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maybe someday someone would find all that stuff, the way someone found Emily Dickinson’s trunks of poetry long after she was dead. That seemed like an okay plan to me. To be an artist after you were dead. Let someone else give me that label. I’d never own it myself.
    “So he’s really still alive, then?” Jeff asked about my father.
    “He’s alive.”
    “In prison?”
    I laughed and spit out my Diet Coke.
    “No, in a yurt or something. He’s finding himself.”
    “How long does something like that take?”
    “So far about a decade. He left when I was little. I don’t know, it’s some kind of vision quest. He can’t explain it well, so I can’t, either.”
    “You live with your mom, then?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You ever hear from him?”
    “All the time. We e-mail.” I couldn’t believe I’d just said that.
    “That’s good,” he said. He stared off and then lit a cigarette.
    I glared at him but he just kept smoking, daring me to say something.
    I wasn’t a stranger to cigarette smoke. Lots of my mom’s friends smoked because they were sober and somehow you were allowed to hold on to that vice. She didn’t let them smoke in the house but they were always in the backyard, puffing away. I thought it was so strange how some viceswere off-limits while others were not so bad and it all depended on what crowd you ran with.
    I added, “Hey, listen, don’t tell anyone that I talk to my dad. Not even my mother knows.”
    I had only given him half the story. My father and I did e-mail but not regularly. I waited to hear from him the way I imagined normal girls would wait to hear from an aloof guy they liked.
    “I don’t know my dad,” Jeff said, puffing.
    “Where does he live?”
    “I don’t know. He took off like yours did.”
    “Wait, mine didn’t just take off for no reason. He’s finding himself. He’s an artist.”
    “Okay,” he said.
    “He had vision and purpose. The whole fame thing got to him. So he left.”
    “About ten years ago.”
    “Right.” I let a minute pass and then I said, “Jeff, how can you smoke? You’re a big track star.”
    “I’m a walking contradiction,” he said.
    He was quiet and I let him be. It made me nervous but my father also told me it was important to let silence accumulate. People thought they had to fill the gaps all the time. But it was important, in singing as well as relationships, to allow for space.
    Not that Jeff and I had a relationship. Talking to him was okay. I used him for practice.
    He looked at me. I looked at him.
    Jeff had great hair. It was thick and it fell into his faceand he shook it out. He must have known he looked cute when he did that.
    “What about you? Are you musical?” he asked.
    “I play the guitar a little.”
    He nodded, looking at the cigarette more than smoking it. He jerked his head back toward the kitchen.
    “Ella’s a drummer, you know.”
    “What?”
    “And she goes to your school. She’s good, too.”
    “What?”
    “Laurel Hall. That’s you, right?”
    “I’ve never seen her there.”
    “Maybe you never looked.”
    I stared through the glass and saw her pulling a pepperoni pizza out of the oven as gingerly as if she were delivering a baby. Then she slammed it on the counter and hit the bell.
    “If I did see her, I must have thought she was a guy.”
    “Laurel Hall has guys?” Jeff asked.
    “Not really. They just have some people who aren’t girls.”
    Jeff laughed.
    “You’re funny,” he said.
    “Thanks.”
    “Funny girls aren’t usually pretty.”
    “Is that the case?”
    “Well, pretty girls aren’t usually funny.”
    “Is this your gearheaded way of giving me a compliment?”
    “Whatever,” he said, and he was blushing. As much as Iwas a loner, I’d found it wasn’t hard to make guys do that. I knew that I was different and some guys liked that. Once it was clear that a guy was even remotely interested, all you had to do was call them on it to see what they’d look like with a pink