My insides start plummeting. I feel like a baby fish who just got dropped out of a plane. A baby fish who’s flapping her fins in foreign air, trying to stay afloat, but keeps falling faster and faster. I read about it in National Geographic last night. About how some states repopulate their lakes by farming fish until they reach a certain age and then they release them into the wild by dropping them out of planes. After hitting the water, 90 percent of them survive. But I don’t know if I’ll survive. I can’t take this new reality Cole is dumping me into. “Will you wait a second!”

But Cole’s not listening. “If we choose Dad, we go to a new school. He’s not sure where yet, but somewhere closer to his job.” His voice is so even, so unemotional, like he’s not even talking about our life, our parents, our family. “We’ll get to see the parent we don’t choose every other weekend.”

“This is our life you’re talking about!” I yell. Something breaks behind my eyes, and tears rage down my face. Strange, warm tears. It’s been so long since I’ve felt them.

“I know,” he says, without trying to give me a hug. He’s still so calm. It’s like we’ve switched places and I’m the emotional wreck and he’s the chill one. What the hell’s going on? I am not supposed to be like this. He is not supposed to be like this. This is not supposed to be happening.

I scoot fast to the edge of the bed, preparing myself to run out of the room, to confront Mom and Daddy. Then I remember that Mom had to go to the office, and Daddy’s key chain with his bazillion keys wasn’t in the key bowl when I came in.

Cole picks up the pieces of the picture and turns to place them on my bed. “Here, you can have it.”

“Why? Why are they splitting up? Why like this?” This cannot be about the boutique. Daddy would never take his issues with Mom’s work this far. None of their arguments ever get this serious. Not to say that the residue of black-blue words hasn’t hung around for a few days here and there—house cold and quiet. But eventually someone cracks a joke or cuddles up or cranks up some nineties R&B or breaks out Monopoly or burps really loud, and things go back to normal. It’s like they’ve always known the limit of how far they could stress their love. But this is way over the limit.

“He wouldn’t say.”

“He didn’t say anything about why? Like, nothing?”

“You know there’s no getting real talk out of Dad. I’m surprised I got that much,” Cole says, picking up a couple of the photos around him.