up her brain, impairing her memory.
I flipped to the start of the genetics chapter. Claire leaned over and tapped a drawing of a tightly wound coil of DNA. ‘I heard a Peninsula sub freaked out about genetics on Monday.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Kind of. I was in the class.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was this guy, Mr Rice. He was subbing for Mrs Hewes -she’s on maternity leave. He told us that DNA is magnetic. We’re stuck with our parents, and they’re stuck with us, whether we like it or not. DNA can explain everything we do, except we’re too stupid to understand that yet. Only the aliens can understand it.’
‘Aliens?’ Claire giggled. ‘Even my teachers in France weren’t that messed up.’
‘He didn’t seem messed up, really.’ I clutched a pillow close to my chest, curling away from Claire. ‘Maybe our school is just being narrow-minded.’
Claire stared at me. ‘You believe him?’
‘I just think it’s an interesting theory. I don’t believe the part about the aliens.’
She shifted positions, moving closer. ‘So why do you think it’s interesting?’ Her tone of voice was curious but delicate. It was the same voice she’d used when we were friends, as if I were the most fascinating person in the world.
After a thoughtful moment, Claire added, ‘Is it because you like the idea of everything happening for a reason? Or that, if you looked hard enough, you’d be able to understand why people do the stuff that they do? Like why they go away without telling you where they’re going?’
If she said one more thing, I would punch her puffy face. I would point out that she wasn’t one to talk-she’d found her mother fooling around with that young Frenchman, after all. I pictured Claire throwing open the double doors to her parents’ bedroom, seeing Mrs Ryan and the boulangerie baker tangled in bed together, the sheets on the floor. The baker was wearing a black beret and nothing else. The soles of his bare feet were dirty, and so were his hands.
Claire pressed her lips together coyly. Even in her current state, she could be her old self with me-the one who always said, It’s okay. You can tell me. I’ll still like you. But she didn’t like me in the end, did she? She didn’t let me into her world; there was something horribly wrong with me. Maybe it was an obvious thing, something a lot of people saw.
Still, I thought about the thing bumping around inside of me. The thing I was afraid to admit, even to myself. Part of me wanted to tell her. Part of me needed someone to tell.
‘Do you remember when we used to roll down the hill in the park?’ Claire asked quietly.
I bit my lip hard, startled. ‘We used to have races.’
‘Rolling races.’ Claire made a small smile. ‘That was fun.’
‘And we used to play a lot of Monopoly,’ I said, as if just recalling.
‘You were always the guy on the horse.’
‘And you were always the shoe.’
‘And I used to tickle you.’ Claire giggled.
‘I hated that.’
‘C’mon. It was so much fun.’ Claire looked thoughtful, then wily, almost like she was considering tickling me right then. She moved toward me. In anticipation, I moved back on the bed and jerked my foot away quickly, sideswiping the softness of her stomach. It felt substantial and…mushy.
Claire jumped back and crossed her arms over the spot on her stomach that I’d kicked. I tucked my foot underneath the bed skirt. ‘Sorry.’
‘I was just getting my highlighter,’ Claire mumbled. It had fallen on the floor; she reached down for it. At that moment, the holiday tree came on. It was on a timer, playing a different Christmas song every fifteen minutes. This time, it was Perry Como singing ‘Mistletoe and Holly’. Claire and I both jumped.
The mood changed fast, from light to awkward. Claire sat back down and we went through the rest of the biology chapter on genetics and then I took her through cells. She got it right away, which made me wonder if she’d really failed biology at all. I duly explained mitochondria, the nucleus and vacuoles, evolution and natural selection, the chemical composition of proteins and carbohydrates. I left out fats on purpose. Claire pretended not to notice.
When my father was young, he was in a car accident. He and his friends were driving home from a party, and they were going down a twisty road and hit a deer. This was when my father lived in western Pennsylvania.
It felt like a story I’d learned in history class, repeated again and again each year. My father’s friend’s name was Mark, and Mark’s girlfriend’s name was Kay. Kay was sitting in the front passenger seat. The car crashed in such a way that her side was crumpled, but Mark and my father were unharmed. My father got out of the car and saw the deer, dead and bloody on the ground. Then he ran over to Kay’s side and took one look at her and passed out. He woke up later in the hospital. Kay was in a coma. Later, she died.
My father brought it up at the oddest of times. The last time he talked about it, we were walking into the Village Vanguard jazz club-I was the only one in the family who would go there with him. ‘I basically saw the girlfriend of my best friend die,’ he whispered, just as an older black man hobbled onstage to the piano. ‘Sometimes I think about how different my life would have been if that accident hadn’t happened.’
Different how? He wouldn’t have gone to Penn State or met my mother? He had been a senior, and my mother had been a freshman. They’d met in line at one of the university’s dining halls. But my mother paid my father no attention. Even though he was handsome, he had a strange accent. He was from a part of Pennsylvania that people from the Philadelphia area shunned.
My father won my mother over with persistence. There were gaps in the story; next, it jumped to the part about my mom getting pregnant with Steven. My father was in med school by then. He’d gotten an offer to intern at the NYU Downtown Hospital. My mother, who was fascinated with New York, dropped out of her sophomore year of college, moved to New York with my father, and had Steven.
I once asked my mom if she and dad would’ve been friends in high school. ‘Probably,’ my dad said right away. ‘I was well liked back then.’
Behind her hand, my mother shook her head. When my father left the room, she said, ‘We grew up in very different places.’
My father was a collector. He collected fossils, bugs preserved in blobs of amber, ships in bottles, and snow globes. ‘I like things that are trapped,’ he explained. ‘Too many things leave us forever.’ He even had a way of trapping memories-every time we got a ticket from a parking garage, he wrote a few details about where we’d parked and where we’d been and what we’d seen on the back of the stub. He did this with drycleaning slips, movie-ticket stubs, restaurant receipts, throwing it all in a big leather box at the foot of the bed. ‘All of these things are important,’ he said. ‘We’ll want to be reminded of it later.’ He’d been doing it the whole time I’d been alive.
Sometimes, when my father spent whole weekends in bed, I crawled in with him, and we watched cartoons. My father laughed at them as much as I did. When I got out of bed, he stayed, but I still thought
