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“It’s open house day, and we’re going to go look at houses!”
    I stood there for a minute. I guess I was dumbstruck. I guess maybe the caffeine I’d just pounded at coffee hour hadn’t kicked in yet. Finally I came up with, “Um, why?”
    “Well, Carmen’s house is too small, unless you and Neilly want to share a bedroom, ha-ha”—oh, please God, make it financially impossible for us to do anything but move into Carmen’s house—“and our house…well, you know.”
    “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to help me out on this one, Dad.”
    “I just couldn’t…I couldn’t share the same room with Carmen that I shared with your mom. I just couldn’t do it.”
    See, now they try to convince me that this isn’t about Dad trying to put my mom and me behind him, and then he tells me he’s selling the fucking house. So he won’t ever have to look at the place where I was a kid again.
    “You know…do you think you could just tell me something in advance once in a while? I’m getting pretty sick of you surprising me with stuff. You got any other plans to turn my life upside down? Because I think I’d like to know in advance for once.”
    Dad got frustrated. Good. “Dec, you know what? Ugh, just get in the car. We’ll talk later.”
    “Like hell.” I stormed over to the car and found my seat occupied by Carmen Foster and the backseat occupied by Neilly Foster. I was still really pissed off. But on the bright side, I was going to the backseat of my dad’s car with Neilly Foster. There were literally hundreds of guys in school who would probably kill to be able to say they went to the backseat of their old man’s car with Neilly Foster. And if you took a vote among the student body for Most Likely to Go to the Backseat of Their Old Man’s Car with Neilly Foster, you would not find me in the top five hundred.
    I climbed into the backseat and saw Neilly sulking. “Hey,” I said.
    “Hey,” she said.
    “Did you know about this?”
    “No!” Neilly said to her mom.
    Her mom ignored her and turned around and said, “Declan? It’s great to meet you. I’m Carmen.” She extended a hand, which I didn’t want to shake, but I didn’t want to piss off Neilly by being a dick to her mom, so I said “Hi” and shook her hand.
    And yeah, she was a total MILF, but the implications of that were just so weird that I quickly turned the full force of my perverted imagination on Neilly, who was wearing shorts.
    We studied Greek mythology in the ninth grade, mostly so we could read The Odyssey , which I actually kind of liked because there was sex and gore in it. One thing I remember was that in the Greek hell there was this guy who was standing in a pool of water with a fruit tree hanging over his head. Every time he reached up for the fruit, the tree would shoot just out of his reach, and every time he reached down to get a drink, the pool would dry up. I can’t remember what he did to get to hell, but it must have been pretty bad for him to be punished by being so close to the things he wanted so badly and never being able to touch them. This is pretty much what it was like for me to be in the backseat of a car with Neilly Foster’s bare thighs.
    We rode in silence to some house, and Dad and Carmen got out and circled to the side of the car, while Neilly and I sat motionless. I guess Neilly was still sulking. As for me, I had shorts on and a boner, so I figured I’d just hang out in the backseat until I could get my mind onto something unsexy. I thought about asking Dad to help a brother out by flashing some back hair, but I didn’t think he’d think that was funny in front of his girlfriend, fiancée, babymama, whatever the hell this woman was.
    “Are you guys coming?” Carmen asked in a fake-perky way.
    “No!” Neilly yelled again.
    “Dec?” Dad said.
    “Tell you what. How about you guys just pick out a house and buy it and tell us the day before we have to move. Okay?”
    Dad looked mad. Carmen