“I’ll work on that,” I say, and go back to fiddling with the rug.

It’s quiet again. I can literally hear the clock in his office ticking. Four minutes of therapy left to go.

Three minutes.

Two.

“So do you have anything else you want to talk about?” Dave asks.

Last chance, I think. Tell him about seeing Ty.

“No,” I say. “I’m good.”

Which has to be like Lie #17 in this session alone.

Then I stand up, even though I still have ninety-six seconds left, and walk away from therapy as fast as I can go.

I have dinner with Dad at Olive Garden. We normally have dinner together on Tuesday nights, after my regular Tuesday session with Dave. Because Megan has yoga on Tuesdays. Dinner with Dad is always a quiet affair because he has even less to say than I do. He doesn’t have the most exciting job in the world—he’s an accountant—and he knows I don’t want to hear about Megan or the house he lives in with her or how they pass their time, so there’s not much left to discuss. It was easier when Ty was with us (although Ty hated the Dad dinners and was always finding last-minute excuses not to show), because at least then we could talk about sports.

Now we’re down to one safe topic of conversation.

“How’s school?” Dad asks.

“I got a seventy-one on my calculus midterm,” I blurt out.

I don’t know why I tell him. It’s embarrassing, especially with my dad, who’s obviously a bit of a numbers guy himself. I can’t look at him when I say it. I’m sure my face is bright red, but I keep picking at the salad like everything is fine.

Dad puts down his breadstick. “That sounds serious.”

“It is serious,” I agree. “My grade’s down to at least an A-minus. Which means I’m not going to be valedictorian.”

“Can you retake it?” he asks.

“No.” Lie #18.

“I see.” He clears his throat, then goes back to eating the breadstick.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I say after a minute. And I am. I hate disappointing him, even after everything. I care what he thinks.

“It’s not important,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it. Dad’s always going on about how hard you have to work to be the best, to excel at everything, to reach for the very top—the best grades, the best education, the best job—so that you can live up to your potential, he always says, which is where I read so that you don’t end up an accountant in Nebraska with a divorce and two (wait, make that one now) kids when you could have been so much more.

We eat. Dad drinks two glasses of red wine, even though he hates wine. Then he pressures me into ordering dessert.

“How’s your mother?” he asks as I disassemble a piece of tiramisu.

I could tell him about the crying thing. But he doesn’t want to hear that. He doesn’t want to know that she cries all the time and that she doesn’t get out of bed unless she has to be at work or church and that she sleeps with Ty’s old stuffed monkey clutched to her chest. He doesn’t want to hear that she thinks Ty is still in the house, and I don’t even know what he’d do if I told him what I saw in the basement.

He wants me to say that Mom’s okay.

So I say, “She’s all right”—Lie #19—and Dad pays the check. We put on our coats and wander out into the cold night air, and he hugs me stiffly, and then, as usual, we go our separate ways.

5.

THE HOUSE IS DARK WHEN I GET HOME. Mom must have already gone to bed, which isn’t so unusual, even at eight o’clock at night. She sleeps so she doesn’t have to be awake, so she will be conscious of what’s happened as little as possible.

I wish I could sleep like that.

I spend an hour doing homework. Then I reach that time when normally I would go downstairs to watch TV.

This is a dilemma. I haven’t ventured into the basement in four days, not even to do laundry. I haven’t watched TV. I haven’t brought it up with Mom that maybe the cologne thing wasn’t so ridiculous after all.

Yes, I’m aware that I’m a total coward.

I take out the journal Dave gave me. For a few seconds I actually consider writing in it again, scribbling down a long confession about everything I haven’t said out loud. About the ghost. About the text. About Steven. About Ty. About me. But I can’t make myself do it.

So I stick the moleskin notebook under my mattress as a tribute to clichés and curl up on my bed for a while, reading A Beautiful Mind, which I can’t get into. Then I try Contact by Carl Sagan, which is my favorite novel ever, but my eyes move across the page without finding meaning in the words. I keep thinking about the look on Ty’s face when I threw the phone at him: startled and offended and a little sad. I’d never thrown anything at him before. We weren’t like that. We always got along.

Suddenly I’m furious. I think, So what, I’m never going to go into the basement again? I’m going to tiptoe around my own house until I leave for college? I’m going to be scared of what, a figment of my imagination? What am I, like ten years old? Afraid of the dark?

Get over yourself, Lex, I tell myself. Grow a pair.

So I jump up. I march straight down into the basement and stand for a few minutes glaring at that spot where Ty appeared the other night, at the small dent in the wall that is of course still there from where I chucked my phone at him. I make myself stand there for a full five minutes.