I jut up from the floor into a sitting position. “What?! You filled—Mom! I’m eighteen. Don’t do excrement like that without telling me! You’ve mandatorily ultimatum-ed me without even presenting the options! What the underworld?”

“This is going to be a good thing.” Mom’s voice goes monotone. Powering down again. “It’s only seven days.”

“Mom, sitting around a campfire and singing top-forties music with strangers sounds like a literal nightmare right now!”

“I highly doubt you’ll be singing music around a campfire at a Rediscover Yourself retreat. You saw the site. You’ll be chatting with other people who are feeling lost, hurt—the things you’re feeling.”

Heat flashes through me. It takes everything I have not to scream. I yank the AirPods from my sweatshirt pocket, stuff them in my ears, and press play before reassuming my horizontal position along the floor.

My mother leaves the room. Good.

“Bury a Friend” blasts in my ears as I glare up at the portrait over the fireplace. It’s almost six years old now. Mom looks beautiful with her long hair draped over her shoulder. Her handsome now-ex-boyfriend and my ex-kind-of-stepdad George stands next to her smiling. The middle school versions of his son, Gill, and I are sitting in front of the two of them, looking adequately awkward. We look like a perfect, happy family.

I loved envisioning us that way. I loved feeling like I had a family.

Before them, it was just me and Mom, and of course Papa. When George and Gill came into our lives, I thought we were locked in together forever. But Mom and George never married. So, when they broke up a month ago, the tentative family dynamic I’d been clinging to for the last seven years dissolved in a matter of days. This picture is a lie now.

George is wonderful. It’d been … a relief to imagine him as my dad. I can’t keep doing that if he and my mom aren’t together. It’s weird.

My actual dad hasn’t reached out since he left us for California. I google him once a month to keep up with his work; so we have a one-sided, distant, sort of stalkerish relationship.

I switch Billie Eilish’s album out for the fury of my new favorite metal band, White Chapel, close my swollen eyes, and do my very best to disappear into the floor.

2. Angst and the Journey

SIRI

August 27, Thursday

New Jersey

Mom can’t take me to the airport for my Colorado flight because a dancer got sick and she has to go into work early.