Free Gasp (Visions) by Lisa McMann Page B

from our parents, and they learned from their parents and grandparents, and so on down the line. Sawyer hasn’t spoken about his parents since he moved out. I guess I’ve been hogging all the attention these days.
    “Have you seen your parents lately?” I ask.
    “I stopped in to see my mom the other day. She’s fine.”
    “That’s good. I bet she was glad to see you.”
    “Yeah.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t press him on it. I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about them.
    “So,” Sawyer says after a while, “do you think your father still has visions? Or do you think he had one and it stopped after its tragedy happened, like Tori’s did?”
    I’ve been thinking about that. “I guess I don’t know. Imean, I believe he’s had one for sure, obviously. But . . . I don’t know.” I frown, puzzled. Something doesn’t add up.
    “Maybe it’s not a repeating vision that’s been driving his depression all this time,” Sawyer says lightly, pulling toasted raviolis from the broiler and plating them with a small bowl of marinara and freshly grated cheese—from here it looks and smells like Pecorino Romano, but I’m not sure. “Maybe it’s the guilt of not having saved people.”
    I think about that. And I don’t know. I might never know.
    But I do know that I’m hungry and this bad boy in the kitchen can cook.
    •  •  •
    When Sawyer drives me home, I invite him to come inside. And he does. He offers a nervous hello when I officially introduce him to Aunt Mary and Uncle Vito, but they greet him with warmth. When my mom comes up to him, he plants a kiss on her cheek, which makes her smile, and my dad doesn’t yell or kick him out. He just leaves. Probably heading to the ash heap to find some more treasures. I still think that’s progress. The Sawyer part, not the treasures part.
    Once Sawyer and I migrate to the living room with Trey and Rowan, I ask them, feeling a little ashamed, “You guys doing okay? I’m really sorry I blasted out of here.”
    “It’s just weird,” Rowan says. “I feel so bad.”
    Trey nods. “It sucks. It’s like we had this power to do something good, and we didn’t use it.”
    “Not didn’t ,” Sawyer says. “ Couldn’t. We did our best. We did everything we could think of to stop it. But we can’t force some stranger to give us what we need.”
    “And now it’s over,” I say softly. I still can’t believe it. “I mean, I think so. There’s nobody for Tori to pass the vision curse to.”
    “Tori told us the vision is completely gone,” Sawyer explains, and he fills in the others on our visit.
    And it’s a boring Friday night for the first time in forever. None of us are working. There’s no vision to ponder. Ben shows up after a while and we all hang out in Aunt Mary’s living room, even the cousins, and we play this game called Apples to Apples, and after months of stress, it’s like I’m finally starting to decompress. It’s over.
    It’s really over.
    When my dad comes home around nine, he doesn’t have pocketfuls of scavenged burned junk. He has ice chests and ice and bags of groceries. We stop our game and look up as he stands in the kitchen, arms laden.
    “Two things,” he says in his old familiar, booming voice, and it shocks me to hear it again after so long. “First, our new landlord just called and said we don’t have to wait until the fifteenth—the house is ready and we can move in on Sunday.”
    We try not to cheer too loudly because we don’t want to seem ungrateful, but we are all ecstatic over this news.
    “And second,” Dad continues, holding up a bag of groceries, “Paula and I are taking Demarco’s Food Truck out tomorrow. And next week, and the next, and every day until we open the doors of our new, improved restaurant!”
    The household breaks into applause, and I cheer too, at first, until the doubt creeps in and all I can do is clasp my hands together and stare at my dad’s flushed cheeks and