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I half choked on a sob "Stranger thanafter all this time with no memory at all of the last five years?"

The corners of his mouth slid up the tiniest bit, and he cocked his head "Yeah, sort of It’s just that" His eyes slid over every part of my face "You don’t look any different" His brow fell as he tried to explain "What I mean is, Austin looks older He looks twenty-two But youyou still looksixteen"

My dad had always been dorky And by dorky I guess I mean cheesy but sweet

He was the hands-on kind of dad When I was little, he was the dad who volunteered to go on class field trips, and coach my softball and basketball tea He worked, too, but his job as a coave him the flexibility to telecommute, which meant he’d collected coach’s trophies until I went into middle school and his role was usurped by coaches who collected real paychecks for what they did

But he’d never ame or recital or parent-teacher conference

He was that dad

So seeing hihter--later was like a punch to the gut

It wasn’t justall these years laterit was hiht over which college scholarship I should pursue This led version of that one

His eyes hat I noticed first Where my mom’s had been tense and drawn, his were red rimmed and vacant Hopeless

Unlike with mytoward the house the moment he stumbled from the beat-up van he’d parked haphazardly at the curb, the door still dangling wide open Ithe fact that I was pushing my way past my mother and her new son and husband, past Tyler and histo follow us to the hospital--so on, that I be checked out

Gary Wahl--Austin and Tyler’s dad--would take my official statement there I was pretty sure that because I enty-one, and no longer a minor, I could make some of these decisions on my own, but I still had to answer questions about where I’d been, or at least about what I could recallwhich was pretty s mattered now I didn’t care that we had an audience or that in or some noxious combination of the two and that he probably shouldn’t have been driving in the first place He was here, and that was all that mattered

"I’m sorryI’m sorryI’m sorryI’m sorry," I mumbled at the same time he did