Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst Page B

some of the cool stuff we’re doing.”
    â€œWhy didn’t he think you should come?” I ask. Tilly’s pacing around us in big lopsided circles, and when she gets close, she brushes my arm and my hand veers off course. I start widening the
H
, to cover up the stray marks.
    Candy watches me draw. She’s wearing a necklace, a silver chain with a
C
on it, and she’s holding on to the letter, fiddling with it. “I think mainly just because he wouldn’t get to see me as much,” she says. “Plus, Ryan’s not his kid, so you know. He doesn’t care as much whether he ever . . . gets better or whatever.” She picks up her letter and shakes it in the air, brushing off a few pieces of grass. Then she laughs. “He also thought Scott sounded kind of creepy. He said the whole thing sounded like a cult.”
    I laugh, too. “Well, he
is
kind of creepy. But in a good way, mostly.”
    Tilly’s back near us again and joins in our conversation, even though I didn’t think she’d been listening. “Why did your parents divorce?” she asks Candy.
    I sort of cringe, because I know you’re not supposed to ask questions like that, and also because of the weird phrasing. Tilly does that with certain words, like “marry” and “divorce” (and there are probably others, too, though I can’t think of them right now): instead of saying “get married” or “get divorced,” she just uses the plain form of the verb. It’s one of those things that’s not grammatically wrong, but it makes it sound like English isn’t her first language.
    Anyway, Candy doesn’t seem offended. She shrugs again. “I don’t know. I was pretty little, like still a baby. If you ask my mom, she says they were just too young, but I don’t really know what that means.”
    â€œDo you like your dad better than Rick?” I ask. Now that the topic’s open, I’m sort of curious, too. I mean, I’ve had friends who have divorced parents, but I’ve never really discussed it with any of them.
    â€œYeah, of course,” she says. “I love my dad. He’s awesome.”
    She goes back to her writing, and I start coloring in the
A
. Tilly wanders back over to talk to Ryan. But a few minutes later, when Candy’s folding up her letter so that it will fit in the envelope, she says, “But I guess it’s kind of hard to say.” It takes me a second to remember what we were talking about. “’Cause I’ve never really lived with my dad, you know?”
    â€œUh-huh,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.
    She takes off her glasses and cleans them off on her T-shirt. For a minute, her dark hair falls forward so that I can’t really see her face. “I mean I did,” she says, “but I was too young to remember it. And my mom’s been with Rick since I was like two, so he’s the one who’s always been around.” She runs her fingers along the crease in the folded page, making it firm and crisp. “Sometimes when I’m pissed off at Rick or my mom or Ryan, I think about how cool itwould be to go live with my dad instead, but I can’t really imagine it. He lives in this little apartment, and I always have to sleep on a pullout couch when I’m there. And I’d have to go to a new school and everything. So.”
    She stops talking. I guess that’s the end of what she was going to say. She puts her letter down on the grass and picks up the envelope, resting it against the book on her lap. “Hey, can I borrow your markers?” she says. “I want to decorate this before I mail it.”
    â€œSure.”
    We sit there for a while, coloring silently. Ryan and Tilly are both talking at the same time, and neither one of them seems to be paying much attention to the other, but somehow it’s working for them.
    â€œSo