Escape Velocity by Robin Stevenson Page A

guitar in my dad’s band. I thought he was my boyfriend, but he wasn’t really. I was stupid about everything back then.
    â€œSo what is he like?” she asks, moving over to sit on the edge of my bed.
    I picture Mr. Samson. “Um. Nice. Handsome. He has this great smile…” I remember the way he wouldn’t meet my eyes in Mrs. Robson’s office, how he seemed glad to be rid of the responsibility of dealing with me. There’s a bitter taste at the back of my tongue. “He’s funny,” I say. “He makes me laugh a lot.”
    â€œYou don’t have pictures?”
    I shake my head. “I don’t have a camera.”
    â€œOh, come on. Not even on your cell?”
    â€œI don’t ever take pictures. Anyway, I left my cell phone for Dad.” My stomach tightens and twists. I haven’t told Zoe that my father is having surgery tomorrow. If I talk about it, I might start to cry, and more than anything, I don’t want to cry in front of my mother. Besides, she hasn’t even asked how he is doing.
    â€œSo where did you meet him?”
    â€œAt work,” I say.
    â€œI thought you said he was at your school.”
    I wonder if she’s trying to catch me, if she suspects I’m lying. “Yeah, I guess we did meet at school first, but then he started coming around where I work.”
    â€œWhere do you work anyway?”
    â€œWorld’s Biggest Dinosaur,” I tell her. “It’s a tourist attraction.”
    Zoe’s eyebrows are raised, mocking me. “You don’t say.”
    I ignore her. “Tom used to come around and hang out with me there. During the quiet times, you know? And we’d…we’d talk.” As I say it, I can almost imagine how it could have been: the two of us sitting out front on the steps as the sun dropped in the sky, close enough that I could smell his aftershave and feel the cotton sleeve of his shirt brushing against my bare arm.
    â€œYou really like this boy, don’t you?” she says, smiling at me.
    It’s as if this Zoe and the other one are two different people. Too bad the one thing I’ve managed to say that actually interests her is a lie. “I’m crazy about him,” I say.
    â€œDon’t let him know that,” Zoe tells me. “You have to keep the upper hand. Keep him guessing.”
    I nod, but I can’t meet her eyes. After what she did to my father, I can’t believe she thinks she can give me advice on how to manage a relationship. Even one that is entirely fictional.

Twelve
    Dad has told me the story of how he met my mother. He was living in Hamilton, working for a construction company and moonlighting as a drummer in a band called Deep Underground. They were playing at the university bar, the Downstairs John. Dad was in his mid-thirties and said he was feeling old up there on the stage looking out at all the young kids in the crowd. Then he saw my mother. Love at first sight, he told me. She was sitting with a group but off to one side a little, watching the band instead of talking, and seeming somehow separate and alone. “She had this glow,” Dad said. “Like she was twice as alive as anyone else in that dark room. I couldn’t take my eyes off her all night.”
    He asked for her phone number after the show, and they started hanging out. He was crazy about her. She was very driven, very ambitious. A straight-A student. He said he always wondered what she saw in him, a man fifteen years older who had never finished high school.
    I guess she must have seen something, because a couple of months later, she was pregnant with me. Dad says all through the pregnancy, things were great. “Zoe loved being pregnant,” he told me. “She looked gorgeous; she painted pictures of pregnant women and hung them on the walls in her dorm room. She seemed happy. She wouldn’t move in with me though.”
    Dad rubbed his face as