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Tip held me up in the backseat as Lola drove us home. My throat burned and the car smelled of vomit. The front windows were rolled all the way down, the air freezing. Lola stomped hard on the gas and the brake, making our bodies shudder regularly, but Tip braced me against him. It reminded me of the roller coasters that locked you in by a harness around your shoulders.

Lola was saying sorry for letting me drink so much. Tip was saying, “Easy, easy,” about her driving. “Red light!” he had to yell once. We pulled over once for me to throw up out the side door. My ears rang from the music still.

“Are your parents going to kill you?” Lola said, and I knew they would be long asleep, having assumed David and I were up late reading about Namibia or quizzing each other on the physics of Arctic ice floes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are
your
parents going to kill
you?”
I felt like I was very funny. In spite of my sick, I felt proud of myself; for what, I didn’t exactly know. Surviving without David Nelson? Going to a party? Escaping myself for some number of hours? It was no matter. I was filled with a drunken satisfaction. The night had offered me possibility that there could maybe be a life here in the
after,
something beyond just waiting for Danny to come home. What that something was exactly, I had no clear inkling. But that was no matter. The possibility of possibility—it was enough.

Tip and Lola walked me up the stairs of my front porch, but I kept telling them I was okay now, okay, okay, okay. Tip let go only after I, with considerable effort, fit my key in the lock and pushed open the door. Lola patted my head. We all said our goodbyes in loud stage whispers.

My head was buzzing as I fell into bed, still in my clothes. I had managed to rummage a bowl from the kitchen cabinets and rest it next to the bed, though it would come to no use. Yes, the room spun, and yes, my stomach lurched, but only for brief moments, because for once sleep came like an anvil, heavy and sudden and relievedly free of thought.

It was the desk drawers that woke me, slamming open and closed. I opened my eyes to thick darkness, the middle of the night still, though it felt like I’d been sleeping for days. My head pounded like a drum; swallowing felt impossible, my mouth dry and pasty, tasting like garbage. My ribs hurt. It took a moment to place the noise, the heavy footsteps and slamming drawers, the grunting. From nearby.

From Danny’s room.

I jumped out of bed, far more quickly than I thought possible, and ran into the hall, nearly tripping over Olivia, who was sniffing the air in Danny’s doorway. The furious motion, the stooped figure—it was not Danny. It was my father, moving through the room like a pre
–Homo sapiens,
his back bent, his head and arms dangling intently as he pawed through the desk drawers, throwing pens and blank pads of paper and crumpled receipts on the floor, banging impotently on the keyboard of the computer. The trash had been strewn from the plastic can, the trophies knocked from the bookshelf, the mattress pulled off its axis, now drooping crookedly on the floor, large sections of box spring exposed.

I throbbed. My whole body was throbbing.

“Daddy?” I said, and he looked at me wildly, his chest heaving. For a moment he said nothing, his face doing a bizarre curdle, and
I feared he could smell my drunkenness or he was seeing the alcohol rising off me in misty, vaporous plumes. I wondered if he would chastise me, an idea that both horrified and thrilled me. But the sound out of his mouth was like nothing I’d heard from him be-fore, not even after that first night Danny did not return and the next morning and then the night again, when it was clear something had gone terribly wrong. It was a throaty hum of a noise, high-pitched and childish-sounding. No, dog-sounding. He was whimpering. He looked around the room as if he’d just arrived to find it this way, staring disbelievingly at the posters that now hung askew, the blankets torn from the bed, the garbage littering the floor. His eyes pooled with moisture.

I steadied myself against the doorframe. I felt like I could fall over.

For a long time we stayed frozen like that, my father staring at me, me clutching the doorway to stabilize myself. For years I would replay the moment in my mind, one of my father’s cheeks still bearing the red imprint of his pillowcase, his hair mussed into a sparse crown, an undone button of his pajamas exposing his curly white stomach hair. He blinked at me, as if he would never look away. It had been so long since he’d looked at me. It seemed like years since he’d softly pinched my ear and called me Chicken for my skinny legs. Since he’d asked what you got when you crossed a cheetah and a hamburger.

“What is this?” my father said, the words crackling, his expression naked and pleading, as if I were someone who knew the answer and,
dear god,
could I please just stop holding out on him. I opened my mouth to speak. The pull cord on Danny’s blinds swung back and forth. The other dogs made their way up the stairs, the cockroach-like skittering of their nails on the wood growing
louder and louder. My mother had to be awake now too, maybe lying in her bed, studying the dark ceiling.

I made a noise, a dizzy, drunken, wordless sound. It was all I had, a low sort of growl. And that was the moment I really knew—the sick, sudden, ugly moment—how incapable we were, how impotent and inconsolable, how limited our reach. Grief had already, in a few short months, mined an impassable trench between us. We were—like a boy buried in a ditch or bloated in salty ocean water or starved in some sadist’s basement—beyond rescue.

Winter came early. The first big snow fell in the second week of October, then a huge storm hit days before Thanksgiving, three and a half feet covering the town with an eerie blankness and adding an extra two snow days to vacation, which seemed to make everyone giddy to the point of feverish, though the effect on our household more resembled a quarantine. Drifts blockaded our front door for days, until I finally chiseled away at the hard-packed, icy barricade. The search was canceled that Saturday and never really started up again in earnest. By December only the hardiest volunteers still showed up, and even those petered out over the holidays and the freezing January rains. Kirk Donovan stopped coming over. The librarian took down the wall-sized card from the school library; the administration dismantled the shrine in the hallway. I expected at
least a brief outrage, cheerleaders tearing at their clothing or orchestrating a few well-positioned bawling fits; there was nothing.

