Like this is news? My mother never cooks.

“Chinese is cool,” I say.

“Great,” he says. “Let’s go get her. Let her know you’re here.”

Inside her office, she’s tapping away on her desktop. She holds up a finger, the sign to wait. “Just sending in this prescription for Vicodin for a tummy-tuck patient. Be one more second,” she says, and then hits the button on her online prescription software that will send the recipe for numbness to the nearest pharmacy

I wouldn’t mind a Vicodin right now—anything to take the edge off eating scallion pancakes, cold noodles, and pepper steak while making fake conversation with my parents. Nothing has changed since the night a few months ago when I showed her the tats all over my body to remember my dead baby brothers, the ones she pretends never existed. Nope. It’s business as usual. Come to dinner. Talk about school. Be a good boy. See you later.

“So, Trey,” my father says when he’s done, folding his napkin and pushing away his plate. “Final semester. Have you given some thought to what happens come December when you graduate?”

I clear my throat and take a drink of water, wishing it were beer. “I thought I might go to nursing school,” I say, and I manage it with a straight face, flashing back to my joke last night with Harley.

My mother’s eyes brim with curiosity, and it’s the greatest evidence of an emotional reaction I’ve elicited from her in years. “Nursing school. That would be fantastic,” she says, and I want to roll my eyes and say, “You can’t think I was serious?” But they’d be thrilled if I became a nurse, because I’d at least be in the right field. And as far as they’re concerned, the field I’m in is the wrong one. I don’t tell them that when I graduate in December, I want to do what I’m doing right now: designing art on bodies.

We talk more about school and nursing, and it’s kind of amazing in a sad, pathetic way that my mom can chat endlessly about medicine and never about the losses that sliced our family into a before and an after. When she’s done, she surprises me by saying, “Your father and I would like very much for you to bring Harley over sometime.”

I nearly spit out my water. “What?”

“Yes, we’d like to meet her. Can she join us?”

“Um, okay,” I say, and soon after that I head out, texting Harley in the elevator, but when I reach the lobby I stop the message because there she is again.

Sloan.

On the street. Sliding into a cab. She’s not alone. I can’t see whom she’s with. But I feel dirty for even noticing her, and I hope to hell she’s not around when I bring Harley with me. I don’t want my present running into my past.

Harley

A stick-skinny mom in khaki shorts pushes a blonde girl in a swing, and I catalogue the mom’s blasé attitude. Her listless hands on the chains. Her cell phone pressed hard against her ear. Her eyes rolling as she half-heartedly gives the kid a push on the back. The girl kicks her legs, pumping them, trying to fly higher, to touch the yellow ball in the sky with her toes.

“No,” the mom says into the phone, her lips a pink slash across her face. “I asked you to be home by five thirty. I have Pilates class, and you said you’d be home.”

Her voice makes my chest hurt, a deep hollow ache all through my bones.

I’m in Central Park at the playground, and the sun is baking my shoulders. Sweat drips down my tank top so I tug it away from me, but the relief is temporary. The sky is in a punishing mood, lashing the city with brutal heat.

“But that’s not what we decided earlier. Don’t you remember?”

The mom has claws in her voice, but I bet the person on the other end is just as pissed off. I bet they go round and round like this every day, fists raised, two boxers in a ring. Jab, jab, hit, hit.

“Higher. Push me higher,” the kid shouts.

The mom ignores the request.

I drop my head into my hands, and my forehead is slick against my damp palms.

This could be my life. Not the playground, because I don’t mind that. Not even kids, because I guess they’re fine, all things considered.

But fighting with Trey.

Arguing, over who’s doing what.

Getting annoyed.

Rolling my eyes.

Not loving, not caring, not cherishing the other person.

Look what happened to my parents when they had me. Dad cheated, they split, and now he’s so far gone I don’t know where he is.

Look at Trey. The babies his parents lost decimated their family.

That could happen to us.

I can’t stand the thought of us being ripped apart. I finally righted the sinking ship of my life, and now it’s capsized again, with one stupid mistake. My phone rings, and it’s probably Trey, so I grab it from the pocket of my jean skirt, sliding my finger across the screen.

“Hello,” I mumble into the phone. I must be a sight. Hanging out at the playground, hunched over, and sweaty.

“Darling.”

My skin crawls. I swear there are fire ants all over me hearing her voice. The sound I’ve avoided since she tried to buy me back.

“Yes,” I say, stripping my voice to its bare necessities. “What is it?”

“Your registration form for the fall semester arrived,” she tells me. My mom used to pay for my school, so she received all my forms. She doesn’t pay for college anymore, but the university hasn’t quite gotten its records updated.

“Just put it in the mail, please,” I say, but my throat hitches, and I can feel tears pricking the back of my eyes. Great. I’m barely pregnant, and I’m already hormonal. This is going to be a fucking fiesta. But the one thing I won’t do is let her hear me cry. I suck back the tears.

“I think it would be easier if you stopped by to pick it up.”

I shake my head, even though she can’t see me. “No. Just mail it to me.”

“It’s overdue, Harley. You need to turn it in.”

“Then I’ll go to the school and pick up a new form.”

“Well, darling. It’s Friday, and it’s due at the end of the day, so perhaps it would just be easier if you stopped by to pick it up. You can even fax it in from here.”

I breathe out, hard. I don’t have any fight in me right now. I don’t need to be pregnant and kicked out of school. “Fine. I’m at the park. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I stand up, and my stomach roils for a moment, and I’m sure I’m going to yak again. I clasp my hand over my mouth, but the feeling subsides quickly, and I walk away.

“Let’s go. Your dad is in charge of you now,” the mom says sharply to her kid.

My god, parents suck.

I’m going to suck so fucking soon.

My plan was to meet her at the door, hold out my hand and take the form. But then I had to pee, so mother nature won. Now I’m washing my hands in the hallway bathroom, and then I dry them on a soft, and surely expensive, lemon yellow hand towel.

When I return to the living room my mother waits for me, perched on the edge of her royal blue couch. Her eyes are red, like she hasn’t been sleeping well. She’s usually so sure of herself, but she’s clicking and unclicking the band on her watch, a strange little tic that tells me she’s not the Barb Coleman who conquers the world right now.

Still, I want to rip that nervous look off her face because I hate all that she did, all that she didn’t do. But then there’s a primordial part of me that longs for what we never had. That wishes I could drop down on the couch next to her, lay my head in her lap, and tell her that my life is about to change irrevocably. What should I do, Mom? She’d smooth my hair, offer some wisdom, and tell me she’d help me through it. That she’d be there, every step of the way.

“Can I have the form now?”

“Of course,” she says, reaching for it on the table and handing it to me. I grab a pen, spread out the form on a paperback from my purse, using it as a hard surface as I fill in the boxes while standing. I don’t want to sit down. That would imply I’m comfortable here. I’m not, and I never will be.