“This is where I want to go,” I told Mom and Dad on the ride home.

  When I returned to high school, it felt so small. All the things that had seemed so important to me before I visited Villanova were no longer important. In a year, I wouldn’t even know these people. In a year, I would be in Philadelphia, talking about dolphin gang rape with bearded strangers. Valerie would be in California. Rick Stevenson would be at NYU. And who was cool and who was not cool was no longer a cool question to be asking. The only people who thought they were cool were actually no longer cool, like Lia McGree, homecoming queen.

  “So you two are dating?” I asked, when I interviewed Lia and Peter for the school paper that fall.

  “No,” Peter said.

  “Definitely not,” Lia said. “I actually have a boyfriend. Derek Simms. Double m. He’s in college.”

  “But aren’t the homecoming king and queen supposed to be dating?” I said. “I thought that was a rule.”

  It was just a joke. But Peter and Lia both looked at each other and blushed, as if they were suddenly embarrassed to not be dating. Homecoming king and queen failures.

  “We hardly know each other,” Lia said.

  “I mean, we’re in calc together,” Peter said.

  Lia looked at her watch. Lia really was as beautiful as a model. I mean, she was a model. She had been signed to an agency she called John Casablancas. She had been in an L.L.Bean catalog that winter wearing a skort. But that didn’t make her popular the way it would have in a movie. It just made her a little boring and somewhat deranged-seeming. It made Valerie go, “Lia’s actually wearing the skort today,” and then laugh.

  “Are we done here?” Lia said. “I have a test.”

  Lia left, but Peter remained seated, as if he had expected more from the interview. As if he had blocked out an hour, which he had.

  “Well, this is awkward,” Peter said.

  “What’s awkward?” I asked.

  “Should I remind you that you and I are dating?” Peter said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “We never broke up,” Peter said. “We were going out in the fifth grade, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “And you never actually dumped me.”

  “Oh. I guess I assumed the breakup was implied,” I said. “The whole not-speaking-to-each-other thing for seven years.”

  “Seven years?” Peter said. “That’s a long time.”

  “I guess this is our seven-year anniversary,” I said.

  “A big milestone.”

  “I hope you got me something nice,” I said, and he said, “Sadly, all I have is this pen,” and so I took the pen, because I thought we were just joking around. I said, “This is an excellent pen,” and I was surprised by how quickly I blushed. Surprised by how quickly I suddenly liked Peter—this was Peter, who used to ask for his Latin homework days in advance. Captain of the track and tennis teams. On his way to the University of Michigan, where he was going to be premed. All-around good guy. That’s what people were always saying about Peter senior year.

  Good guy. Good guy. Good guy.

  But Mom and Dad didn’t see it that way.

  Mom and Dad didn’t believe in good guys. All boyfriends were bad boyfriends. Even Peter, who parted his hair directly down the middle and hung posters of famous astronauts in his room. Peter, who was just trying to tell them a funny little story about how we met. But they didn’t find it funny. They were confused.

  “Wait, you’ve been dating for seven years?” Mom said.

  I hated how this happened, how certain audiences could turn something wonderful into something humiliating. How they can make you look at someone and suddenly, for no reason, hate them.

  “It’s just a funny story,” I said.

  “Interesting,” Dad said.

  Dad shifted in his chair. Dad didn’t say anything in response to Peter’s story. And it was excruciating to live in his cold silence. Dad was very quiet now. The loudest he ever got was when the computer froze or the remote control was not where it was supposed to be.

  At least Mom tried to be nice to Peter. She ate a tomato.

  “That’s a cute story,” Mom said. “So, Sally says you want to be a doctor?”

  “Why does everybody think I want to be a doctor?” Peter asked.

  “Because you tell people you want to be a doctor,” I said.

  “Ever since 9/11, I’ve become very interested in politics,” Peter said.

  What he wanted to be now was the president of the United States. But he understood that was a long shot, so if that didn’t work out, he’d shoot for senator. Of Connecticut.

  “You know what they always say about the people who run for office?” Dad said, when he finally spoke. “The best people never do.”

  * * *

  When dinner with Peter was over, Mom went upstairs to her bedroom. She put her fan on so high, she couldn’t hear the rest of the house. Sometimes, Dad went out to the porch to read his book about Abraham Lincoln (he was really into Abraham Lincoln now) or eat cereal in the kitchen (Dad believed in cereal for dessert now), and Peter and I slipped into the living room to claim the white couch.

  “I’m sorry about the couch,” I said, as if Peter might stop liking me because of my couch. It was uncomfortable to sit on the white couch and watch as many movies as Peter and I did. But Peter didn’t care.

  “You know, I hear Lia McGree has an amazing couch,” he said. “Maybe I should just go there.”

  I laughed. I swatted him.

  “Is it suede? I hear it’s suede.”

  “Of course.”

  * * *

  At first, in those early days with Peter, we didn’t touch. I didn’t think it bothered him, because he took film very seriously. That’s what he called it—film. And I figured he couldn’t make out while watching film, the way Dad couldn’t hold conversation when a golf tournament was on TV.

