One Last Thing Before I Go

door just as Casey and Jeremy are coming downstairs from his bedroom. They stop to consider each other with wary surprise, the air between them charged with panicked thoughts and a complex knot of postcoital guilt.
    Seeing her parents together, Casey recalls the years of dreaming that her parents would remarry. She would lie in her bed and dream up elaborately dire scenarios that would bring her parents back together. These scenarios usually involved something bad happening to her: cancer, a car crash, amnesia. She once went so far as to plan her own fake kidnapping, complete with a letter cobbled together from newspaper type. And maybe it’s because of that, that seeing them here now fills her with a sense of impending dread.
    “What are you doing here, Dad?” she says, trying for all the world to sound like someone who wasn’t having sex with the boy next to her ten minutes ago.
    “Your mother wanted me to come.”
    “Hey, Mr. Silver,” Jeremy says. “Hi, Denise.”
    Casey sees Denise look up at Jeremy, and in that moment, she understands what has happened. Whatever it is her mother is about to say, she knows that it will change everything, and while there’s a part of her that wants that, she doesn’t want it to happen like this.
    “Mom,” she says.
    But before anything else can happen, Valerie Lockwood comes in from the back, followed by Rich.
    “Denise!” Valerie calls out, shouting to be heard above the Radiohead that seems to be coming from everywhere at once. “You made it.” Valerie, who has always had a tendency to dress too young, is wearing leggings and a sleeveless blouse and waving her half-drained vodka tonic around with a careless abandon that indicates it’s been refilled more than a few times. She kisses Denise’s cheek, oblivious to the grave, simmering look on her friend’s face. Rich steps past them, sizing up Silver. “Hey, Silver,” he says. “This is a surprise.”
    “This is nothing,” Silver says.
    * * *
    Casey stares at Silver, her eyes beseeching him to do something. But doing something has never been his thing.
    “Is something wrong?” Jeremy says, picking up on the vibe.
    “Is something wrong?” Denise snaps at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
    “Denise!” Valerie interjects, stepping instinctively in front of her son. “What the hell is wrong with you? What happened?”
    “Mom!” Casey shouts. “Just stop it!”
    “No!” Denise shouts back at her. “I’m not going to stop it.”
    “They don’t know!”
    That throws Denise, shuts her up for a moment. A small crowd is gathering in the hall, sensing some drama in the offing.
    “We don’t know what?” Jeremy says.
    Rich leans in to Denise. “What’s going on, honey?”
    “Yeah,” Valerie says, looking pissed. “What the hell is going on?”
    And then, to Casey’s abject horror, her mother starts to cry, right there in the Lockwoods’ front hall, and any lingering hopes of her making a clean escape are dashed. She looks over at Jeremy, standing pale-faced and confused beside her, and feels a surge of pity for him, in these last moments before everything changes.
    * * *
    Denise is suddenly dizzy. She can still taste Silver on her tongue, can still smell the sad, vaguely musty odor of his bedroom—God knows when he last changed those sheets, or what kind of ecosystem has evolved in those filthy brown carpets. The whole episode seems insane to her now, unreal. Did they really just do that? The music washes over her, confusing her as kids slide past her, in and out of the Lockwoods’ front door. She looks over at Rich standing beside Silver. For one crazy moment, she imagines that he is sniffing at Silver, that he can smell her on him. The room starts to spin, and somewhere in a room off the hall there’s a strobe light flashing in time to the music, and Denise realizes it was a mistake to come here. She wants it to be morning, wants to be lying alone in her bed, watching the shadows slowly retreat as the sun creeps across her duvet. If she can just make it to morning, she’ll be able to make sense of all this, get everything back on track. But right now? Now all she wants to do is find a way to gracefully extricate herself from this situation, from this house, without collapsing, or vomiting, or having to make eye contact with Rich or Silver, or Jeremy Lockwood, for that matter.
    “I’m sorry,” she says through her tears, she’s not sure to whom. She is aware of everyone around