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away over the years (making varsity lacrosse at Kingsley; fronting an alt-metal band; seducing Ms. Callan, his ninth-grade math teacher).
    â€œTell me,” Melanie said. She slipped the palm of her hand into his, patting it on top.
    Smiles decided he should probably talk about something before he went on another mad kissing spree. “Well, get this. I went to see your dad this morning.”
    He told her about the message from his mom, and the “package,” and how her dad had destroyed the letter at his dad’s direction. They sat on the couch, with Lake Jägermeister on the carpet between them. Smiles hadn’t been able to get it all out yet.
    The more he talked, the more Smiles missed his mom. This letter thing was stirring up the pain, like the rocks in his tank. There was comfort in the hurt, though. He wanted that bed of memories; he wanted those bits of her.
    â€œSmiles . . .” Melanie hesitated.
    â€œYeah? What do you think?”
    She gave him a quizzical look. “It’s just that . . .”
    Smiles waited for her to continue, but she just sat there, doing a kind of tilted-head thing. It reminded him of his frustrating conversation with Mr. Hunt earlier in the day. Was this something genetic? Were the Hunts programmed to turn gooey and useless at critical moments in Smiles’s life?
    â€œC’mon, Mel, just say it.”
    â€œWell, don’t you think . . . don’t you think that it . . .”
    â€œ
What?
”
    â€œDon’t you think the message could be from your birth mother?”

17
    WAS IT POSSIBLE?
    Could he really not see it?
    Could he really not see the blazingly obvious truth?
    â€œOh,” Smiles said. “I don’t know. I hadn’t even thought.”
    Of course it was from his birth mother.
    His stepmom, Rose, had had no reason to leave Smiles some kind of weird letter/time bomb, set to explode on his eighteenth birthday. You’d only arrange that kind of thing if you knew you weren’t going to be around. Rose didn’t know that—she hadn’t known she was going to die in that accident.
    She wasn’t a coward who couldn’t face up to something she’d done. The letter was probably an apology his birth mother was too scared to make in person.
    Smiles stared absently at the aquarium. In all their years together, he had brought up his birth mother only once. They were still small, ten or eleven, and Smiles had told her he’d tracked down her address. Her name was Alice. She was a mathematician like his father, and Smiles had discovered she was working at a think tank on the West Coast. They were up in Smiles’s room when he showed her an envelope containing a letter he’d written to her. Melanie still had a sharp memory of her young self in Smiles’s room, sitting cross-legged on his Patriots comforter, wondering how awkward it would be to write a letter to a mother who had discarded you.
    Through the envelope, she could see the messy scrawl of his handwriting. The square dark blot in the middle was a school picture he’d included for her. He’d sent the letter more than a week earlier. It had already been postmarked, sent to California, and come back. A handwritten note near the stamp said
Return to Sender
.
    Melanie hadn’t understood at first. “She’s not there anymore?”
    Smiles had shaken his head. “It’s her handwriting,” he said. “I’ve seen it before.”
    He’d never brought up Alice again.
    â€œDo you have a number for her?” Melanie asked now. She grabbed his phone from a pile of Xbox games just in case.
    Smiles only shrugged. “I never looked for her again, after she returned that letter. I didn’t even try to find her when my dad got sick.” He seemed disappointed with himself, and Melanie felt another surge of anger at the woman who had made him feel this