Page 113 of Playworld

The news could make both my parents so furious in ways and for reasons I didn’t understand. Mom stepped into her bathroom.

“Sneaky bastard,” Mom said—to me, as if I’d been the one standing at the podium. She stuck her head out the door. “All of them!”

There was a small circular mirror in her bathroom, and from where I was standing, I could see, in its reflection, her giving her eyelashes a final brushing. “Did you eat dinner at work?” she asked.

I never ate dinner at work.

Mom reappeared, looking even prettier. “I’m meeting a friend for a drink,” she said. Mom never did this, and it scared me. “There’s leftovers in the refrigerator.” She plopped her lipstick in her purse and left.

In the kitchen, standing before the open fridge, I ate the spongy Popeyes chicken and considered my prospects. Tanner was still at camp. Cliffnotes was working a double. I’d left myDungeons & Dragonsbooks in my dressing room. I had no interest in starting my summer reading. Oren didn’t want to speak to me. Dad was gone. And now an even gustier loneliness blew through the apartment of an entirely different order from any such feeling I had experienced before.

I called Amanda, but Miss West answered. “She’s in Westhampton,” she said when I asked. “Let me give you the number.”

After I wrote it down, I asked, “How’s your hand?”

“It’s wrapped like a boxing glove, but I’m a lefty, so I’m not completely incapacitated.”

“I’m a lefty too,” I said, a little too enthusiastically.

I heard her flick open her lighter. “Do you do everything left-handed?”

“I bat righty.”

“Tennis too? What about golf?”

I’d played either only a couple of times. “Same.”

“So you’re ambidextrous.”

“I guess.”

“It’s how we outsiders adapt to a right-handed world.”

I’d never thought of myself as an outsider.

“I really appreciate you being such a prince the other night,” MissWest said. “I told Amanda when you left the hospital, ‘He’s such a prince!’ And you know what she said to me?”

My heart quickened. “What?”

“Nothing,” Miss West said. “That kid mistakes frogs for princes and princes for frogs, let me tell you. You know, if we really wanted to change this country, we’d impose a waiting period on couples after they got engaged. So they could do a background check on each other. Think how many lives would be saved!”

I didn’t understand anything adults were saying today.

Miss West’s buzzer buzzed in the background.

“The Chinese is here,” she said, and hung up.

—

On Wednesday, Reagan fired eleven thousand air traffic controllers. Mom and I watched the news about it together. She was sitting on her side of the bed while I sat on Dad’s. She filed her nails with an emery board and disapprovingly shook her head. She turned to me and, in a state so close to rage it was scary, said, “You don’tfirestriking workers!”

When I didn’t respond, she added, “Makes you wonder what’s next, doesn’t it?”

It didn’t. Mom groaned with exasperation and left the room. I could hear her run a bath.

“No more Eastern Air Lines Shuttle to D.C.,” Mom said over the splash of the faucet. “Your father willlovethat.”

I heard her press the bathroom lock’s button after she’d closed it.