David Nelson and I halfway reconciled by the time winter semester started, our interactions characterized by his refusal to use a contraction—“I could have called you earlier but I did not want to bother you.” “I do not think that it is a good idea to study together in your room anymore.” “I am glad that we are talking again. It is nice to be talking with you”—which made him seem even more bookish and robotic than usual. There was something both comforting and homesicky about being with him, a same-but-different quality that made me sometimes miss him even when he was right in front of me. He’d taken up with one of the Dungeons and Dragons freaks, Adam Deselets, and his speech was now peppered with references to feats and spells and foes. He was a first-level paladin. I nodded when he told me such things, asking, “Is that good or bad?” to which he’d answer that he was base class but with XPs he would be able to get to prestige. It was like listening to a small child who had made-up words for everything.

There were times I caught him staring at me and I would wonder, is this different from before? Was the look in his eyes—a look that seemed altogether more wistful and more probing—new, or was I just imagining things? We’d be in the middle of a discussion about whether or not Mr. Hollingham had false teeth or about the presidential election in Haiti, and I would see him, cloudy-eyed but intent, his Adam’s apple bobbing earnestly, staring as if he were seeing me for the first time—or maybe the last—and things between us would tilt uncomfortably. I’d find myself going cold inside, brittle and impatient and wanting to say, “You’re an idiot.” I was unforgiving in the way I would later be unforgiving of boyfriends who talked to me in baby voices or seemed too easy with their gifts or
praise. Starting with David Nelson, any visible display of longing stopped me cold. Such displays always felt deceptively insistent, cloaking a desire to split me open and see inside. I didn’t want to be split open. I didn’t want my insides seen.

And so it was that Lola Pepper became my closest approximation to a best friend, though it was a relationship predicated on a mutual agreement to pretend our differences didn’t exist or at least didn’t bother us. Never did we have the sort of relationship where things could be taken for granted or sentences could be finished for each other or we could entirely relax. To her credit, she was unfailingly persistent (it was hard to be lonely with Lola Pepper around) and largely good company, as she was almost always in a light, fluffy mood. Her house had an otherworldly quality to it, mainly due to her walk-in closet full of toys she’d never relinquished from childhood: Cabbage Patch dolls, Chutes and Ladders, Candyland. She would ask, “Have you ever played Hungry Hungry Hippos? It’s hilarious” as she unearthed the box from the bottom of a stack. She didn’t much seem to care about winning or losing, happy to bash the lever that controlled the mouth of her purple hippo as the marbles spun around the board. I would do the same with my green hippo, and such was the way we’d let minutes slide easily between us.

When she first started coming over, I was irritated by the reverent way she insisted on tiptoeing through Danny’s room
(Please, can I just peek in there for a minute?)
, gingerly touching old swim goggles or his pillowcase. She’d never been in there when Danny was still around; now she treated it like the end of a long pilgrimage. “Come on,” I’d say, standing in the doorway. “Let’s see if there’s ice cream downstairs.” Or “I have something to show you” (I didn’t). Or “Let’s watch something stupid on TV.” It was always easy to find something stupid on TV. Lola was as beguiled by talk shows where hosts harangued
lovesick guests as she was by infomercials selling get-rich real estate schemes as by cartoons where buildings morphed into cars, cars into superheroes.

It was mostly nice having her around, for the sake of the noise and the way she obliviously shook things up, especially with my parents. Noticing my dad watching golf, she fired off a whole round of inquiries about Greg Norman versus Steve Elkington and if John Daly was ever going to be consistent. Which did he think had been a more competitive course this year, the Ryder or the U.S. Open? With my mom, Lola acted as if a vet tech were akin to a rare form of celebrity.
Did you ever treat a gecko? Have you ever seen a tumor removed from a guinea pig? How do you get a gerbil unstuck from its Habitrail?

Sometimes my father just stared sleepily as she rat-a-tatted away, as if she were a human alarm clock he did not know how to silence. Often her conversations with my mother were frenetic and garbled, each of them interrupting the other, nobody listening. But other times I’d be surprised. My mother, it turned out, had in fact used a makeshift concoction of tongue depressors and Vaseline to loosen a gerbil from its Habitrail. My father favored Greg Norman over nearly everyone else.

One night my mom came into my room after Lola had left, coming behind my desk chair and grabbing both of my shoulders. The unexpectedness of the contact made me flinch a little beneath her. She didn’t seem to notice. “Such a nice girl,” she said. “That’s really something, the flag team. A flag girl.”

I had no idea how to respond. I didn’t find it something at all, Lola’s flag-girl status. I found it one of the many
in spite ofs
of our friendship. But I knew what my mom meant. She meant I’d finally arrived, finally friends with someone involved in an extracurricular not centrally concerned with world history or geopolitics. And her enthusiasm was so irritating, it was almost enough for me to stop
inviting Lola over. Except watching Lola flitting around my parents, undaunted—not even seeming to realize she should be daunted—and creating such easy, effortless access points with them felt very familiar to me, very much like Danny was back, or at least a part of him was, the part that softened things between everyone and made it, for all his failings, that much more livable here.