One Last Thing Before I Go

disappointing. She is seeing her parents not as parents, but as people, and while it has brought her closer to her father, it has also had the effect of making her pity him, which, in turn, profoundly saddens her. She cannot keep track of how she feels from minute to minute. She wonders, briefly, if it might be hormones.
    “Hey! Casey!”
    She has reached the front of the house and now turns to see Jeremy, in jeans and an undershirt, sitting on the front-hall stairs with a bunch of guys. She says hi and smiles even as she is aware of his friends taking a quick inventory of her: Legs, check. Tits, check. Face, check. Ass, remains to be seen, but can be fairly extrapolated given the evidence at hand.
    Jeremy comes off the stairs and joins her on the landing. “I’m glad you came.”
    “I said I was coming.”
    “Yeah, sort of,” he says. “But your texts are tricky.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    He smiles. She smiles back. He has this one tooth, in the corner of his smile, that overlaps the tooth in front of it, and there’s no reason that she should find this appealing, but she does.
    “So, Paris,” she says. “You excited?”
    “Yeah,” he says. “Truth is, I could use the change of scenery.”
    “You’ve been in college for two years.”
    He grins. “I know. What can I say? I get restless.” His face turns earnest. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”
    “Sure.”
    He looks around, then takes her hand and leads her through the throbbing crowd, past wildly dancing morons, girls laughing, guys high-fiving like they invented beer, kids making out on the couch like they’re the only ones here, and kids standing around waiting for something else to happen that will send the party into an even higher gear. Everything else notwithstanding, there is something thrilling about the way he has taken her hand and is moving her through this forest with purpose. She feels oddly embraced.
    The kitchen is a mess. They step over crushed plastic cups and plates and through a door to the back staircase, then upstairs to his bedroom, where he closes the door behind them and turns on his desk lamp. She hasn’t been up here in years, but it doesn’t look like anything has changed. Navy carpeting, matching bed and desk by Pottery Barn, a framed poster of Bird and Magic on the wall, a team pennant from his high school basketball glory days.
    He sits down on the bed while she politely looks over his desk, the pretentious college paperbacks—Bukowski,—some sports magazines, his Mac and assorted multimedia devices, some decorative water bongs, a few loose pictures of his college buddies, his airline ticket.
    “So,” he says. “You OK?”
    “Sure,” she says, leaning against the desk to face him.
    “How’s your dad doing?”
    “I honestly don’t know.”
    “It’s weird, you know? I haven’t seen him around in years.”
    “I know.”
    “I think he was the drummer at my aunt’s wedding. Does he still do that?”
    Casey rolls her eyes. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
    He looks up at her, suddenly ill at ease. “I know you’ve had a lot going on, with your mom getting married and your dad’s . . . situation. I just . . . I kind of thought, after that night, that we might hang out, you know? And then you didn’t answer my texts . . .” He seems lost, tripped up by his own verbiage. “I just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”
    Casey looks at him, feeling both contempt and attraction. She is almost positive that this is a uniquely female combination. “You wanted to make sure that I’m OK, or you’re OK?”
    He nods, considering. “Both, I guess. I wanted to make sure we’re OK.”
    “Because we had sex.”
    “Yeah.”
    She comes over and sits down beside him on the bed. This is her moment.
    “I’ve been going through some stuff,” she says.
    He takes her hand. “You want to tell me about it?”
    She feels his fingers laced between hers, solid and strong. It’s his too, she thinks. He has a right to make this decision with me. But she knows that’s not true. The decision is hers. She just wants someone to help her make it. And she knows what he’ll say; she could probably write the script of their conversation right now and get almost all of it right, word for word. And that’s why she came here, she realizes. Because she knew what he would say, and then she could pretend they had decided together.
    “Hey,” he says, pulling her closer. “You’re