Read Online Fade Out by Nova Ren Suma - Free Book Online

they’d never been shed, the dad will say Forgive me and the daughter will say I do , the sun will shine, the dog will retrieve the stick, the music will play, the credits will roll. The end.
    But I’m shutting down the projector and starting my own movie. Here goes.
    “I’m not going,” I say.
    “You’re not what?”
    “I’m not going. In October. You can’t make me.”
    “Of course you’re going,” he insists.
    “I’m not!” I shriek. Then I get serious and say, quieter, “I’m not.”
    I’ve said it, and he looks shocked, so I decide to say some more. I see big trouble in my future, grounding by water torture, grounding by fire, but I have to add one last bit, the cherry on top of my angry sundae, and say I hate him for what he did and I’ll never forgive him, never.
    He has a dazed, empty look in his eyes. I’ve stunned him to silence. There’s nothing more to be said after what I confessed—or wait, no. Now he’s talking.
    “Have you seen the dog?” he says.
    “She went off that way.” I point to where I pitched the stick.
    “She should be back by now,” he says. And he calls her name, “Gloria! Gloria!”—a ridiculous name for a dog—and goes down the riverbank to search for her.
    Gloria’s not barking. I can’t see her anywhere. The stick I threw may have landed in the river. I may have just drowned my soon-to-be stepmother’s dog.
    I start down the riverbank looking for her. I’m walking past the parking lot when I spot Gloria. There she is, beside my dad’s car, stick in mouth, waiting for us. I don’t know what happened to my dad, so I just go to Gloria and plop down on the curb beside her.
    “What should I do?” I say, not caring that I’m talking to a dog.
    Gloria opens her mouth to drop the stick. She doesn’t want me to throw it again—she wants to show me her jaws.
    “I don’t really hate him,” I tell her. “I’m just feeling all weird. And sometimes you say things you don’t mean when you’re feeling weird.”
    Gloria snorts. She stares me down with her cold canine eyes.
    “I don’t have to go in October, do I?”
    She snorts again, softer this time.
    “He never should have lied,” I say. “This is what you get when you lie.”
    Gloria slumps down to sniff the concrete. She may not care what I have to say—she may be a dog and technically not even able to understand what I have to say—but I need at least one living thing to tell it to.
    My dad comes up then and I could repeat it all back to him, but I don’t. In the movies, people talk to each other because otherwise you’d have nothing to watch. But here, on this side of the river, we don’t talk about anything.
    The big nothing between us is carried to the car. It travels with us down the road and back to the house, and once there it squeezes itself onto the love seat in the den while I watch TV.
    Some movies I could be watching on the classic movie station this Sunday afternoon: Detour. D.O.A. The Stranger. The Maltese Falcon. The Man Who Cheated Himself. The Woman in the Window. The Man Who Made Up a Big Fat Lie. (I invented that last one.)
    It could be any of those, I’m not sure what. Nichole just walked in front of the TV.
    “You can’t seriously be watching this,” she says. “Where’s the remote?”
    Now, normally, I would never give up the remote control. When my brother and I had a war over the remote, I once chucked it down the garbage disposal before letting him have it. (Mom rescued it before it got ground to bits.) I also shoved it so far down into the cushions of the pull-out couch that it wasn’t found until weeks later when my uncle Lou came to stay for Thanksgiving.
    But Nichole sets me on edge. Tonight she has her long hair down, knife-straight. And worse, she’s brought a friend. The friend has honey-colored hair, a faint smirk, and stands there feverishly sending text messages instead of acknowledging that I’m here in the room.
    The remote is in my lap. Nichole sees