“Eight. Need to get moving soon.”

“You can stay here, if you want. I’ll cook. Are you hungry?” Boys are always hungry.

“Um, yeah, but I gotta get back tonight. It’s busy on the weekend. All the Wrinklies counting on me to shift their gear, ya know?”

Just stay. They can miss you in the Bad Place for one night. Stay here, make some phone calls if you need to, rearrange your plans while I make us dinner. And then we can go for a walk on the north side of the island, out along the rocks. We can watch the sun set and maybe watch a movie on TV. Just stay tonight.

He pulls on his underwear, plain black boxers, not new, not worn out either. “I’m sorry. Maybe next time.”

“Yeah, cool. No worries.”

“Do you want any weed?”

I nod and reach for my bag to take out some money but he refuses. Instead he drops an eighth on the bedside table and leans over, kissing me again, giving this whole it’s so hard to leave you routine, which he keeps going with until I push him away.

“Come on, you don’t want to miss Ted. He’s waiting.”

He looks over at my alarm clock—“Shit”—and picks up the pace with getting dressed. “I’m sorry, I really wish I could stay.”

It’s weird being naked while he’s dressed. I don’t like it at all and I wish he’d just leave already if he has to.

“I’ll call you,” he says as he leaves without looking back at me.

My bed is comfortable. This bed, the guest bed. I listen to his footsteps down the stairs, across the living room, through the kitchen; the door closes really gently behind him. I move into the middle of the bed, splay my arms and legs out, relieved to be alone again, no talking, no repeating myself. No one to see the silly faces I make. I look up at the shapes made by bumps and depressions in the ceiling. An owl. An eel. A sea monster . . .

Chapter Five

Sometimes my parents were amazing. Like when Mom was still singing and she auditioned for a band that had just gotten signed and we went to California. We had a cool car that never broke down, an electric-blue Mustang convertible my parents loved. We drove fast with the top down. At least, I always remember us going fast.

California was strange as well, though. I was little (five? six?), and California felt like a magic word. So I didn’t understand why California wasn’t clean, why I didn’t turn blond and golden there, why I still felt small for my height, and lonely. Why there was always this patina of dirt clinging to the hair on the palm trees, why the scars from mosquito bites still lingered big and black and ashy on my legs. Soon I developed a knack for looking at things without thinking about them. It helped. I just noticed the strangeness, the distance between me and everything else. The cars as they stopped at the traffic light outside my window, the letters on signs sitting bulky against their backgrounds, all these people who didn’t seem to see me.