The Stuff That Never Happened by Maddie Dawson Page B

me paying your rent for the rest of the semester,” he said. “And I certainly can’t pay for college next fall. You might as well know all this right now so you can make your plans. Them’s the breaks, kid. Life isn’t fair, and it just got a lot more unfair.”
    I swallowed hard and tried to speak in a very adult voice. “Is this because you’re so upset about Mom?”
    “Listen, I won’t have you talking bad about your mom,” he said way too loudly. “You can’t go through life blaming other people. That’s the trouble around here, is all the goddamn blame for every goddamn thing.”
    “I’m not blaming her—but what the hell, Daddy?”
    “Stop it! And I won’t have you cussing, either. Your mother doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she deserves our sympathy. She’s with a man who could be her son. She’s going to need lots of luck in her second childhood.”
    “Do you—do you want me to come home?”
    “Do what you want. Nobody’s going to pay your tuition or your rent, so you figure it out. I didn’t raise an idiot.”
    There was a muffled noise as he dropped the phone. When he spoke again, his voice sounded far away. “I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe your mother’s boy toy will pay your rent and tuition for you. Try that,” he said, and after about thirty seconds of fumbling, he managed finally to hang up the phone.
    BECAUSE TROUBLE has always come for me in clusters, three days later the guy in the apartment above mine fell asleep while his bathtub was filling, and water came through the ceiling—and then the ceiling itself came down in big wet chunks. The landlord said he couldn’t get to it for another few weeks, and that we shouldn’t use our tub in the meantime. He suggested we wash in the bathroom sink, which made us howl with laughter.
    Luckily for Magda, she had a married sister who lived in Santa Barbara who agreed to take her in, but there was no room for me there, too. As it was, she was going to have to share a room with her five-year-old nephew.
    And then the club where I performed once a week with the Oil Spills decided we weren’t pulling in the big crowds anymore and they wanted to try out other bands.
    “Before the universe sends the locusts and frogs, I think I have to go home,” I told Magda. “I am obviously meant to take this quarter off and put my family back together.”
    Magda was a prime believer in signs from the universe. We both agreed that we’d find a way to room together again in the fall, one way or another.
    That day I walked across campus to the admin building to see what you had to do to withdraw from classes, and whom should I see but Grant, riding his bike toward me. He blinked and slowed the bike, almost heading off the path and derailing two other riders behind him, who slid into the dirt.
    “You!” he said. His bike skidded, and he jumped off. The two guys behind him flipped him the bird.
    “Oh,” I said. “Hi. Just so you know, you nearly killed those people back there.”
    “Sorry.” He gave them a little wave and turned back to me. “How are you doing?” His cheeks were bright pink, and he was sweating.
    “I’m fine, I suppose. Leaving school tomorrow. Going back home.”
    He cleared his throat. “Why would you do that?”
    “I have to,” I said. “I have so many good reasons you wouldn’t believe it. Bad luck is raining down on me. You’re actually taking a big chance even standing here talking to me. An airplane could fall out of the sky on us.”
    “Maybe I like to live dangerously. Give me the first three reasons.”
    So I told him about the ceiling falling down in my apartment, and my band getting laid off from its usual gig—but when I started telling him about my family’s troubles, I could feel a lump in my throat.
    “Everybody’s falling apart at home, and my father has gotten demoted at his job, all because my mother has left him for a guy who’s some kind of artist stud and drives a VW bus with