Today Tonight Tomorrow

I drop my phone back onto the nightstand next to my writing journal. It’s open to a sentence I scribbled in the middle of the night. I flip on the lamp to take a closer look, to see if my two a.m. nonsense makes sense in the daylight—but the room stays dark.

Frowning, I toggle the switch a few more times before getting out of bed and trying the ceiling light. Nothing. It rained all night, a June storm tossing twigs and pine needles at our house, and the wind must have snapped a power line.

I grab my phone again. Twelve percent battery.

(And no reply from McNair.)

“Mom?” I call, racing out of my room and down the stairs. Anxiety pitches my voice an octave higher than usual. “Dad?”

My mom pokes her head out of the office. Orange glasses lie crooked across the bridge of her nose, and her long dark curls—the ones I inherited—are wilder than usual. We’ve never been able to tame them. My two great nemeses in life: Neil McNair and my hair.

“Rowan?” my mom says. “What are you doing up?”

“It’s… morning?”

She straightens her glasses and peers down at her watch. “I guess we’ve been in here awhile.”

The windowless office is dark, except for a few candles in the middle of their massive desk, illuminating stacks of pages slashed with red ink.

“Are you working by candlelight?” I ask.

“We had to. Power’s out on the whole street, and we’re on deadline.”

My parents, author-illustrator duo Jared Roth and Ilana García Roth, have written more than thirty books together, from picture books about unlikely animal friendships to a chapter book series about a tween paleontologist named Riley Rodriguez. My mom was born in Mexico City to a Russian-Jewish mother and a Mexican father. She was thirteen when her mother remarried a Texan and moved the family north. Until she went to college and met my Jewish father, she spent summers in Mexico with her father’s family, and when they started writing (words: Mom, pictures: Dad), they wanted to explore how a child might embrace both cultures.

My dad appears behind her, yawning. The book they’re working on is a spin-off about Riley’s younger sister, an aspiring pastry chef. Pastel cakes and pies and French macarons leap off the pages.

“Hey, Ro-Ro,” he says, his usual nickname for me. When I was a kid, he used to sing “row, row, Rowan your boat,” and I was devastated when I learned those weren’t the real lyrics. “Happy last day of school.”

“I can’t believe it’s finally here.” I stare at the carpet, suddenly gripped by nerves. I’ve already cleaned out my locker and taken my finals breakdown-free. I have too much to do today—as student council copresident, I’m leading the senior farewell assembly—to get nervous now.

“Oh!” my mom exclaims, as though suddenly waking up. “We need a picture with the unicorn!”

I groan. I was hoping they’d forgotten. “Can it wait until later? I don’t want to be late.”

“Ten seconds. And aren’t you signing yearbooks and playing games today?” My mom cups my shoulder and gently shakes me back and forth. “You’re almost done. Don’t stress so much.”

She always says I carry too much tension in my shoulders. By the time I’m thirty, my shoulders will probably touch my earlobes.

My mom rummages around in the hall closet, returning with the unicorn-shaped backpack I wore on my first day of kindergarten. In that first first-day photo, I am all sunshine and optimism. When they snapped a picture on the last day of kindergarten, I looked like I wanted to set that backpack on fire. They were so amused, they’ve taken photos on the first and last days of school ever since. It was the inspiration for their bestselling picture book, Unicorn Goes to School. It’s odd, sometimes, to think about how many kids grew up knowing me without really knowing me.

Despite my reluctance, the backpack always makes me smile. The unicorn’s poor horn is hanging on by a thread, and one hoof is missing. I stretch the straps as far as they’ll go and strike a tortured pose for my parents.

“Perfect,” my mom says, laughing. “You really look like you’re in agony.”

This moment with my parents makes me wonder if today will be a day of lasts. Last day of school, last morning text from McNair, last photo with this aging backpack.

I’m not sure I’m ready to say goodbye to everything yet.

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nbsp; My dad taps his watch. “We should get back to it.” He tosses me a flashlight. “So you don’t have to shower in the dark.”

Last shower of high school.

Maybe that’s the definition of nostalgia: getting sappy about things that are supposed to be insignificant.

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