One Last Thing Before I Go

that too,” she says, running her thumb across his jaw.
    Something is happening here.
    She steps into his embrace and kisses his face, underneath his eyes, so that when, a moment later, she kisses his lips, he can taste his tears on hers. The kiss is long and deep and he feels his chest trembling as he pulls her close. He wants to keep kissing her right here, in front of their house, until his aorta snaps and he dies in her arms.
    But the kiss ends, like everything else. And he knows that now Denise will say something, something honest and practical and beautiful and devastating, something to move them gently back into their separate orbits again. But instead he feels her lips on his again, and a small groan, almost a sigh, escaping from her as her mouth opens his.
    When this kiss ends, he no longer doubts her intentions.
    “Let’s go,” she says.

CHAPTER 33
    B y the time Casey summons up the nerve to walk over to Jeremy’s house, the party is in full swing. She cuts through the yard, past the pool, and up the Lockwoods’ sloping lawn. Jeremy has been texting her on and off for days now to come to his party, and so she has, unsure of her agenda.
    The music is pumped up loud enough that the bass and drums are escaping through the double-paned glass and floating across the yard before dissipating into the air. A handful of kids are gathered in a small clump at the far end of the pool, surreptitiously smoking a bowl. A couple lies on a single lounge chair in the missionary position, dry humping as they make out. She feels a million years away from all of this.
    A small group of adults are sitting on the deck, drinking mojitos and trying to hear themselves above the music. They are either too drunk to register the illicit activities down by the pool or else consider themselves too cool to intervene. Casey sees Rich, leaning back in his chair, nursing a beer. She waves at him, then thinks about sitting at dinner with her mother and father, and feels guilty. She moves around the deck to give him a quick kiss.
    “How was dinner?” he asks.
    “A clusterfuck,” she says.
    “You OK?”
    “Define OK.”
    He nods and offers up a small but genuine smile. “Is your mom here yet?”
    “She’s on her way.”
    Rich nods and takes a sip of his beer. “Well, you go hang with the cool kids. I won’t cramp your style.”
    “I have no style to cramp,” she says, and heads inside.
    She comes through the back door and it’s every house-party movie you’ve ever seen: more kids than the house was built to hold, standing in every nook and cranny, drinking, yelling, dancing, making out. She sees a handful of kids from her graduating class, says hi to them, never stopping to talk. Motion is the key here. If you stop, the party will swallow you up. Someone hands her a beer and she takes a nervous sip or two before she remembers that she shouldn’t. But she holds on to it anyway, because holding it makes it a shield of some kind.
    Jeremy is leaving for Paris on Monday. He will take a few classes, sit in cafés, start wearing a scarf, experiment with facial hair, develop an affinity for an obscure local cigarette brand that he will express yearning for in the years to follow, and sleep with more than a few of the French girls in his dorm. It will be five months that will feel like a small lifetime, and he will return to the United States believing that he has changed in some fundamental way, but by the end of his junior year, he’ll be clean-shaven again and back in his Abercrombie & Fitch, and he’ll have stopped Skyping with the one or two girls to whom he had pledged eternal fealty.
    We’re all clichés, Casey thinks, all following scripts that have been written and played out long before we landed the role.
    She doesn’t know why she’s here. Or, rather, she does know, but doesn’t know if it’s a good idea or not. Her mother is certain she should have the abortion. She was too, until Silver had his stroke. Then something changed, although she’ll be damned if she can say what. It’s been strange, spending this time with her father, both gratifying and deeply frustrating. And he’s been utterly helpless in this one regard. He will not direct her, other than to say that he has her back either way. She suspects, with budding awareness, that this lack of a firm position on her pregnancy is not unique to her father, might even be a defining characteristic of his. And this realization is both edifying and immensely