The Spring Girls

“Jo—” Laurie called, and I watched him look for me in the darkness. I even thought about ignoring him and running as fast and as far as I could, but he spotted me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, as if my dad hadn’t been fucking blown up and my mom wasn’t on her way to Germany and my house was falling apart.

“What’s wrong?” I yelled at him, not giving a shit that none of this was his fault. “What’s wrong is that—” I stopped to dig for what exactly was wrong, besides the obvious. “Why are you still here? I told you to go hours ago.”

“I can’t just leave you like this. Your—”

“I can take care of myself, Laurie.”

He sighed and stepped closer to me. The streetlight was shining directly on him now, and I wondered at what point we had moved to the edge of the yard. “I never said you couldn’t, Jo. I’m just trying—”

“Trying what? To swoop in and try to make me feel better. Guess what? That’s not going to work here, Laurie, because you see, my fucking dad is lying in some hospital bed fighting for his goddamn life right now!”

I knew I was wrong for yelling at him, but honestly, it just felt so good in that moment.

“I’m only trying to—” He tried to explain, but I cut him off again.

“Well, stop. Stop trying.”

“Stop interrupting me!” he half shouted, and turned away from me. His fingers tugged at the hair closest to his scalp, and he looked at me again. “I’m trying to be here for you, Jo. Just fucking let me, for God’s sake.”

“God doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Jo, I know you’re upset and—”

I couldn’t let him finish a sentence, not tonight. “You don’t know anything. My dad actually loves—”

I stopped myself. Where was this coming from? Even this version of me couldn’t finish my hurtful sentence. But when I looked at Laurie, I realized that the damage had already been done. His face had fallen like a shooting star onto the grass, and I was struggling to find the voice I was spouting with only seconds before.

“You know what, Jo? Fine. I’ll go. Have a good fucking night.” His accent was so strong that I barely understood the last part as he dashed across the street and I stood there frozen inside and out, waiting for him to turn back around.

I never wanted to be the kind of person who lashes out at their family . . .

Laurie wasn’t my family.

He was a random neighbor boy who I had spent the last few months getting to know inside and out, and he had done nothing wrong but try to be there for me. He wasn’t my punching bag, and I needed to find it in myself to walk my ass over and apologize. I could smell bacon cooking from the kitchen, and my stomach growled despite the fact that I hadn’t eaten bacon in years.

I thought about Shia and his comforting words to Meg and Amy as Meg played with Amy’s hair until she fell asleep on her lap. John Brooke had left almost as soon as he arrived, yet Shia was still here. Swallowing my anger and pride, I crossed the street and knocked on Laurie’s door.

He opened it after a long pause, and I stood there, silent until he waved me in. Neither of us talked until we got upstairs to his room. He had already changed into his pajamas, a white T-shirt and blue plaid cotton pants. His bed was a mess, like he had been trying to sleep but rolled around instead.

He sat down on the edge of the bed for a moment before lying down. His long body was almost too long for the bed, and I sat down on the edge of it. I lay down next to him, just as I had many, many times, and he clicked the lamp off above his head.

“I’m sorry,” I told him in the darkness.

“I know,” he whispered back.

35

jo

Our house became something between a clinic and a funeral parlor after my dad came home from his hospital stay in Germany. The mood had changed significantly, and it was hard to remember what life was like before there were ten doctors’ appointments a week and people in and out of our house like someone died. Even Denise Hunchberg brought some sort of casserole over pretty much every day since the moment John Brooke helped Meg wheel Dad through the door. We had everything from bar food from Aunt Hannah’s late shifts at Spirits, to Denise’s Cheez-It casserole, to vibrant bouquets of flowers sent by Mrs. King herself.

Meg must have been getting better at sucking up to the woman, I thought.

The house became overcrowded and started to smell like an office-party potluck. I had finally gotten my license, so I could help take my dad to his appointments and take myself to work when I could. I thought I might have to quit my job at Pages if my dad’s doctors kept adding specialists for him to see. Unlike Meg, I liked driving on the post with my dad; we had started our own secret get-out-of-the-house club.

