFORE ME. “You’ve been ‘thinking’ all the way through Viramontes’s meteor shower plans.”
Most of the club members are filing out of the auditorium now, but a few hover around Dr. Viramontes’s podium. Avani is waiting for me to explain my mood, so I say the first thing that comes to mind to placate her curiosity.
“I’ve been invited to go on a camping trip with Reagan,” I tell her.
To my surprise, she brightens. “Oooh, I heard about that.”
Wait, she knew, but I didn’t? And since when had she started talking to Reagan again?
“I overheard Brett Seager talking about it,” she explains excitedly, twisting sideways to face me in the auditorium chairs while she sits cross-legged. “He was at the drugstore with his older sister earlier today.”
“What?” Now I’m interested. Very interested.
She nods quickly. “I was behind him in the checkout line. He was talking to someone on his phone, saying that he was going camping near King’s Forest with some other people from school. I didn’t catch any names but Reagan’s. He was trying to convince whoever he was talking to on the phone to go with him.”
Brett Seager is a minor celebrity in our school. His parents don’t have a ton of money, but somehow he’s always doing things like skydiving, or going backstage at cool concerts, or jumping off the roof of some rich friend’s house into their million-dollar pool. But he’s not just a party-boy daredevil. He reads Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg . . . all the American Beat Poets. Most guys I know don’t even know what a bookstore is.
So yes, he’s pretty and popular, but he’s more than that. And I’ve been nursing a crush on him since elementary school. A crush that turned into a small obsession ever since he kissed me at a party over spring break. Sure, he got back with his on-again, off-again girlfriend the next day, which was humiliating and upsetting for me at the time. Reagan tried to cheer me up by playing matchmaker, introducing me to a couple of boys. Guess it wasn’t meant to be for any of us, because I never clicked with those boys, and then Brett and his girlfriend broke up over the summer.
The important thing here is that if what Avani overheard is true, it sounds like Brett could be going on Reagan’s camping trip. And that makes the great outdoors a lot more enticing.
More panic-inducing, too, because Brett was not a factor in my mental plan for this trip. Reagan’s mom had said it would be all girls. No way would my parents let me go on a weeklong unsupervised camping trip with boys. My father would flip the hell out.
Guess this information is under the table.
“Are you sure Brett said he was actually going?” I ask Avani.
“Yep.” She hikes up her shoulders to make herself look muscular and pretends to be Brett. “ ‘Bruh, you’ve to go with me. I need to jump off that wicked waterfall. We can Instagram the whole thing.’ ”