“It’s fine,” I murmured, because for some reason I was still having a difficult time finding my voice. Jamie tilted his head just a fraction, his eyes hard on me this time, and I felt naked beneath his gaze. I’d never had anyone look at me that way — completely zeroed in. It was unnerving and exhilarating, too.

But before I could latch onto the feeling, he turned back to Jenna, their eyes meeting as slow smiles spread on both of their faces. I’d seen it a million times, but this was the first time I felt sick watching it happen.

I saw him first, but it didn’t matter.

Because he saw her.

IT WAS JUST OVER A WEEK later that Jenna and Jamie put a title on the flirting relationship they’d been having for a solid eight days. That’s how it was when we were in high school — there were no games, no “let’s just hook up and see where this goes.” You were either with someone or you weren’t, and they were very together.

I had the privilege of watching them make out between classes, and as much as I wanted to hate them together, I just didn’t. In fact, I’d pretty much forgotten that I’d seen Jamie first because they were disgustingly cute together. Jenna was taller than me, but she was just short enough to fit perfectly under Jamie’s arm. She was a cheerleader, he was a basketball player — different seasons, but popular and respected nonetheless. His dark features complimented her light ones, and they had a similar sense of humor. They even sounded good together — Jenna and Jamie. I mean honestly, how could I be mad at that?

So I dropped it, dropped the idea of him, moved easily into the third wheel position I was used to with Jenna and her long list of boyfriends. Jamie was the first of them who seemed to enjoy me there. He was always talking to me, making jokes, bridging the gap between awkward and easy friendship. It was nice, and I was sincerely happy for them.

Still, I had opted out of tricycling that particular afternoon after school. Instead, I swung my Jansport onto my bed and immediately started ruffling through the clothes in my top drawer for my bathing suit, desperate to get some time on the water before the sun set. Daylight Savings hadn’t set in yet, but the days were slowly getting shorter, reminding me that summer was far away.

“Hey sweetie,” my mom said, knuckles rapping softly on the panel of my door frame. “You hungry? I was thinking we could go out for dinner tonight, maybe to that sushi bar you love so much?”

“I’m not really hungry yet. Going to go check out the surf,” I replied, my smile tight. I didn’t even look up from my drawer, just pulled out my favorite white, strappy top and avoided her eyes. It wasn’t that I was a dramatic teen who hated her mom, I wasn’t — I loved her, but things were different between us than they had been just two short years before.

Okay, this is the part where I warn you — I had daddy issues. I guess in a way, mommy issues, too.

But let me explain.

Everything in my life was perfect, at least in my eyes, until the summer before my sophomore year of high school. That was the summer I opened my pretty gray eyes and looked around at my life, realizing it wasn’t at all what it seemed.

I thought I had it all. My parents weren’t married or even together, but then again they never had been. I was used to that. It was our normal. Mom never dated anyone, Dad dated but never remarried, and somehow we still always ended up together — just the three of us — every Christmas. I’d always lived in my mom’s house, but I’d spent equal time at my dad’s. My parents never fought, but they never really laughed, either. I assumed they made it work for me, and I was thankful for that.

We were unconventional, me bouncing between houses and them tolerating each other for my sake, but we worked. Dad’s skin was white, pale as they come, freckled and tinged pink while Mom’s was the smoothest, most delicate shade of black. Ebony and ivory, with me the perfectly imperfect mixture of the two.

They may not have made enough at their respective jobs to shower me with birthday gifts or buy me a shiny new car on my sixteenth birthday, but they worked hard, they paid the bills, and they instilled that mindset in me, too. The Kennedy’s may not have been rich in dollars, but we were rich in character.

Still, not everything is as it seems.

I never understood that saying — not really — not until that summer before tenth grade when everything I thought I knew about my life got erased in a violent come-to-Jesus talk. My mom had drank too much one night, as she often did, and I’d humored her by holding her hair back as she told me how proud she was of me between emptying her stomach into our off-white toilet.

“You are so much more than I ever could have wished for,” she kept repeating, over and over. But then the literal vomit turned to word vomit, and she revealed a truth I wasn’t prepared for.

You see, the story I’d been told my entire life was that mom and dad were best friends growing up. They were inseparable, and after years of everyone around them making jokes about them dating, they finally conceded, and it turned out they were perfect together. They had a happy relationship for several years, a bouncing baby girl who they both loved very much, but it just didn’t work out, so they went back to being friends. The end. Sounds sweet, right?

Except it was a lie.

The truth was much uglier, as it so often is, and so they hid it from me. But mom was tequila drunk that night and apparently had forgotten why she cared so much about lying to me. So, she spilled the truth.

They had been best friends, that much was true, but they had never dated. Instead, my dad had turned jealous, chasing every guy who dared to talk to my mom out of her life. But he didn’t stop there. One night, when she was crying over the most recent guy who’d dumped her, my dad had come on to her. And he didn’t take no for an answer.

Not the first time she said it.

Not the eleventh.

She counted, by the way.

Mom was seventeen at the time, and I was the product of that night — a baby not meant to be born from a horror not meant to be lived.

I guess this is the part where I tell you I immediately hated my dad, and in a way I did, but in another way I still loved him. He was still my dad, the guy who’d called me baby girl and fixed me root beer floats when I’d had a bad day. I wondered how the soft-spoken, caring man I’d grown up around could have committed such an act.

For a while, I lived in a broken sort of limbo between those two feelings — love and hate — but when I finally had the nerve to ask him about it, to tell him that I knew what happened, he had nothing to say. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t try to defend himself, and he didn’t seem to hold any emotion other than anger that my mother had told me at all. After that, I slipped farther toward hate, and I stopped talking to him a short five months after the night my mom told me the truth.