Nikki: How do you think?
Conrad: Well, I think you look great. You look great all year long.
Will: Awwww.Nikki: No, I don’t like when you’re nice. It makes me suspicious.
Conrad: What? Why? I’m always nice.
Tina: Uh-huh. Yeah, right.
Conrad: I am! Tina, don’t pile on with them. You guys always gang up on me. It’s always three against one.
Nikki: You’re a lot of things, Conrad, but nice isn’t one of them.
Conrad: I am … offended. That’s what I am. Truly. I think we’ll find a lot of support out there for me, lotta people on my side. Call in if you think that I’m nice and these other three are full of—
Tina: Probably not helping your case.
Conrad: We’re gonna put it to the listeners. You guys’ll see. And call in if you’ve already given up on your resolutions. God knows I have.
Will: It’s January third.
Conrad: I know—it’s my longest record yet. 555-1002, give us a shout.
TOP 40 MUSIC TOOK OVER, and I paused the show.
I was always a day behind on my dad’s show—with the time difference between Indianapolis and San Diego, I rarely ever caught it when it actually aired. Luckily, they archived them online.
It was the first day back to school after break. Everything had gone by quickly after Christmas. Rose still had another week off, but it was back to business for me and Sidney. No more sleeping in, lying around, eating cereal for lunch, and listening to Mom and Dan doing the crossword puzzle.
I had asked my mom the day after Christmas if the engagement meant we were going to move. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before except that I never really thought too deeply about much of anything if I didn’t have to.
Mom answered in the affirmative.
“Sidney’s finishing up middle school this year, so she can transition into high school anywhere. Rose has graduated, and you’re almost done. Our lease is up in the summer. It just makes sense. The timing is right.”
“So that’s why you guys decided to get married now? For, like, the sake of convenient timing?”
“It was a factor,” she said, “but obviously a marriage isn’t founded purely on timing alone.”
“Are we gonna move into Dan’s house?”
She shrugged. “We might find a new place. Some place between Dan’s job and mine. We’ve also been talking about…” She paused, considering. “Well, I’m thinking about going back to school.”
My mom worked in a core facility at the School of Medicine downtown. A core was a place with shared machines that a bunch of research labs used since the machines were too expensive to buy individually. Mom’s core did flow cytometry, which was a technique used to separate cells into different populations. I remember her explaining it once with M&M’s when we were kids—pouring a bag out on the tabletop, all the different colors mixed together, and then separating them out into yellows and reds and blues. Flow cytometry used lasers to separate the cells out by different properties, just like you could separate M&M’s by color.
She had mentioned going back to school to get her PhD before, but I didn’t know it was an actual thing that was actually becoming real, like the marriage and the apparent move.
“So I’d still be working downtown,” she continued. “If that were to happen. But we can find a place that will fit all of us if we want. If you want to keep staying with us for college, like Rose is.”
“Staying with us?” I said to Rose later. “Can you believe she said it like that? Like it won’t even be our home. Like we’ll be strangers or something. Seriously?”
Rose just shrugged and said, “I mean…” and then she turned back to her sketchbook like she had expressed a complete thought.
I thought of her response to Mom at Lincoln Square: We feel … Okay. Right? We feel okay?
I felt okay with it only so long as nothing changed. That’s what I should have said, but stuff like that never came in the moment. The perfect comeback only comes to you way after the offending incident, most especially when you’re alone in the shower with no one but the shampoo bottle to tell it to.
When I reached my locker the first day back at school, Alexis Larsson was already there. She was someone who had probably never shared searing rejoinders with her shower products. Truthfully, she was the kind of person who probably warranted those comebacks herself, but she was something like my closest friend at school now that Rose had graduated.
Alexis had appeared in seventh grade, a transfer from some fancy junior high on the north side. None of those new-kid-is-an-outsider tropes applied. No, Alexis instantly became the coolest person in our grade. It was like on a reality show when they introduce someone new and controversial midseason for ratings.
The mystique and hype surrounding Alexis had mellowed out by now—there were so many more people at Meridian North High School to dilute it—but I still had that feeling every now and then of being twelve and completely awed by her. Hoping she would like me despite the fact that she must have, or we wouldn’t still be friends.
“One more semester,” she said by way of a greeting, holding one hand up for a high five and adding in an ominous voice: “The beginning of the end.”
“Hooray.” I slapped her palm and then set about getting into my locker.
“How was your break?” We had texted a little, but she was gone for the bulk of it on a family ski trip to Colorado. All the Larssons got together at Grandpa Larsson’s cabin in Breckenridge—it was an annual tradition. I caught the pictures and videos Alexis posted throughout, seated on a ski lift or posing in front of a massive fireplace or holding up a snowball with a devilish grin. Alexis didn’t know I knew this, but one time she handed me her phone to look something up, and there was already a page open on the browser titled “Become Instagram Famous in Eight Easy Steps!” I couldn’t say what step she was on currently, but she had a couple thousand followers, so she must have been doing something right.
I shrugged. “Pretty good.” I didn’t feel like going into it. “How was skiing?”
“I snowboarded, mainly,” she replied. “But it was everything.”
One of Alexis’s favorite phrases—things were often everything or nothing. She left very little room for the in between.
“What do you have this afternoon?” she said.
“Radio broadcasting.”
“Ah.” She grinned. “Ready for your big debut?”
I made a face. “No?”
“You’ll do great. Shit, I’m gonna be late. Text me after,” she said, and then quickly strode away.
* * *
I didn’t care what Jamie said—the fact that my dad worked in radio didn’t give me much of an advantage in radio broadcasting class. It didn’t mean I automatically knew everything there was to know any more than Josh Epson’s mom being our sophomore English teacher meant he inherently understood symbolism in The Scarlet Letter better than the rest of us.
Although since my mom worked in science, we always did have pretty great science fair projects growing up. So maybe we did have a bit of a leg up on that one.