  But eventually, he slid his hand under the blanket. He put it on my thigh. And I understood that watching the movie was not really about watching the movie. It was always about Peter touching my thigh under the blanket.

  This was when Dad would walk in, of course.

  “What are you kids watching?” he said, and sat in the Man Chair. He sliced an apple with a paring knife, because that was the only way you were allowed to eat fruit in the Man Chair: with a weapon.

  “Alien,” I said.

  “What’s it about?” Dad asked.

  “An alien,” I said.

  Dad settled in his chair. “Does the alien have a name?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Everybody just calls it the alien.”

  Dad watched in silence for a bit. Until one of the aliens popped out of a woman’s womb.

  “These aliens are kind of dumb-looking, don’t you think?” Dad said.

  “What do you mean, they’re dumb-looking?” Peter said.

  “They just don’t look like aliens are supposed to look,” Dad said.

  They did not look like any aliens that Dad knew.

  “But how do you know what aliens are supposed to look like?” Peter asked.

  “I just know,” Dad said.

  “But isn’t that the whole point of aliens?” Peter said. “That they challenge the status quo? They make us question the incidentals of our evolutionary history?”

  I felt proud of Peter. How much he knew.

  Until Dad said, “Okay, why don’t we just watch the movie, Peter.”

  So, the three of us just sat there and watched the movie, and I understood why you and Billy literally crossed the border into Rhode Island just to touch each other. But when I suggested the same to Peter, he didn’t get the point of driving so far. “And I’m not really much of a beach person,” he said.

  * * *

  After nine, TV movies always descended into madness. Like the one about the misogynistic ghost who haunted a hotel and pulled the bedsheets from only the women while they were sleeping.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “How can the ghost turn doorknobs but then also float through walls?”

  “Because it’s a shitty movie,” Peter said. “Anything can happen in shitty movies. That’s why they’re so shitty.”

  I loved making fun of movies with Peter. But I could tell that when Peter was done making fun of the movie, he was ready to make out. He put his hand on my thigh under the blanket, and I was like, Peter, my dad is upstairs right now reading about Abraham Lincoln, and Peter said, “What? You don’t think Abraham Lincoln would approve? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  I laughed. For the first time, I felt like maybe I loved Peter. We started to kiss, right there on Mom’s white couch, with the television blaring in the background to cover up any noise we might make. Fooling around was so new to us that it trumped any other thing happening in the universe, except the informercial about dirty catheters.

  Attention catheter users!

  Peter and I stopped. We looked at each other. We laughed. But then he just shrugged and slid his tongue back into my mouth.

  Stop using dirty catheters!

  Eventually, Peter went for my pants. He unbuttoned them with one hand—something he seemed very proud of—and then slipped his hand down. Slid his fingers into me, and at first it felt strange. It felt wrong to be doing this in our house, to become the kind of girl who gets fingered on this couch, of all the couches, but it felt so good to be touched like that by another human being, I completely forgot about the couch. There was only me and Peter and our hands.

  And then, footsteps.

  Mom always woke up whenever we started getting serious, as if she could feel the terrible things that were happening to her couch.

  We paused. Looked at each other and hung in the silence, waiting to see what would happen to us. But nothing happened. Mom just flushed the toilet and never came down.

  If you or a loved one are using dirty catheters …

  We really started to get into things. We kissed until our lips were raw. I wondered how long we were going to do this, kiss until our lips just fell off our bodies. We both wanted more, I knew. But sometimes, we were too polite. Too careful. So nervous.

  I’m sorry, Peter said. Does that feel okay?

  Yeah, I said. That feels okay. I mean, good.

  But every night, the footsteps. We retreated to opposite sides of the couch. Peter always kept his speech for graduation on the ottoman. The student body president had to give a speech, and Peter had been working on it ever since April. Kept it close by his side so he could pick it up and pretend like that’s what we were doing, just going over Peter’s speech at midnight. One second he would be sucking on my tits—that’s what Peter called them, too—and the next, he’d be reading from his speech so quickly and so formally, it made us laugh.

  “China is an emerging super-economy and we must begin to take it seriously,” Peter said.

  “Good,” I said, “that was very good. The best speech about China that I heard today.”

  “Why, thank you,” Peter said. “I’ve only been working on it my entire life. I mean, China could crush us, just like that! Like that, Sally!!”

  He snapped his fingers, and I could see in this moment what would happen to us in the fall, when he went to Michigan and I went to Villanova, and we became different people. Peter was going to major in political science and work for the government and one day try to abolish the death penalty. One day, Peter was going to sit behind a mahogany desk and sign all the bills. And who was I going to become?

  The footsteps upstairs stopped. But we just returned to watching TV. China had killed the mood. We watched some terrible show about serial killers who loved their mothers too much, and we watched it in such utter silence, it disturbed me. Eventually, Peter reached over, tried to start things up again. But a woman on-screen was getting her throat slit. Her blood squirted out of her neck, and Peter slid his hand over my breasts.

  “Your tits look so good in the glow of the TV,” he said.

  I pulled the blanket over them.

  “It’s late,” I said. “Maybe you should go.”

