The door swings open.
I don’t open it.
Someone on the other side does.
A middle-aged woman with a 1960s-esque beehive and cleavage to her chin.
She looks every bit as surprised to see me coming into my apartment as I am to see her already standing inside it.
“Daphne!” she shouts, with pure ecstasy.
“Hiiii,” I say, trying furiously to place her and getting nowhere.
My dad steps out of the kitchen, into view, slipping one hand over the woman’s shoulder. “Hey, kid,” he says. “Surprise!”
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24
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1ST
16 DAYS UNTIL THE READ-A-THON
My gut instinct is to step back into the hallway, close the door, and try again. See if anything else greets me.
Dad yanks me right into a hug, thwacking my back so heartily it makes me cough.
“You sick, kid?” He draws back, gripping my shoulders as his sparkling green eyes give me a quick survey.
“A little,” I say, because suddenly I do feel feverish.
“Come on in, come on in,” he says, like this isn’t my home. He spins me toward the kitchen. “You finally get to meet Starfire.”
A wordless squeal emanates from behind him. He sidesteps, presenting with a full-arm flourish the woman who opened my apartment door.
Several feet behind her, Miles hovers in the entryway, looking as flustered as I’ve seen him. Which is to say, technically not very. But for Miles, every bit like a man who was just forced to let two strangers into his apartment.
I barely have time to register Starfire’s bubblegum-pink lip gloss before she’s wrapping me in a bone-crunching hug that smells like the inside of a Bath & Body Works minutes after a gaggle of preteens rolled through hyped up on Frappuccinos.
“You. Are. Just. So. Cute!” She rocks me hard back and forth in time with her pronouncement.
“Oh,” I say. “Thanks.”
When she releases me, she keeps one of my hands in hers, her long, baby-blue fingernails slightly clawing into me. “Finally,” she says tearily. “At first I thought you were the tall one.” She jerks her head over her shoulder toward Julia, whose face plainly projects: I have already been through what you are currently experiencing.
My eyes flick toward Dad, trying to communicate that I have no idea who this woman is.
But my father and I never had the time to develop anything resembling an unspoken language.
He just beams. “You have no idea what it means to me to see my two girls together.”
For one second, I genuinely wonder whether Starfire is a half sister I never knew existed.
But whereas all Dad’s previous girlfriends easily could have fit that bill, Starfire has to be within a decade of Dad’s own age—though with the kind of filler and Botox that make it impossible to tell whether she’s ten years younger or ten years older than him.
“Should we go into the living room,” Miles pipes up, already guiding Dad down the hallway. “Daphne and I will grab some wine and snacks.”
“Sounds great!” Julia chimes in, dutifully looping an arm through Starfire’s.
Starfire, for her part, makes another wordless baby-talk coo in the back of her throat, and squeezes my cheek before she’s dragged off, a huge grin turned over her shoulder all the way, so that she keeps bumping into Julia and almost toppling over in her four-inch blue spike heels.
Miles ushers me into the kitchen, whispering, “They just showed up.”
“And you let them in,” I whisper back.
“He said he was your dad!” he hisses. “And that you were expecting him! I didn’t know what to do.”
“I mean, in the loosest interpretation of the word,” I say, “that’s my father, but I’m never expecting him.”
“And Starfire?” he asks.
“The missing sixth member of the Spice Girls,” I say.
“You’ve never met her,” he guesses.
“Never even heard of her,” I say.
Miles sighs and turns to open the wine cabinet. I grab a couple of glasses from the other cabinet. When I turn back, he’s laughing to himself, shaking his head. “Should we take bets on who shows up next?”
“At this rate,” I say, “I won’t be surprised if my dead great-aunt Mildred climbs through the window tonight.”
“Not even about the window part?” he says. “Was she a contortionist?”
“I’m just assuming ghosts have the Santa Claus effect, where they can turn into Jell-O and shimmy through tight spaces.”
“You ready for this?” he asks, and while I haven’t told him a ton about my dad, he’s clearly picked up on enough in the last three minutes.
“No,” I say. “But once I make it through the first bottle of wine, I’ll be better.”
He sniffs the air. “Am I . . . smelling . . .”
I nod. “That’s my dad. Hotboxing in our apartment.”
He winces. “Want me to ask him to stick his head out the window?”
“Be my guest,” I say. “In fifteen minutes, he’ll forget and light up again while he’s midsentence and you feel like you can’t interrupt him. The sentence will last twenty minutes.”
He touches my elbow. “Just text me if you need an out.”
My brow lifts. “You’ll cause a diversion?”
“If I have to.”
I turn toward the hall. “He never stays long. This is probably a thirty-minute interlude on their way somewhere better. We’ll get it over with. Or I will—you’re not obligated to—”
“I’ll stay,” he says. “Unless you don’t want me to?”
“No, I definitely want you to,” I admit. “It’s just that I absolutely do not expect you to endure this.”
He runs a hand over my elbow, and I do my best not to shiver: “Someone once told me I’m very good with strangers. Come on.”
As we walk into the living room, Dad blows out a puff of smoke. Julia’s stuff has all been moved into a tower in the corner, the air mattress three-quarters deflated and balled up at the bottom, so that our guests can sit on the couch, two pairs of intensely white teeth floating against sun-bronzed skin.
“There she is!” Dad says, followed by a hacking cough.
“Here I am!” I set the wineglasses on the coffee table before perching on the very edge of the chair perpendicular to the couch. “And you. And Starfire.”
Starfire beams at me. Dad beams at Starfire. Miles and Julia exchange a bewildered glance.
“These are for you,” Dad says, scooting forward. He balances his joint on the corner of the coffee table and produces an—admittedly beautiful—bouquet from down on the rug. “We thought they looked just like you.”
“Your aura, of course,” Starfire puts in. “It’s hard to judge in pictures, but JayJay was drawn to these, and we compared them to the picture he keeps in his wallet.”
At my blank stare, Dad chimes in, “Your old senior photo!”
News to me that Dad has a copy of that. I’m pretty sure Mom and I agreed they were so bad it wasn’t worth getting any printed, and just sent the file for the least awkward one to my school to use.
“Thanks,” I say stiffly, leaning over to accept the bouquet.
“That’s something I loved about him right away,” Starfire says dreamily, looking up at Dad as if a halo floats above his head. I’ve seen that look on plenty of Girlfriends Past. “He never shows up empty-handed.”
