Free Once More With Feeling by Megan Crane Page A

code word for me. Sometimes it meant too loud, too passionate, too excited. Sometimes it meant pathetic and silly. Or just childish. Sometimes it was used as a pat on the head, something patronizing and dismissive. But one thing I knew: it was never, ever, a compliment.
    I glared back at her, no doubt with all of that intensity she hated. And who knew what I might have said?
    ‘I think this has gone off the rails a little bit,’ Dad said then, forestalling whatever I was about to say. Saving me from a total meltdown, more like.
    He smiled at me, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to return it. ‘I know you’re upset, and I don’t blame you. Who wouldn’t be? And no one’s saying you shouldn’t be. You have the right to your feelings.’ He leaned his elbowson the table, and angled himself toward me. His smile deepened. Every alarm inside me started ringing. Loudly and ominously. ‘But what your mother and I really want to talk about tonight is what we can do to help patch things up between you and Carolyn. This family is our primary concern. Do you see that as any kind of possibility?’
    It felt like a knife in the gut, a betrayal. He might as well have kicked me. Those internal alarms were never wrong – and still, I never listened to them. I might as well have kicked myself, really.
    ‘There’s no patching this up,’ I said, my voice much calmer than it could have been, all things considered. ‘I’m surprised you would think otherwise.’
    ‘No one’s asking you and Carolyn to suddenly be the best of friends after all of this,’ Dad said, and the worst part was how kind he looked then, how compassionate. It made a part of me feel like some kind of monster for not being over the divorce that hadn’t even happened yet. For not simply hand-waving away Carolyn’s actions. Once again I saw that damned blue blouse, frozen in the air, stuck in the last moment my life had made any kind of sense to me.
    Imagine, I thought now, if I’d been a little less reasonable and calm and easy about the whole thing from the start. If I’d taken Lianne’s expletive-laden advice and burned all of Tim’s belongings in a blazing pyre in the front lawn. If I’d punched Carolyn straight in her face, the way I still wanted to. The way Lianne still claimed shewould. What would my parents have done then?
    But I suspected I knew.
    ‘You girls have never seen eye to eye, and this situation is only exacerbating that,’ Dad continued in the same reasonable, rational, horrible way. ‘No one says you have to transform yourselves into best buddies. But how about a little civility? Is that too much to ask?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said flatly. ‘It is far too much to ask.’
    ‘Oh, Sarah,’ my mother said. So very sadly. As if I had reached across the table and plunged that fork of hers directly into her heart. ‘This kind of thing will eat away at you and make you brittle if you don’t find it in yourself to forgive and forget.’
    ‘Then I guess I’m going to calcify right here,’ I snapped, outrage and the deep hurt beneath it making me sound very nearly flippant. ‘Because I’m not going to all of a sudden forgive Carolyn when she can’t even bring herself to apologize for ruining my entire life, and none of us are likely to forget the fact that she’s having my husband’s child, are we?’
    ‘And what about that child?’ Mom pounced on that as if I’d walked into a carefully constructed trap. ‘That poor little thing. It’s not going to be the baby’s fault that any of this happened, is it?’
    I felt another surge of sympathy for that baby, who would be born through no fault of its own into this complicated mess. Of course it wasn’t the baby’s fault. But it also wasn’t mine.
    ‘Is it my fault?’ I countered. ‘Have you sat Carolyn down like this, to tell her what she needs to do to solve the situation?’
    ‘This is not about Carolyn—’ Mom began.
    Which meant no, she hadn’t sat Carolyn down anywhere,