Free The Disenchantments by Nina Lacour Page A

weeks after you go. Visiting the old haunts, seeing how they’ve changed. You make me want to stir up my life a little.”
    I want to tell Pete everything, but how can I—especially after this? He never had his own kids, so somehow I’ve become the only child to all three of them, and no matter how great they are, even if they hold secret conferences to discuss my choices and praise me, it’s a lot of pressure to carry their hope and admiration and worry all on my own.
    I want to ask Pete to tell me what’s next after all of this. But it’s a question that feels too huge, too impossible. So I let the conversation end, promise a million things about Melinda, and tell Uncle Pete good night.
    It’s still warm outside but a breeze has picked up. I browse through song choices and settle on “Modern Girl,” the track Bev listened to on repeat for the entire summer before ninth grade. I choose this song because it’s connected to what I was trying to remember earlier, after Bev didn’t answer the question, and even though I would rather be thinking about anything else, I can’t stop thinking about what else she’s keeping from me.
    I close my eyes as the guitar starts.
    “Listen to the lyrics,” I remember Bev saying.
    “They’re cool. I like the donut part.”
    “They’re perfect.”
    “Yeah, they’re good,” I said. “They’re simple.”
    Bev started the song over again.
    “Listen,” she said.
    “I know,” I said. “I’ve memorized it.”
    She looked discouraged, and then I got the feeling that this was about more than how good the lyrics were. We were quiet. Carrie was singing,
Hunger makes me a modern girl
.
    “Are you trying to tell me something?”
    She turned up the volume.
My whole life was like a picture of a sunny day.
    In the other room, her mom and dad were watching TV. I could hear them laughing. There was a line between her eyebrows, her mouth curved down. The lines came again.
    I tried to figure out what she meant.
    “Has something changed?” I asked.
    She didn’t answer me.
    I spent the rest of the night trying to get her to tell me what it was, but she didn’t. She just played the song over and over as we talked about other things. I thought about what my mom told me in one of our many awkward conversations about Bev and me now that we were older, about how teenage girls can be complicated and mysterious creatures. My mother had never been so right about anything. Because here was Bev, sitting in the bedroom that was as familiar as my own, looking at me with the same eyes I’d been looking into since we were nine, trying to get me to understand something by just listening to a song. Maybe there was something important that she wanted me to know. But probably Ma was right. Probably all Bev was trying to tell me was that she was now older and therefore complicated and mysterious and so fucking attractive and troubled in the way that all teenagers are troubled.
    So I just listened to the song and watched every gesture she made, and searched for the clues to figure her out, and then the night got later and her dad appeared in the doorway to move me out to the couch, and I said good night and thought so much about what it would feel like to touch her that I forgot about everything else.
    Later, Alexa wakes me with a squeeze of my shoulder. She takes an earbud out of one ear. “Hey,” she says, “we’re going to bed now, okay?”
    It must be at least 3:00 A.M . The air has gotten cooler.
    “Were you talking to your dad earlier? When you first came out here?”
    I shake my head. “Uncle Pete.”
    “I have some questions for them. Research, for the play. Next time you’re going to call them will you let me know?”
    “Sure,” I say. “How was the game?”
    “It was good,” she says. “We left something for you on your pillow.”
    I brush my teeth with Meg. We try not to crowd each other, take turns spitting into the gray, cracked sink. Bev isn’t here, but I don’t ask