How to Build a House by Dana Reinhardt

Author:Dana Reinhardt [Reinhardt, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89388-9
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2008-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

HOME

One Saturday night in January, Tess invited me to sleep over at Avi’s. Rose was still home from school.

One thing I’d learned about college from watching Rose go away was that you have vacations that never end. The other thing I learned was that when you go away to school, you get to start your own life, and whatever happens back at home is something that’s happening to other people.

Rose seemed unfazed by the divorce. She shrugged in her typical Rose way and tossed her long dark hair to the side and said something about it being the inevitable outcome of any relationship confined by the draconian societal construct known as marriage.

“It’s a prison,” she said. “Eventually, the smart ones figure out how to escape.”

We were sitting on the beach drinking lattes, still in our pajamas. Avi and his girlfriend, Lynn, who lived together now, had an early tennis game. It was sunny and clear and hot, too hot for a January morning. But in this new world, heat in January is a way of life.

I looked out at the ocean and the sand; I turned around and looked at Avi’s condo complex and the hundreds like it up and down the coast as far as my eyes could see. I imagined it all gone, underwater, swallowed up by the rising oceans.

There was nowhere, no place, nothing, that felt safe anymore.

“Anyway, they’ll be fine. It’s probably better this way. They’ll move on, find new lovers, have new experiences. Live their lives.”

Rose seemed to have aged ten years in the five months since I’d seen her.

In high school she’d been a romantic. She pined over this gorgeous boy with dark hair, olive skin and a necklace made of white seashells who surfed and played the drums. I used to watch her get ready to go out to parties where his band, Sex Wax, would perform. Fruity-smelling skin lotions. Carefully applied eye shadow in earthy tones. Outfits assembled to appear as if they’d been thrown together.

The only thing she wanted was to be his girlfriend. For him to love her. She was never able to look at anybody else.

Then she went to college. She dated somebody her freshman year, but ever since then she’d been having only casual relationships and lots and lots of sex. She liked to talk about the liberating world of sexual encounters unadorned by any effort to define them.

I still couldn’t bring myself to tell either of them that I’d been having sex with Gabriel off and on since October, encounters unadorned by any effort to define them, and that it was anything but liberating.

I didn’t understand. There was Sarah Denton. There was me. Who was I to Gabriel? Were we still friends? Who was I to anyone? What had happened to all the relationships in my life that mattered?

“Tell me, Harper,” Rose said. “How’s Art these days?”

I looked quickly at Tess. I couldn’t help it. It was our tacit agreement never to talk about Dad. I wasn’t sure why I’d allowed this in the first place, but it had become a part of our new relationship.

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