My dad stared up at the clock on the wall in the waiting room. “They always make me wait so long,”

“Yeah, they do. I bet this will still be faster than Dr. Alaban,” I said.

The pages of the People magazine I was scrolling through were stuck together, and I wiggled them apart. Apparently Jennifer Aniston was pregnant with twins! For the tenth time in the last year. And it was determined that they would most likely have her genetically superior locks of brown hair.

I would never understand people’s obsession with her becoming a mother. So what if she didn’t want to have children?

“No way. Dr. Alaban is just thorough, Jo.”

I looked up from the faux news story on the page. “Thorough? Dad, he takes an hour to even get to the room and has to listen to your heart like ten times before he gets it.”

My dad rolled his eyes. “Your generation is so impatient.”

I rolled my eyes right back at him and leaned forward, tucking my leg under my body in the typical cushioned waiting-room chair. “We just don’t like to waste time. Unlike yours.”

He laughed at that. “Oh, you’re not wasting time on the internet?”

“Learning, yes.”

“Learning what? How to bully people or create hashtags for catastrophic events?”

“Touché.”

The woman behind the desk smiled at me when I looked at her. She was on the phone and seemed to be happy at her job. She remembered my dad’s name each time we came to the neurologist. She was pretty, probably in her twenties. She looked like Angela from Boy Meets World.

“But your generation raised my generation to not like to sit around and wait for stuff.”

“You also don’t know what hard work is. You expect stuff to come to you. Not you.” He waved his hand at me and smiled a little. I was getting used to the chip in the corner of his front tooth. Meg bothered him about fixing it, but he didn’t want to.

“We expect things like free health care and some Social Security,” I teased. It was true, but it wasn’t either of our faults.

“Touché.” He raised his fist and playfully tapped mine in a fist-bump. He drew it back and made a weird little whishhh sound, and I tried not to laugh.

“Dad.” I bit down on my lip and shook my head. “No. Just no.”

He shrugged. He told me I was no fun, and the office phone rang again. My dad ran his fingers over the healing skin on his neck. I felt like every day it got easier to look at his wounds. The first time Meredith gave him a bath, we heard her vomiting down the hall afterward. To drown out the noise, Beth started playing the piano Laurie’s grandpa had given her, but Amy had already heard. I saw it in her cotto

n-flower-blue eyes when she stared down the hallway, then picked up her phone and went back to her cyberland. Sometimes I wanted to check her search history, but I couldn’t go against my essential beliefs of privacy. No matter how badly I wanted to.

Amy was acting out; we knew it had to do with my dad’s being home and everything changing so fast. Amy had to start helping Beth around the house, which, of course, Amy didn’t want to do. But Meredith was busy, and so were Meg and I. Within the six weeks since our dad had come back, Amy’s teacher had already emailed Meredith about Amy’s behavior. Dad said she was seeking attention, and I thought maybe she was, but of course she was. She was twelve and her dad not only looked different now, but he was a little different inside, too.

But of course he was; four deployments and rolling a Humvee over a roadside bomb on a residential street and barely surviving will do that to a person.

I could still see more of my original dad than my sisters could, but they barely spent time with him.

His jawline was so sharp, like Beth’s and like Meg’s. I thought I looked more like him than my sisters since I got his height. Our hair was the same dried-mud, milk-chocolate brown color.

His leg was still plastered, and the skin on his cheek had started to heal into a waxy coat. The skin they used to replace the skin he lost was so red. The week before, I showed my family a video about a group of doctors in Brazil who were testing tilapia skin on humans with burn damage. Basically a skin graft. Only my dad thought it was interesting and amusing. Meredith left the table.

I got my phone out of my pocket and had a text from Laurie. He asked what time I would be done and said he wanted me to come over when I got back from running around with my dad.

“Who you talking to that has you smiling that way?” my dad asked.

“Smiling? No one.” I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips. I wasn’t smiling.

“Uh-huh.”