“Hang on,” I protested, taking a large bite of the cookie. “You’re the one who told me you’d shave my head if I got married before I’m thirty. So why should I get serious about anyone when I’m sixteen?”
With a rueful laugh, Mom said, “True, but maybe you’d go easier on their hearts if you knew what you wanted.”
“I was wrong about Brian’s mom. This is the nightmare.”
Not a moment too soon, Dad returned to the kitchen, grinning as he held out his cell phone toward me. “You want to see what’s really nightmarish?”
“No!” I rushed toward the stairs. “I don’t!”
History had taught me that whatever disgustingness my father was going to share would rattle around uncomfortably in my head for days. Given a different life, Dad would have been a photojournalist for National Geographic, but he’d settled for photographing vermin, their dwellings, and his favorite subject: their droppings.
Dad closed the distance between us. “A hundred pounds of fresh bat guano.”
“Dad, stop!”
“Odiferous piles…”
Luckily, his phone rang again before he could show me the mountain of bat dung, and I raced up the stairs, dodging the tall stacks of our library books, and retreated to my bathroom. As I stepped into the shower, more than water rained on me. So did Mom’s words. Deep down, I knew she was preaching the truth about her sine qua non theory, which she had discovered from one of her self-help reads. Adventure first attracted my parents to each other when she flew past Dad on Mount Si, both of them on training runs. Kindness clinched it for them on their first real date when Dad sealed her house from future rat invasion. But it was their sense of humor that made them last twenty-six years of happily ever after.
I turned the water even hotter. As much as I hated admitting it, Mom was right: After seven months—count them, seven—of frenetic dating since Dom broke up with me, I was striking out on the sine qua non front. How hard could it be to find a replacement guy—one guy, that’s all—who could make me fall even harder than I had for Dom? But no matter how fast I cycled through boys, no one came remotely close.
Overheating, I shut the water off, cracked the bathroom door open for fresh air, and toweled dry. Downstairs, I heard Dad telling Mom, “Looks like Auggie didn’t find all the bedbugs at that new condo. I’ve got to go back.”
“But it’s Bill Day,” Mom protested.
“I know, but we can’t have them cancel the contract. Otherwise, Rainier will be a pipe dream.”
And there it was again—the sound of another grand plan cracking under the pressure of reality. Dom breaking up with me because of our “age difference.” Dad begging off yet another set of family plans. Legend has it, after Dad proposed, my parents committed to having fifty life-defining experiences and photo safaris before they turned fifty. Their Fifty by Fifty Manifesto was memorialized on a restaurant’s napkin that now hung on our kitchen wall. They’ve ticked off exactly one and a half: mountain biking through Zion to celebrate Mom’s fiftieth, and our plan to climb Mount Rainier this summer for Dad’s. If the five-year age difference hadn’t mattered for my parents, what were seven between me and Dom? At least, that’s what I had told myself.
I shut my bedroom door and stared at my computer.
Afraid?
I didn’t want to be the type of person who put her whole life on hold, waiting for perfect blue-sky conditions. So I opened the computer. The camera from my fantasy shopping expedition last night was still waiting in my cart at the online photography store. I had earned more than enough money, and the camera could be exactly what I needed to create the best portfolio possible.
I hit Buy.
An SOS text from my other best friend, Ginny, led to a twenty-minute therapy session. Before she and Reb graduated, it would have been the three of us at one of our homes, dissecting this boy problem, preferably over raw cookie dough. But now it was too hard to coordinate a three-way call, with Ginny in New York and Reb wherever she was traveling these days. My phone chirped again before I could squeeze into my favorite jeans, which I had grabbed off the floor. Another text from Ginny: So how do I get Chef Boy to notice me? Right on cue, my stomach growled. Call it Pavlovian, but whenever I talked to her, I got hungry. She was, after all, an incredible baker, perfecting her skills at the Culinary Institute of America. Starving, I’d have to hurry if I wanted a snack before collecting Quattro.
I texted back: Name a dish after him.
Done, I turned to my closet to continue my own flirtation prep. Even if you’re fishing catch-and-release style, you need the right bait. It took me a good five minutes to design an outfit that said casual yet shouted badass—skinny jeans, leather cuff, funky socks peeking over the top of motorcycle boots, all capped off with a boy’s snug-fitting button-down shirt.
As soon as I made it to the kitchen, Mom filled two mugs of steaming coffee and handed me mine.