After some point, I couldn’t stay with Mom, who stood guard at the bay window, waiting for Dad to return. I escaped to my bedroom to read up on his potential condition. Spinning around to grab the computer off my desk, I bumped against the hope chest I had inherited from one of my great-grandmothers on Dad’s side. The lid was lovingly carved with her name: Faith.
My own faith felt scraped raw. My knee throbbed. I slid to the floor, leaning against the bulky trunk, and rubbed the growing bruise. Then I waited impatiently for my computer to boot. As it did, I checked my cell phone in case Ash had called me back. Or even Max. Where the heck were they? If I were them, I’d be on the first flight home, but Ash was in Boston, probably awake for the twenty-third hour in a row for his residency, and Max was down in San Francisco, being a rock star publicist for a bunch of start-ups.
At last, the computer finished booting. After sifting through long articles with medical terms I couldn’t understand, my worry spiked when I read one I could. Most people with Dad’s potential condition can’t tell that anything’s wrong since the disease attacks only one eye at first. “Centrocecal scotoma,” that’s the official term for that stealth attack, more commonly known as a blind spot: a permanent or temporary area of depressed or absent vision caused by lesions of the visual system. When the remaining good eye starts getting a blind spot and people lose their central vision, that’s when they finally notice their vision loss. Dad was right about one thing: There is no cure.
Rearing back from the damning words, my mind bounced to the thousand ways my parents were going to need me. College—was I even going to be able to go far away from home as I’d planned? How could I be off in Milan when Mom might need me here in Seattle to help take care of Dad? And my brothers—would they be willing to step out of their busy lives to pitch in?
On the off chance they had e-mailed me, I logged in to my account. But there, instead, was a message from Quattro, who must have gotten my e-mail address from my blog. For an insane moment, my heart rate quickened even before I skimmed his words: Hey… You OK? Your dad? I’m in town till Tues, checking out high schools for Kylie: joy. Lmk if you need a bacon maple bar fix.
Without hesitating, I started typing a response. Clever one-liners burst from my head to my fingertips until I jerked my hands off the keyboard. Dad was far from okay. I had told Quattro that I wanted a clean break from boys. And I was flirting? Confused, guilty, and slightly disgusted with myself, I abandoned my response and exiled the computer to the floor.
Across from my bed hung a photo of a blackened tree stump, scorched from last year’s thunderstorms. I’d taken that photo right after Dom broke it off with me in mid-August. Unable to sleep, I’d gotten up at dawn, running hard through the wetlands behind our house. I spotted the stump and knew exactly how the tree must have felt: blissfully growing in the sun one day, then blasted into splinters the next. Now my parents were the ones fragmenting.
I never thought I’d feel this busted apart myself again. My gaze settled on my half-written e-mail. Here was a guy about to go off to college; I was shackled in high school. Hadn’t I learned anything from history? Anything about dating an older guy? Maybe like a strain of superresistant bacteria, I had become immune to all the normal warning signs of a bad boy. Or worse—I’d developed a blind spot for all the wrong boys. I straightened, horrified.
If I were calling Paradise Pest Control in a panic about an epic infestation, Dad would recommend a complete purge. It was time to end this plague of Mr. Wrong, Wrong, and More Wrong.
This didn’t require a no-boy diet; it was time for a total and complete Boy Purge.
Before I would even allow myself to be tempted, I blocked Quattro and powered off my computer. And then I went downstairs to wait with my mother.
Chapter Five
A couple of days after Dad’s trip to the emergency room, a neural ophthalmologist confirmed the diagnosis that Dad would be blind in a measly six months. In the week since then, we’d been on a yo-yo diet of denial, bouncing between Mom’s manic optimism and Dad’s stoic silence. Case in point: Dad had insisted on trail running with me this afternoon like everything was normal. Not that I would ever tell him this, but I kept worrying that he was going to trip on some tree root he couldn’t see and knock out his teeth or worse.