A/N: Got the date wrong last week. Today is Wednesday, not Tuesday. Whoops.

Going forward, I think I'm going to make more of an effort to respond to your feedback individually. It feels weird that people say such nice things about my writing and I don't really acknowledge it. If I do message you, feel free to ignore me!

This chapter contains themes that more sensitive readers might find upsetting. If you're concerned and would rather know what those themes are before reading, PM me.

In the summer that I was eighteen, I got a phone call from my dad.

And the strangest thing was that I smiled, because I knew he'd be asking what time I'd get to the golf course tomorrow, and it would be a brief talk but he'd end it with a promise that this was the week he would finally best me, and I'd hear the grin in his tone, and I'd be happy for the rest of the night because we were gradually building up to a normal relationship, an actual father-daughter relationship.

I thought he felt the same way.

So I don't know why he did it.

I think I knew, just from his first few words, what was happening. I was sat at the desk in my room, writing a letter to Andrew, and the lamp cast enough light that when I looked up at the window I could see my own terrified reflection overlaying the pine trees swaying gently in the dark, beyond my back yard. I remembered the assembly at school, the chirpy lady they had brought in, who told us how to recognize the signs in our friends, and it hadn't worked, lady. I never recognized shit.

"I'm sorry, Pacifica." He wept, openly, into my receiver. "I'm sorry that I mistreated you. My only daughter. I'm sorry I wasn't a father to you." There was what sounded like a gust of wind, obscuring his next sentence. I stared at the trees, tipping to the right, tipping to the left.

"Dad," I managed, my mouth the only part of my body not in full paralysis. "Where are you?"

"So sorry."

"Dad. Tell me where you are."

"I'm at work. No, I finished work... but I'm still at work."

"Are you at your office?" I was up on my feet now, taking the stairs two at a time, keeping my footfalls soft as if any sudden noise would shatter the illusion that everything was going to be fine.

"I can see the world from up here, Pacifica, and it's so bleak."

"Just stay on the line, Dad. Tell me more about the world, okay?" Mom's car keys. No time for a jacket. No time for shoes.

"I never meant to hurt you. Never wanted to... we were so absorbed in our own lives."

"It's okay, Dad, I forgive you." Ignition. Car started without hesitance. "Just stay with me, okay?"

A single, flat tone.

"Dad?" I looked at the screen. Call disconnected. "Dad," I shrieked, the doors of the car suppressing my hysteria for the outside world. I tried calling back and listened to six excruciating rings. I dialed 911. I told the operator I needed them to send someone to the address of my dad's office building, that he was going to kill himself, and they asked me to stay on the line, but I hung up and tried Dad's number four more times.

I could drive. Not officially - I didn't have a license. But I had driven Wendy's van before, and I most likely wouldn't need to parallel park or reverse around a corner tonight. I just needed to get from point A to point B. So I drove. I dialed Mom's number as I careened through town, but she didn't pick up either. I left the phone on the passenger seat and took turns dialing each of my parents, and every single time I heard that pre-recorded voice telling me when to leave a voicemail, my heart sunk lower in my chest. My body periodically seized up and I realized I hadn't been breathing.

I hit the interstate at sixty miles per hour and screamed, because the world went black around me - the streetlights didn't extend beyond the town. The tires screeching were my only reminder that I was still on the ground, as my bare foot dug into the grooves of the brake pedal. I fumbled around on the dashboard and my headlights came on, but they were blinking - hazard lights, I thought - and while they would have accurately broadcast my current situation to other motorists, driving in intermittent light would have been precarious, so I continued to search for the headlights. When I finally found them, my foot slammed on the accelerator and the engine went nuts.

Between ten minutes and an hour into the drive - I obviously wasn't keeping track of time - a diner flew by me on my left, and my eyes latched onto its warm yellow glow projecting into the road. Inexplicably, all I could think was that I could pull over, get a table, sit and sip coffee under the lights and around the people and the quiet music and everything would feel normal until this situation played out on its own. Something inside me screamed that I should enjoy the normalcy in uncertainty while I could.

