“—and something happened,” I said, ignoring her. “Maybe something bad happened, a surgery went wrong or something, and she can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Or the thing that happened is Dad boned her,” said Willow.

I took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Yeah. Or that.”

For the next several days, Willow and I commenced an intensive stealth operation. We were determined to get to the bottom of this. Really, I think we hoped for proof that this adulterous scandal was just a product of our young, wild imaginations.

What we discovered instead were two boxes of condoms. One in the drawer between our parents’ underwear drawers—unopened and close to expiring—and the other in Dad’s gym duffel bag. Accompanying it was a nearly empty bottle of Neosize XL and a brand-new bottle of Sir Maximus.

As if that wasn’t proof enough, one day while Dad was in the shower, we finally got ahold of his phone.

You couldn’t unread the things that we read.

“Oh my god,” said Willow. “How can someone as boring as Dad text like he’s a character in an HBO show?”

That was actually a vast understatement, neighboring on praise. It indicated a hint of prime-time television class, which Dad did not have in these texts. He sounded more like a plumber in a cheap homemade porno.

Once we had eliminated any shadow of a doubt about Dad’s faithfulness, we moved on to Mom’s phone. We had to find out if she knew.

What we found instead were dick pics. Sooooo many dick pics. It was dicks as far as the eye could see. Most of them belonged to Derek—tattooed, shaved-and-trimmed, endowed-to-a-fault Derek—but these were occasionally interspersed with the dicks of Sean, or Milo, or Terrence.

Most of these only went as far as sexting. But occasionally they ended with a hotel address.

When Willow and I discovered our first video, we opted to put our detective work to rest.

We never confronted Mom and Dad about it.

We stopped talking about it.

And then we just stopped talking.

THREE

WHENEVER I WAS LUCKY enough to fall asleep, I never felt it happen. It just snuck up on me. I simply woke up—whether it was a half hour or eight hours later—and I would think to myself, Well, that was lucky.

I woke up.

My first thought was not, Well, that was lucky.

It was, Where the hell am I?

I was in a bedroom—which would have been weird enough on its own—but it wasn’t even my bedroom. It wasn’t even a bedroom I recognized. I was lying on my side, staring at a wall that was barely visible beneath everything plastered all over it. One half was covered in ’80s band posters—the Clash, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode. The other half was a collage of blown-up photographs—photos of backwoods Illinois, of Carbondale, of Piles Fork High School.