She gave me a surprised look. On the rare times I talked about my dad, I always did it with a glower, with hate, and she would always reply, “Your dad was a good man in a bad situation.” But coming from her, “good” meant nothing. To her, nobody was downright bad. You could steal her purse and whack her over the head with it, and she wouldn’t think you were bad. And she’d say the same thing about a roast she picked up at the supermarket. “It’s a good piece of meat.” It meant zero.

Now, she opened her mouth, and I knew what she was going to say, so I stopped her. “But what was he like?”

“You got your eyes from him. And your dark skin. I only met him a handful of times. The first time, he made quite an impression. I could see why your mother was charmed by him. He had that wild side to him, too. He was a rocker. The typical teen back then. Had blue hair. Wore tight leather pants. Pierced and tattooed all over. Your grandfather almost threw him out of the house!”

I knew some of this, but before, I didn’t care. Before, I wished I could have emptied my head of any bits of information that had to do with my father. Now, I listened intently. He was wild. Nothing like me. I wondered if I might have been the blue-haired rocker type had things been different.

“But he was an athlete, too. I remember he played basketball. He had all sorts of talents. And I liked him. Deep down, under all the tattoos and piercings, I knew he really loved your mom.” She looked down at the shag carpet, her mouth moving but no sound coming out, as if she was trying to figure out how to put her thoughts into words. “And I know that is why he left. He couldn’t stand to see your mom so weak. She was falling apart. It was difficult to see her so sick, so afraid. But it was as much the fault of your mother as it was his. She refused to speak to him. Partly she hated herself, but she also saw something in the future with him … something she didn’t want. So she shut him out, too. He left before you were born. But he was a good man in a bad situation.”

“You always say that he was a good man. Past tense.”

She sighed. “I think he desperately wanted things to work out between him and your mother. I don’t think he got over losing you both. I don’t know what happened to him, but he’s never tried to contact us since that day. I don’t know what your mother knows.”

Of course, Mom would know better than anyone. We had ways of finding these things out. Knowing her, she probably created futures in her head all the time that had her tracking him down. She was just so … She couldn’t leave anything alone. I sat there, surprised at how numb I felt. I guess nothing where he was concerned would matter to me now. He’d already been dead to me for too long.

“She didn’t tell you because she feels so terrible about what it’s done to you,” Nan said. “Haven’t you ever wished you could undo something in your life?”

Of course I thought of Emma. Of Bryce weeping at the graveside, of Mrs. Reese watering the asphalt. I’d ruined them. With one stupid decision, I’d ruined them all forever. When Nan patted my hand and left the room, I couldn’t get out of my head how strange it was that the smallest decisions in our lives can leave the biggest scars.

That night I had a dream. It’s not unusual for me to dream when I sleep, but it is unusual for me to sleep very much. This time I dreamt of slivers of pale blue light, breaking through a spiderweb in the darkness. Of glass raining down on me. Of me reaching for someone and grabbing handfuls of wet hair. Of pain.

I woke up with a scream caught in my throat. When I came to, I was sitting up in bed, sheets twisted around my legs. My hands were out in front of me, as if I was bracing myself for a fall. My heartbeat echoed in my ears.

It was just a dream. But it felt real. More like my future.

The worst thing was, I hadn’t been on script in days. I’d been ignoring most of the You Wills or doing the opposite of what they instructed, hoping to shake something up. But nothing had changed.

I’m not going in a car, I told myself.

Sometimes, all I needed to do to change the future was to convince myself I was going to change. When I saw the future of me at the dentist, getting all my teeth pulled because of too many butterscotch candies, I just told myself, “I will no longer eat them.” And the more I thought that, the more that memory of me at the dentist faded, became less real. So telling myself I would not drive a car should have worked. Instead, though, the memory seemed clearer. I could make out the pretty spiderweb pattern on the windshield, I could feel the zip of the seat belt on my chest, my fingers digging into the soft plastic seat.

But I am not going in a car. You got that? No car!

But there was no cycling. No new memories. Nothing to suggest that I’d changed the future. It was useless and crazy, arguing with my own mind. Like arguing with a girl. No matter what my position was, I could never win.

I changed my shorts and pulled an old surfing T-shirt over my head as I ran down the stairs. The You Wills whispered and I tried not to pay attention, but random things floated through my mind: unmentionables, lighthouse, fire-engine red. Something smelled like strawberries. When I reached the screen door, Nan was standing by the washing machine. “It’s laundry day,” she said, a tinge of defeat in her voice.

I realized why she was upset when I saw the cast on her arm and remembered her injury. Nan was one of those people who would keep chugging along even with every bone in her body broken. I rushed to her side, despite the fact that on the few occasions I’d helped with laundry in the past, I’d almost been scarred for life. Something about having to handle my mom’s and grandmother’s silky, giant underwear, knowing that Nan handled mine, hanging them up on the line outside for the whole world to see. I’d much rather believe they just dried and folded themselves and jumped into my drawer. But with one arm, Nan was pretty helpless. “Yeah, I can help.”

“Oh, perfect,” she said, to my dismay. She pointed to a big wicker basket of damp whites, all ready to go out on the line. Perfect. Her unmentionables, or at least, that’s what Nan called them.

“How is your arm feeling?” I asked, hoping she’d say it was miraculously cured and she could take off the cast. I wasn’t sure I could handle more than one week of laundry.

“Oh, fine,” she answered through gritted teeth. She waved me out the door.

I walked outside and grabbed the bucket of clothespins, then started with my socks. The easy thing. Unfortunately since I’d only gone running once this week, I only had one pair in the laundry. I moved on to my boxers, hoping that by the time I got to the more serious stuff, a rainstorm would come or the world would implode or something. I was just clipping the last pair to the line when the world did implode. Because she started coming up the pathway. Taryn. And here I was, surrounded by my underwear, all flapping happily in the breeze.

Okay, maybe a real man wouldn’t have felt weird about it. It was completely third grade to be embarrassed. But I was. Like I said, I didn’t have much real experience with girls. And it was embarrassing enough as it was, being accosted in my ugly backyard, which was all overgrown and filled with rusting, peeling patio furniture. There were faded green aliens and army men (you really couldn’t tell the difference) painted on the clamshells that surrounded the cracked walk. I’d made a bird feeder out of Popsicle sticks and that was there, too, lopsided and pathetic, by Nan’s garden. Nan saved every weird creative endeavor from my youth; they were valued trophies to her. The garbage cans were nearby, and they still reeked from the fish from a few nights before. All my surroundings reeked too much of me, of things I didn’t want Taryn knowing about.