I was just approaching the exit to Roseburg when the dial tone for my Dad changed - it was shorter now, like Mom's, which meant that his cell phone was off, I thought. And for ten minutes I convinced myself that he was alive, he was sitting on the rooftop of his office building drinking whiskey out of the bottle, and he had switched off his phone because the ringtone was giving him a headache.

The red and blue lights were quite spectacular. They danced methodically on the surrounding buildings and cars, through the gaps in the trees lining the office parking lot. There was a disorderly arrangement of people standing in the road, some of them huddled together, others alone, watching me approach, blinking against headlights. I counted three cop cars and an ambulance. A man in navy blue uniform stepped out in front of my mom's car with his hand up, but my hands had already fallen from the steering wheel, too weak to grip it, and I sailed into him so slowly that his legs ended the car's motion entirely.

I remember floating. Or feeling like I was floating. In reality, the officer would tell me later, when he opened the car door to talk to me I was already unconscious, and I flopped onto the pavement like I was just another body for them to bag up. I woke up within minutes, but I wasn't truly aware of where I was or what day it was until an hour later, when I was slumped in a cushioned pink chair at the police station, a cinnamon bun and a cup of coffee and a bottle of water set out on the table beside me.

And even that's a little hazy. I often try to remember what the room looked like. There may have been a vending machine whirring, to keep me safe from silence. There may have been magazines on the coffee table. All I remember clearly is a familiar redhead materializing in the doorway and then crouching down in front of me, in a green checkered shirt, and the warmest of arms around my waist and the smell of cigarettes, and the hot stream of tears soaking into her shoulder that I thought might never run dry.

"I'm gonna go home tomorrow."

I heard Wendy rustling under her sheets, and then her bulbous green eyes were staring down at me, her head backlit by the moon pouring through her open window. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. My mom's gonna be back. I don't know if I want to see her but I think it would be weirder if I didn't. Plus, it's not fair on your dad. Having to look after me with all your brothers running around."

"Well don't leave on his account. He loves having you around. Apart from the whole..."

"The whole 'queer' thing, yeah, I've noticed."

"It's not because he's a homophobe," Wendy was quick to say. "Honest. He was just a little skeptical about us sleeping in the same room. You know... my dad raised me like a fourth son. I'm sure he's always been curious if I would ever swing for the other team."

"And do you?"

"No. At least, I don't think so. That's the kind of thing you know when you're twenty-one, right?"

"Not always. Some people figure it out later."

She seemed to mull that over for a moment. "Would you date me? You know, hypothetically speaking. If I was gay."

"Why does everybody insist on asking me that?"

"Because you never talk to me about it," she whined. "I have no idea what your type is, or anything. Apart from... you-know-who."

"Yeah, thanks for opening up that old wound, three days after my dad died. Real nice."

"I'm sorry."

I stuck my tongue out at her in the pale light. "You're not my type, I'm afraid. Well, I don't know, actually. You would have to quit smoking, that's for sure." One of the reasons I couldn't stay there any longer was that all of my clothes would soon smell like cigarettes. No matter how far away from the house Wendy smoked, she was constantly dragging a cloud of it back to her room that wouldn't dissipate no matter how long we kept the windows open.

I decided that if I held her gaze for too long, with her white tank top and her smooth pale skin and her hair hanging over the side of the bed, I'd feel something for her, so I looked back up at the ceiling. "If I was into you," I continued, "I wouldn't be sleeping on your floor. I'd be up there with you, touching you in your sleep."

There was nothing but the sound of my own breathing for a moment.

"That sounded way creepier than I meant it to."

"Yeah," she laughed.

I tried to savor those last easy waking moments in Wendy's room. I knew that when I returned home, I would be returning to my solitude, where my darkest thoughts circled above me like vultures, randomly swooping down and plucking at my head. My mom would be home from the business trip that she couldn't have possibly cut short after hearing of the death of her ex-husband, but she wouldn't make much difference to the emptiness of the house, unless the news had unlocked a surplus of emotions somewhere within her, which I strongly doubted.

