I knew about that shirt, but only because Oliver had dangled it out the window that morning and made the thumbs-up/thumbs-down sign at me. “Yeah?” he had called. It was a blue-checked shirt, not too dressy, collared with long sleeves. It would look good on him. Neither of us considered how it would look on a forty-six-inch flat screen in someone’s living room. We didn’t even know that was a thing that someone could worry about.
“Did your mom buy it?” I called back.
“Yeah!”
“Looks good!”
“You sure?”
I gave him the thumbs-up sign.
Now my mom was moving in, grasping Maureen by the upper arms. I recognized this as the Get a (Literal) Grip. A classic Mom move.
“Look, Mo,” my mom said to her. “Oliver is home now. That’s what’s important. He’s not going to talk to you, all right? He’s seventeen. Emmy’s seventeen and she never talks to me.”
“It’s true,” I said. “I’m actually legally obligated to ignore her. The other teenagers and I made a pact. There were lawyers involved, it’s a whole thing now.”
“See?” My mom shot a grateful glance in my direction as Maureen laughed a little. “Just go do the interview, let people know that Oliver is home, that you and your family will be okay, and take it from there. Don’t worry about his shirt, of all things.” She squeezed Maureen’s arms again, then let her go. “And your hair looks wonderful,” she added. “I love the new highlights.”
Maureen rolled her eyes but still patted her hair. “Oh, this. I just needed to do something for myself, you know?”
“Absolutely,” my mom agreed. “We don’t take enough time for ourselves. Now go back. The girls are fine here and Emmy will keep an eye on them.”
I was already edging away. “Good luck,” I said, not sure if it was bad luck to wish someone good luck or vice versa, then scurried into the den before I had to hear any more mom conversations. They always made me uncomfortable, like they were the Ghost of Christmas Future, a life laid out for me that I wasn’t even sure I wanted but felt destined to live, anyway.
The girls were toppled over each other on the couch, watching something loud and animated whose theme song would be stuck in my head for the rest of the day. The girls were both singing along with it under their breath, like the TV was compelling them to do its bidding.
I slipped in behind Nora on the couch. She stayed where she was, forcing her to sit on my legs. “Oliver got a new shirt,” Molly said without looking away from the television. “It has blue squares on it.”
“I heard,” I said.
“I want a new shirt, too.”
Nora was about to add something, probably about if Molly wanted a new shirt, then she wanted one, too, but then the show started and they were distracted again.
When the interview aired that night, the shirt looked good, not as bad as what Maureen was worried about. Oliver looked like, well, Oliver, his head oddly huge on the flat screen in Caro’s living room. “Maureen looks like a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs,” Caro said, waving her hands over her just-painted toenails.
I smiled. “You got that saying from my dad.”
“True and true. It’s a good saying.” She held her hand out to me. “Can you pass me the slutty one, please?”
I handed her the bottle of bright-red nail polish. “I think it’s actually called Crimson Cabaret,” I said. “Don’t be a slut-shamer.”
She unscrewed the bottle just as the screen shifted to a shot of Oliver’s backyard, the twins’ swing set front and center, a newer, safer version of the one he and I used to play on after school. “It’s just such a relief to see him here again,” Maureen was saying off camera as Oliver walked through the grass, flanked by both his mom and stepdad. “He was gone for so long and now that he’s here, I just want to get to know him again.”
“And how does it feel to be home?” the interviewer asked. Colleen Whitcomb had been the main news anchor since I could remember, her hair color and facial structure never changing once in fifteen years.
“Colleen’s had work done,” I said, carefully painting tiny blue dots in the center of each of my fingernails.
“Oh, totally,” Caro agreed. “She probably makes so much money that she could hire a team of tiny elves to hide in her hairline and hold her face up.”
“Creepy. They’d probably sing all these songs and be annoying.”
“Good point. Wait, back it up, I missed what he said.”
I reached for the remote and rewound it a few seconds, back to the original question of how it felt for Oliver to be home.
“It feels good,” he said, smiling a little and tugging self-consciously at the button on his wrist cuff. I could see Maureen’s fingers twitch, restraining herself from reaching out and stopping his fidgeting. “I just missed my mom and so it’s good to see her again.”
“Simple words,” the newscaster’s concluding voice-over said as Maureen smiled at Oliver, “that say . . .”
“Aaaand, dramatic pause . . .” Caro muttered, her eyes on the screen.
“. . . so much more. Colleen Whitcomb for Channel Seven news.”
I reached for the remote and muted the sound, trying not to disturb the blue dots. “Well, he looked happy, at least.”
“Simple words that say? So much more,” Caro repeated, mimicking Colleen’s tone. “Who actually talks like that? That doesn’t even mean anything. If I wrote that down on the AP English exam, I’d get a one. Maybe a two if the grader was hungover.”