Page 35

“Sasha?” Mom’s voice sails up the stairs.

“Gotta go,” I tell Brooke.

I flex my hands as I go downstairs, easing out the kinks that I should have never allowed to settle, weeks without practice ending in my first chair loss. Dad looks up from the table, an attempted smile aborted into a mild grimace when he realizes he can’t quite force it.

“Well, look who it is,” he says, which is a stupid thing to say under any circumstance and particularly confusing in ours.

“Seriously?” I sit in my usual chair, making sure that the back hits the wall so I can see him wince. Instead he reaches out, his hand resting on my wrist. We haven’t touched since I got boobs and it made things weird, so I forget to roll my eyes.

“Sasha, honey,” he says, his voice low like when he used to read to me at bedtime. My heart stutters again, as if Shanna had been listening then too, examining the letters that turned into words that he helped me learn.

“What?” I say it with no edge, an honest exclamation of curiosity, just as Mom’s hip hits the swinging door from the kitchen and she brings in dinner.

“Chicken,” she announces, setting a platter on the table that has more food in it than we could eat in the next three days.

“Mom, I’ve still only got one stomach,” I tell her.

“I know that,” she says, with forced cheer. “I just . . .” She looks over at Shanna’s empty chair, and I wonder if she’s disappointed that I sat here instead.

Dad clears his throat, “How was your day, honey?”

Mom and I are both so surprised we look at each other, not sure which of us he’s speaking to. We’re off script. Dad stopped asking me how my day was after one time in junior high when I answered with a real-time explanation of tuning my clarinet.

“Uh . . . fine,” I say. It wasn’t fine. I lost first chair and a friend defected. But it’s the answer I’m supposed to give, so I do.

Dad sucks in a breath and I wonder if he’s about to ask me how Shanna’s day was, when Mom reaches out and brushes her fingers against my cheek. “Everything okay?”

My phone vibrates and I slide it out of my pocket to see a text from Isaac.

Sorry. See you later?

“Yeah,” I tell her, a piece of reed still jammed inside my cheek. “Everything is good.”

sixteen

I power up my laptop, happy enough to forgive Lilly now that I know I’ll be seeing Isaac later. Brooke calls first. She’s wearing a sports bra and has her hair up in a wet ponytail.

“Are you going to put a shirt on?”

“Why?” She looks mystified as she bites into a pizza pocket. “Oh, there’s Lilly.”

Our friend pops up on the other side of the screen. She’s got on a hoodie from last year’s band camp and too much concealer around her eyes. I personally think the mea culpa would go over better if she went ahead and let me see she’s been crying, but whatever. Isaac texted me again to say he’d be over in about an hour, so she’s got plenty of time to apologize.

“Hey, Sasha,” Lilly says cautiously. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” I tell her. “I came home and practiced a ton. Charity’s only keeping the seat warm for me.”

“Damn straight,” Brooke says, some pepperoni falling out of her mouth to land in her bra. She fishes it out and pops it back in her mouth.

“Oh my God, Brooke,” Lilly says, ignoring my jab at her cousin. “You’re so gross.”

“Whatever, dude. I was looking for some pumpkin recipes for foods class last week and typed pump king instead. Skewed my results. Now that’s gross.”

“I don’t want to know,” Lilly says, but I think maybe she does.

“Seriously, Sasha, you doing okay?”

Brooke asks this while holding her pizza pocket up into the air and examining the remaining contents as if they might be more interesting than my answer.