Read Online Future Perfect by Jen Larsen - Free Book Online

medical degree,” I say slowly and carefully. I do not want my voice to shake in the wake of the whistling hollow in my chest.
    â€œYou’re so much like your mom,” he says, beaming at me. “But Santa Maria has a first-aid certificate!” my dad says. “A lot cheaper, I bet, than Princeton.” His face is a pale blue-white blur in this light and my eyes hurt looking at him. Annabelle Lee huffs in the crook of my arm and I loosen my grip and I don’t say anything, because my father is a rushing creek and anything you toss in there will be swept away, Ping-Ponging in the current and bobbing its way out to sea.
    â€œRight, is that what you told Mom?” I find myself saying. I don’t know, or even care, where that came from.
    He frowns at me. “I couldn’t tell your mother anything.”
    In the picture of her at Harvard, with her Harvard T-shirt stretched over her pregnant belly and barely covering it, she’s grinning maybe because she will be back when things settle down, when life is smooth, when my father’s landed a full-time job and the twins are old enough to make their own sandwiches or at least be cared for by someone else. And then I came along and it was too late.
    I imagine that when she left us it was to go back to her real life. The one she should have had without my father.
    â€œShe never went back to school,” I say.
    â€œShe didn’t need to,” my father says.
    â€œCould she have?”
    He laughs. “She could do anything.”
    â€œYou know that’s not what I meant.”
    I can suddenly picture my father with his arms around her and dream-light conviction and confidence in his voice telling her everything is just fine, just fine right here and now and always. My mother, swept downstream under a sunny sky, trying to make it back to shore.
    He puts his arm around me and squeezes. “You’re a good kid,” he says to me. “You know that?” Annabelle Lee huffs again.
    â€œCareful!” I snap, and shift her to my other arm, pulling away from him.
    â€œWhoops!” he says cheerfully. “Did I flatten her? She’ll spring right back. She’s just a big fluff.”
    We stop in front of our house, the rattiest on the block. All the lights are on, in every room, bright enough that it looks like the sun has come back up. I will walk through the whole house and turn them all off, one by one. The overhead lights and the table lamps and the wall sconces and the standing lamps and the desk lamps and the task lights, all of them except the one on the end table next to the couch my father will stretch out on to supposedly go through new MLS listings but actually fall asleep.
    â€œEverything will be okay,” he says suddenly. He’s looking at the blazing bright house instead of me. The refrain of my childhood and every year of my life and every bump and scrapeand bruise inside and out. Everything will be okay, or could be. I knew it wasn’t true. Not everything was okay. But for my father, it’s still an unshakeable, unassailable fact about the world.
    â€œRight, Toby?” he says. Toby barks and spins in circles.
    I trust Soto’s judgment more, and her face is as sad as ever.
    â€œToby knows what I’m talking about,” my father says.
    â€œToby might be the only one,” I say, and he elbows me.
    â€œChip off the old blockhead,” he says, and takes the front steps up two at a time, the dogs bobbing along in his wake.

CHAPTER 6
    O n Saturday I wake up seventeen years old and the first thing I do is run to the bathroom and drop to my knees. It’s the gift that keeps on giving—I’m sick for a long time, hanging on to the side of the bowl with my eyes closed and my heart jittering, holding my hair back with one hand. I can hear Soto snuffling at the bottom of the door, and then the jangling of her collar. The sound of tiny claws on the wood floor tell me