“Judy!” my dad cries.

I slam my eyes shut as he pulls a hand towel over his lap. “Can you guys keep the door closed when you’re coordinating bathroom stuff?”

“Sorry, Cham!” my dad hollers from somewhere in the great abyss of relieving oneself. More quietly to my mom, he hisses, “You always forget about my privacy.”

“It’s okay,” I say with all the okay-ness I can muster.

“I’m sorry, Scott, but I wish you had waited,” she says to him in a voice I don’t think she means for me to hear. There’s a prickly feeling in my throat and my stomach. I think I swallowed a young porcupine. “You have to stay in your chair and wait until—”

“So can I go to Gene’s?” I ask, vision still a little scarred.

“Just a second, Cham,” my mom says impatiently.

I turn my back to her and the bathroom and the entire situation. On the wall behind me, there are younger versions of ourselves. In one picture, the three of us are outside when my dad was still landscaping. I’m naked as a duck playing in the hose while my mom cuts the heads off petunias in her garden. My dad is pretending to mow her flowers down and she’s laughing; they’re in their own world together, while me and the hose are getting along just fine in ours. I don’t know who took the picture.

“Cham, have you ever noticed how clean the cracks between the tiles of the bathroom floor are?” my dad asks. “Your mom does a stupendous job.”

“Yeah, stupendous,” I say, nibbling at my fingernails impatiently. I hear the toilet flush and a paper towel rip.

“Well, sounds like you guys are pretty busy in there,” I say, tiptoeing away backward. My feet have a feathery presence even on something as hard and unforgiving as the floors of our house. “I’m gonna leave you to it and head to Gene’s, okay? Thanksloveyoubye.”

I’m out of the hallway and through the sliding door like a comet. In the dark, overly ordered mudroom, where my mom basically alphabetizes our jackets, I put my sneakers on. That’s how it’s been going lately anytime I could be in trouble with my parents. I’m not complaining. If you think about the solar system and which part you’d like to be, you’d probably say the sun, but if you think about it better, you’d realize the sun blows up eventually, destroying everything and ending life as we know it. Planets like little old Pluto just drift out of the solar system and get forgotten.

2

Days ’til prom: Still 103

ONCE MY BODY REGISTERS WE’RE GOING TO GENE’S HOUSE, every electric current in my human system speeds up: My heart takes over the drums, my thoughts are all past and future and what it was like when he kissed my shoulder during gym class when I was wearing a tank top and what it will be like when we see each other tonight.