Virgin Territory by James Lecesne Read Free Book Online Page A

Doug started saying things such as, “When we used to live in New York”; that’s when I knew for sure that I was stuck in Jupiter. For a while, I sat around plotting my escape, but every scenario ended with me being dragged back to Florida against my will by a state trooper wearing stretch pants and a loaded gun.
    “This is hopeless,” I say, referring to the search for Marie, but also it pretty much covers everything that’s happened in the past five years.
    Doug swerves the car off to the side of the road and then grabs hold of his whole head, as if it’s going to fly away from his shoulders if he isn’t careful. I’m like,
What the …?
He starts lecturing me. My problem is that I have too much attitude. I’m not focused enough on my future. I spend too much time online. The Internet has made me into a loner, a freak. And this is not going to help me later in life, not one iota.
    This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this speech. Whenever he gets into a state, he tells me what a mess I’ve made of things, and how he’s done his best, and how every single day he’s tried to do everything in his power to ensure that I grow up to be a normal, loving person capable of contributing to society. And yet, despite his best efforts, things are out of control.
    “It’s okay,” I tell him.
    This is what I always tell him when he gets like this, but he never buys it.
    “No!” he says, opening his eyes very wide without looking directly at me. “No. It is not okay! That’s my point!”
    His real beef is that I don’t have a clear picture of how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. Why can’t I just tell him what I want to be when I grow up? Why can’t I just choose one thing and stick to it? An orthopedic surgeon? An investment banker? If I would just say it, he tells me, he’d be more than happy tohelp me achieve that dream. Do I want to be an artist? He’ll buy me art supplies, send me to a special school. A musician? He’ll do whatever it takes to get me started in whatever profession I choose. Plumber? No problem. Everybody needs a plumber. But I have to start applying myself, he tells me. I have to at least make an effort.
    I tell him that I’m more interested in living in the now: that’s my goal. I read a book at the beginning of the summer that said that the present reality was all that really exists, so we might as well get used to it and try to live more fully in the moment. But Doug is not convinced, not for a minute.
    I hear him use words like
college
and
SAT scores and financial-aid package
. I watch his mouth move, but I don’t hear a thing.
    “All I know is,” he says, as a way of wrapping up his big speech, “if your mother was alive, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
    We rarely talk about Kat anymore, so whenever Doug starts in on what our lives
might
look like if only she were still alive, I’m out of there. Whenever he tells me how much happier we’d be as a family, how we’d still be living in New York, how Kat would’ve published her poems by now, how I would know what I want to do with the rest of my life and how I’d be moving toward it full steam ahead—that’s when I know he’s just talking crap, and I refuse to be a party to it.
    “Where’re you going?” he calls after me.
    He says this as if I have a plan, but as he knows better thananyone, I don’t have a plan; I never do. I just need some distance between him and me, so I pretend that I’m the planet Pluto, and I’m drifting away from a solar system that refuses to recognize me for who and what I am. I am entering the Oort Cloud, a place so far away that no one has actually seen it with their own eyes.
    “Good-bye!”
I call out to Doug.
    “I’m not going to tell you again!”
he yells back.
“Get in the car!”
    I’m walking along the sidewalk, wondering if the concrete was poured right here on the spot, or if the slabs were brought into the neighborhood ready-made and then pieced