  “But I can’t go,” Peter said, sliding his hand down my shirt. Removing the blanket. “I don’t know who killed her yet.”

  “It’s obviously the boyfriend,” I said.

  Two weeks before prom, on what would have been your twenty-first birthday, Peter and I almost had sex for the first time.

  It was late in the night, and I was upset. Your birthday had been a mess, so I called Peter. I said, “Come over,” and he came over. He sat on our white couch, and said, “What’s wrong?” but I didn’t tell him.

  The whole day was too weird, and Peter was not weird. I had been suspecting this about Peter ever since he told me that the last time he ever cried was when he was eleven and watched Field of Dreams with his dad.

  “It’s very sad,” Peter had explained. “But also incredibly moving. He has a catch with his dad, but his dad is dead and, oh my God, I think I might start crying just explaining the plot.”

  I knew, in that moment, with one single tear running down Peter’s cheek, that Peter was Very Normal. And Peter came from a Very Normal Family. He was always reminding me of this, how his mother served dinner every night at six, meat and three vegetables as a side, even though she worked, and also volunteered, because the Hearts were not criers. They were doers. The first and last time he ever saw his mother cry was when she had to give him cereal for dinner that one night, because she was late coming home from decorating the gym for the eighth-grade dance.

  But Mom was not Normal. Mom didn’t work. Mom didn’t even have any friends anymore, and I didn’t know what had happened to them. For a short while after you died, there had been this woman Wendy, an obese woman down the road who had become Mom’s best friend. They used to get together and smoke weed that Wendy’s brother got for them in Puerto Rico. They didn’t care how it looked, two middle-aged women with joints in their mouths, in their porch chairs, facing the cruel neighborhood. We don’t care! they would say, and laugh. And I didn’t care, either. Because it would make them laugh, deep hearty laughs that I hadn’t heard from Mom since you died. Wendy and Mom were both extremely depressed, and if there was anything that depression gave you, I learned, it was the freedom of not giving a shit.

  For the whole of my sophomore year, Wendy and Mom laughed and got high and made big elaborate dinners that we feasted on all night. Those were the days. The only ones after you died that Mom seemed somewhat happy, but then Wendy joined a weight-loss program and she shrunk until we could barely see her. She rarely even said hello to Mom anymore when she walked around the neighborhood with her new husband, a sports medicine guy.

  Now Mom smoked cigarettes alone on the porch. She watched TV all day in her pajamas. She only left the house to see the psychic or the dentist or to buy a cake for your twenty-first birthday.

  “Let’s go to the store and get cake mix for Kathy,” Mom said that morning.

  I didn’t say what I should have. I didn’t say, But Kathy is dead. And how do you think Kathy is going to eat the cake if she’s dead? Because Mom knew you were dead, and it seemed cruel to remind her of this. I just got in the car. I was a dutiful daughter. It made me feel good to do things like this for Mom, after doing such bad things on her couch. I just shut up and went for the ride.

  At first, the grocery store trip was fine. I liked going to the store with Mom. It seemed to be the only place where Mom seemed like Mom again. I liked watching her push the cart and reach for the things we needed.

  But then we ran into someone. At the store, we always ran into someone—someone she hadn’t seen for a long time. Billy’s mother.

  “Hello,” Billy’s mother said.

  “Hello,” Mom said.

  “How are you?” Billy’s mother asked, and if you were the old man with the mustache walking past us to get the peppers, you’d have no idea by her tone that her son had driven you to your death. You’d think they were just regular women, friends, standing by their grocery carts. Billy’s mother, in her little white tennis skirt and alarmingly large gold earrings (how did she play tennis with such large earrings?).

  “Okay, just doing a little shopping,” Mom said. “I see you’re doing a lot of shopping.”

  You should have seen Mrs. Barnes’s cart. Full of so much food, as if she were bragging. I could see things that only a hungry boy liked to eat: Tang, Pop-Tarts, frozen pizzas, Gatorade. Things Billy ate. Billy loved Eggos—sometimes late at night, on the phone, Billy used to take all eight out of the package, stack them on top of each other, and then cut into them. He said it was like cutting into a couch. And did the Eggos mean that Billy was home? I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Barnes ever eating Eggos. She wasn’t the type—she was a woman always dressed for tennis.

  I didn’t ask, of course. I just looked at our cart. Tea and blueberry jam and cake mix for a dead person. Confetti cake, obviously. Because everybody, even dead people, likes confetti cake.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Barnes laughed. “I’m stocking up. Billy just got back from Villanova.”

  I tensed.

  “Villanova?” Mom asked. She looked at me. In that one glance, I knew she understood.

  “Yes. He just graduated,” Mrs. Barnes said. “We’re throwing him a little party tonight, actually.”

  “Oh,” Mom said. “That’s nice. Very nice. And how did Billy like … Villanova?”

  “He just loved it,” Mrs. Barnes said.

  “Well, that’s nice,” Mom said. “Good for him.”

  “And how are you doing?” Billy’s mother asked me. “You must be headed to college soon, no?”

  “Yes,” I said, and paused. Normally, I would have told her where I was headed, but I couldn’t. “And I’m good.”