her arms around his neck as if she wants to suffocate him. I keep looking. He doesn’t really kiss her back, but he doesn’t not kiss her, either.
I want to rip her stupid bustier right off in front of everyone. Instead, I grab my stuff and head up the stairs, waiting for Tracy or Stephanie or someone to call after me and tell me to come back. For a second, I even imagine Jamie calling my name, but when I think about the fact that he’s got a girl on his lap making out with him, I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten all about me. And suddenly, the reason I’ve been so mad at everyone and everything for the past few weeks is very clear to me: I don’t understand any of this. The rules of high school are completely, entirely, disturbingly mysterious to me.
But everyone else seems to get them.
I let the door slam shut behind me.
execrable (adjective): very bad; deplorable; appalling
(see also: Peter)
7
AT FIRST, IT'S just a normal Saturday morning after a bad Friday night. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop, watching an animated short about photosynthesis for a biology project. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, I’m doing a search for my dad.
I’ve typed his name into the blank box a few times before, but I’ve never had the courage to hit the search button. I was afraid of what I’d find. Would a picture of him I’d never seen before pop up? What if someone posted footage of the explosion that they’d taken with their phone? What if I saw a photograph of him dead? I already had plenty of images in my head—did I really need more?
Today, however, before I take any time to think about it, I type in “Alfonso Zarelli” and hit Search.
Too quickly, the photosynthesis cartoon vanishes, replaced by a results page. Google claims that there are about eight thousand “Alfonso Zarelli” results, but most of those results beyond the first few pages won’t have anything to do with my dad. As I scroll down, I see links to articles on news sites about the explosion and pages from his old company’s website where his name is still listed. Nothing weird or unexpected—until I see the memorial sites.
At first, I’m confused about why his name is listed on pages for other people who died—I don’t want to take in what’s right in front of me. But I can’t stop looking and reading, and as I do, I realize that these are the soldiers and contractors who died with my dad. Their friends and families built websites for them and took the time to list the names of everyone who died in the explosion.
How have I gone this long without even thinking about these people? I didn’t know any of them. I don’t even know if Dad knew them—he could have just been riding with them, like people on a train or a bus who, if they met tomorrow, would have no idea that they’d actually seen each other for the first time the day before. So should I feel bad that I never thought of them until just now?
Yes, I decide. I should.
I click on a site dedicated to a twenty-one-year-old sergeant. There are three photos of him on the home page—his graduation photo from a military academy in California, a picture of him in uniform sitting next to a girl who seems to be laughing at something he said, a photo of a memorial service that his unit had for him, a rifle jammed into the sand, a helmet resting on the butt of the gun. There’s a link to letters from his father, his sister, his best friend—some were written while he was still alive, some after he died—and an email he sent to his sister the night before the explosion. And then there’s a page with a description of what happened to his unit the day he died, and a list of the people who were killed alongside him.
My dad was one of those people.
I close my laptop and push it away from me on the bed. I look at the clock. It’s time to call Peter. We always talk on Saturdays around eleven.
Usually when we’re on the phone, I can tell he’s fishing for information about how I’m doing. He never seems to believe it when I tell him I’m fine. But I get it—I don’t believe him when he says it, either.
Sometimes he’s not awake when I call, so I leave him a totally random, incomprehensible message in the weirdest voice I can come up with, and he calls me back later. But today he answers right away, on the first ring, which is good because I don’t have it in me to come up with a weird voice right now.
“Rosie?”
“Hey.”
“You don’t sound so good,” he says, coughing a little, his voice rough.
“You sound like you just woke up two seconds ago when your phone rang. Did you go out last night?”
“Friday nights in college rock, Rosie. So do Thursday nights. And Saturdays. And the rest of them. It’s awesome,” he says. I can tell he wants me to believe what he’s saying, but the way he sounds, he might as well be talking about doing his laundry.
“It sounds awesome,” I say, playing along anyway. I realize that even though I’m fourteen, and I’m supposed to be into the idea of going out every night of the week, I have no desire to do so. Zero. Zip. None. I guess that means I’ll be a social loser in college, too. Something to look forward to.
As Peter tells me about the party he went to last night, I lie back on my bed. The corner of Peter’s old PSAT book digs into the back of my head, and I yank it out from underneath me and start doodling on it with a blue marker I find under a pile of crap on my nightstand. My room is a mess, but my mom doesn’t say anything about it anymore. She used to tell me all the time that a messy room shows a lack of self-respect. But I don’t think she’s even set foot in here since the beginning of summer. My walls are neat, but that’s just because there’s nothing on them. After Tracy made the squad, I ripped down all the posters she’d made me buy of bands and boys I would never like in a million years, and I tore them into shreds. The shreds are still lying on the floor. I like the way they crunch under my feet when I get up in the morning.
I look at my bare walls and have the sudden urge to draw on them. I wonder if my mother would notice that. Without thinking further, I take the blue marker and draw one petal of a tiny daisy—because it’s the only thing I know how to draw—on the wall next to my bed. I wait. Nothing happens—the wall doesn’t collapse, no alarm bells go off—so I draw the rest of the flower and start to color it in while Peter continues to talk. Drawing on the wall is oddly exciting. Which means my life is pretty sad and pathetic. But I knew that already.
I look at the green light blinking slowly on and off on my closed laptop, and I think about the sergeant still on the screen. Has Peter ever done a search for Dad? I’m just about to ask him when he says, “What did you do last night?”
“Nothing.”
“You stayed home?”
“No,” I say, pausing. I know he’s not going to like it when I tell him about leaving Tracy’s party. He thinks I need to be more social; I think that’s the last thing I need. “I went to Tracy’s Halloween party.”
It’s quiet on the other end, and then I hear what sounds like a long exhale. My blue marker freezes in the middle of filling in a petal as I place the sound.
“Are you…smoking?” I ask.
“You didn’t stay, did you,” he counters.
“Are
