Now, on the way home from Marie’s birthday meal, I knew I should grasp this moment, with all of us together, and hold it. But everything spooling around me felt unreal—nothing was what it should be. Us, Marie leaving, me and Sage, Wilson watching us, Barbie Man still out there.

When I called Sage that night, it was late. I could tell she’d been out and was stoned.

“You told your dad. You promised you wouldn’t.” I whispered it.

“What are you talking about? Speak up. I can barely hear you.”

“You told your dad about Ellen and the man in the car.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“You did, Sage. He asked me how Ellen was doing now, and he stared at me, hard and, like, full of meaning. He knows.”

“He doesn’t. I didn’t tell him.”

“You must have. How else could he know?”

Sage started to laugh on the other end, and I wanted to slam the phone down. “You’re out of your mind. I never said anything, so stop accusing me. You are always so paranoid. Even if I did, which I didn’t, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.”

“It is a big deal and the only person who could have told him is you.”

There was a pause on the line. Why was she lying?

“Jack Griffith was in the Sun Bowl tonight,” she said. She was changing the subject, and she was bringing up something hurtful to me.

I hung up on her. I sat there in the dark living room, my hand still on the receiver, and almost immediately the phone rang. I picked it up halfway through the first ring, but so did someone else on another extension. My mother. Neither of us said hello. We just waited.

“You know what? Fuck you, too.” Sage hung up. There was silence. I could hear my mother exhale on the phone.

“Who is this? Libby? Is that you? Marie?”

I pushed down the dial-tone button with my finger and put the receiver back on the cradle without making a sound. I heard my mother open her bedroom door. She walked toward the top of the stairs, and in the hall light her long hair was down and dark and silhouetted around her, and the light hit her white nightgown as if it were illuminated from the inside. She looked like a ghost, sort of there and not there. I couldn’t see her face. I stayed still, watching her from below, until she turned around, and I heard her bedroom door click shut again.

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