Chapter Three
SYLVIE“How was that talk you just had to go to?” Mommy asks when I walk through the door almost an hour earlier than I said I would.
She is in the front room, seated sideways on a folding chair next to Daddy’s recliner. She pushes a spoon loaded with applesauce and crushed up nighttime pills into my father’s mouth. “Not too good if you be home this early,” she answers before I can.
Prin and I planned out every detail of my lie on our way down to New Haven, but now I find myself simply saying, “No, he was a good speaker.” And I leave it there without going into the carefully composed list of observations I’d made after watching his Ted Talk online. Because I do not want to lie. Because I do not want to think any more about tonight. About the drug-addled boy who stared at me
