June was nothing at all like I’d thought she’d be. Who would have thought that she would be the one to laugh at my ‘dead dad’ jokes? I figured maybe she’d just felt bad for me and that was the only reason she’d given me the time of day. A charity case. Maybe I was being delusional. But there might have been some truth to it, considering my first assumption was correct.

It wasn’t inherently strange that she was a patient of Dad’s but the way she’d spoken about him was. She’d said something had happened. What did that even mean? What kind of drama do you have with your therapist? Either way, she had shared something with him, something located on the side of Dad’s double life that I knew nothing about; in a Venn diagram of Dad and me, this girl lived in the intersection. There was something meaningful about that. Something important.

And I wanted to know what it was.

I did eventually end up trying to do schoolwork as per Mom’s request, but worksheets that normally would have taken me five minutes were taking forever. They made no sense, they might as well have been in a different language, and all I could think about was June and this awful heaviness battling a searing lightness somewhere in my stomach. All together, it made me want to puke.

So I flipped open my laptop and searched her name.

Hardly anything came up. No Facebook. No Twitter. Nothing personal at all, actually – just stuff from the Pleasant Hills school district website that I already knew about her: all the academic awards she’d won, the clubs she headed. A few pictures from when she’d been a cheerleader, backlit by the floodlights and beaming out on to the stadium, Panthers uniform and purple pompoms and all.

But Heath’s online footprint was much larger.

He instantly appeared on Facebook. He was irritatingly good-looking, charming even when two-dimensional. His most recent post was about homecoming, a picture of him and June going to the dance in freshman year next to a picture of them being crowned king and queen – a corny ‘look how far we’ve come’ thing, with more than two hundred likes. There was an album of them on vacation in Hilton Head, June sprawled out in a bikini and doing cartwheels in the waves. The posts went back years. There was something uncomfortable about watching a relationship unfold from only one side, but from what I could see they seemed kind of infatuated with each other.

Thinking of infatuation, naturally, made me think of Bea. Why had she been so weird? What was her problem?