Page 68 of Emmett

“Come on,” Dad says, “get upstairs and try to get some sleep.”

I trail after him without protesting – or saying much at all, really – and I flop down onto the bed waiting for me not unlike Uncle Davis’s bed is always waiting for him here. I don’t know if it means that they knew I would be back here someday or if it’s just a coincidence; but I’m choosing to believe the latter.

“I’m sorry I keep messing up,” I tell him. “I’m trying not to.”

“You’re human, Emmett. Being human is messy.” His hand comes down onto my shoulder with a comforting squeeze. “I’m proud of you for coming home. You made agoodchoice tonight.”

He leaves the door cracked a few inches when he leaves the room, and I don’t get up to close it. I don’t take off my shoes or get under the covers. Instead, I pull my phone from my pocket it chuck it across the room before laying on my back. I hold my hand out in front of me to inspect my bandaged knuckles while I ignore the nausea rolling through my gut at the realization that I came out to my dad and got dumped all in the span of an hour.

Whatever I want, I can’t name.

Whatever I need, I can’t find it.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Emmett

It’s groundhog day.

I worked so hard to get out of this position, and here I am again, anyway.

I sit with my family around their breakfast table while Dad dishes out his homemade pancakes. Rowan stares at the redness left on my neck while Macie loads her stack of pancakes down with syrup and a mountain of rainbow sprinkles. I offer her a small smile to let her know that I’m okay, though I’m not sure that she believes me.

I’m not sure thatIbelieve me.

“Whatcha do to your hand?” Macie asks.

“I wasn’t paying attention,” I tell her. “I shut it in a car door.”

Dad’s eyes flick to me as I lie to my little sister a little too convincingly and a little too easily in order to protect her from the truth.

“I think,” he says, peeling the plastic off of a jar of sprinkles before setting it in front of me, “that your timing is the perfect opportunity to resurrect pancake Wednesday.”

I reach for the jar and turn it over in my hand, inspecting the yellow and black mixture of sprinkles, with bat shapes mixed in. “No way!” I shout with a laugh.

I snatch the bottle of syrup and pour probably way too much of it on top of my pancakes, following with a sickeningamount of sprinkles – maybe even more than Macie used on her own stack. Suddenly I feel like a kid again, back in our old apartment, sitting around the metal fold-out table in the kitchen that wobbled if the takeout pamphlets slipped out from under the bad leg.

“Christ, when was the last time we did pancake Wednesday?” I ask as I slice through the stack of pancakes in front of me.

“The Wednesday before your eighth birthday party,” he answers.

I remember that party. Dad and Davis had made me an absolutely hideousTeen Titanscake and set up a game of laser tag with a few of my friends at my favorite arcade. It was easily the coolest party I’d had up to that point; hell, if they wanted to put that together again for my twenty-sixth, I’d be ecstatic about it.

I remember asking him at one point if Anna was coming – I’d bugged him for more than a month about inviting her. I think I pouted for a decent portion of the party over it when he finally told me she wasn’t coming, even after cake and ice cream. The next week, Dad set up pancake Wednesday and I lied and told him I didn’t like pancakes anymore, but really, I blamed him for not bringing my mom to the party. For notmakingher come. I don’t think he made pancakes again after that until he met Rowan and Macie.

“Well,” I say, stretching my back against my chair, “I’m not eight anymore, so I’m gonna need a lot more pancakes.”

“You got it, bud.”

Macie stuffs one of her last bites into her mouth and shoots her arm up over her head. “Wait, Dad!” She shouts with her mouth full. “Me too!”

I look to Rowan with wide eyes and she offers me a smile and a nod to confirm that Macie is, in fact, calling my dad ‘Dad’ now, too. The little gremlin snatches the syrup bottle as soon as more pancakes are stacked onto our plates, sticking her tongue out at me; and because right now, I’m apparentlyalsoeight years old, I dump a thick line of sprinkles onto my top pancake, roll it up like a sugary taquito, and stuff the entire thing into my mouth while she watches.

“Children, settle,” Dad chides while Rowan cackles, holding her napkin over her face.

I was dreading coming downstairs when I woke up this morning. I told myself over and over again that coming here last night was a mistake; there were going to be too many questions that I didn’t want to answer and too many eyes on me, but sitting at the table with my family, I’m really glad that I made the choice to come home.

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