"How are you feeling, P? We haven't really talked about it. Your dad, I mean."

I shrugged, then realized Wendy wasn't staring down at me anymore. "I don't know. Better. I'm over the initial shock. Now I feel... I don't know. It's like I'm grieving over what could have been, like what our relationship could have been, more than I'm grieving over him."

"I know what you mean," she said, when she was sure I was done talking. "I feel like that with my mom sometimes. I was so young when she died that sometimes when I think about her, I'm not remembering her, I'm just sad that I don't have a mom. And then other times I think about how close I am with Dad, and I wouldn't trade that for anything, not even a mom. Sorry. Making everything about me again."

"It's okay," I yawned. "I like listening to you talk."

"You're sure you want to go home tomorrow?"

"I'm sure."

"You'll stay for breakfast though, right?"

I grinned. "And what's for breakfast tomorrow?"

"Bacon and eggs," we said at the same time.

"Oh, okay," she said, throwing a pillow at my cackling face. "Didn't realize we were boring you."

I was in the living room when Mom came home. She was two hours later than she said she would be; her plane was delayed, I guessed. She didn't say anything about it. She didn't say anything about me commandeering her car, either. She didn't say hello, or ask me how I was coping. She sat down in her armchair and launched into an uninterrupted plan of action - she would be arranging a funeral, I could help if I wanted to, if I didn't want to that was fine too. We would be visiting Dad's solicitor, an old friend of his who lived in Gravity Falls, some time in the week to read through Dad's will.

"Are you upset?" I asked her.

She looked shocked, like she had never anticipated me interrupting. And when she spoke her tone was frigid, stuck on business mode. "Very. I was married to your father for twenty-five years."

"Then why are you talking like a robot?"

"Pacifica, we've had time to process this. Now's the time to be practical."

"You've had time to process this? What part of a five-day conference did you use to 'process this?'"

"I had the evenings in my hotel room, alone."

"And you didn't think I might need you here? After I listened to my dad's last words over the phone, just before he threw himself off a fucking building?"

"I called you on Saturday morning," she said, and she sounded so confident that that redeemed her for shirking her motherly responsibilities, so I walked out of the room and ignored her for the rest of the night.

That was the same night that I stumbled upon the liquor cabinet in my dad's old study. We had a big enough house that we hadn't needed to repurpose the room in any way after he had moved out, so most of the time we kept the door shut and forgot that it existed. I was feeling sentimental; I think I wanted to find a reason to cry, I wanted to feel like a girl that had just lost her father, instead of the cocktail of spite and indifference that was mixed up inside of me. He had left a few books behind, and the stationery in his desk drawers, but other than that there was little evidence that he had once spent many hours a day locked up in the claustrophobic little space. Instead of a trinket to jog my memory or spark some emotion I found the liquor cabinet, and I poured myself a glass of whiskey, and for the next week or two that cabinet became my port of call every night - I could easily sneak the bottles to my bedroom and put them back when they were empty, and drinking in my room until the ceiling spun was too enticing of a hobby to stop. I downloaded a handful of dating apps and spent hours at a time relentlessly flirting with any girl that was remotely into it, and within two weeks I had my first hook-up, even though my dating pool was severely limited, and I was living in small-town Oregon.

In those early days I didn't have a drinking problem. I simply loved who I could become when I flooded my liver with poison. The walls I had built up around me, my defenses, my insecurities, all of them vanished and in its place came the Pacifica of old, the confidence I had had as a kid that had withered away throughout my adolescence, and I didn't use it to climb up on a high horse and put people down anymore, I used it to dominate the dating scene, to pluck a gay woman out of a crowd, and in some cases, to make straight women question if they were really that into men.

The seniors of Gravity Falls High reached the very last step in their high school career - graduation. I (my mom) had to pay the extortionate sum of fifty dollars to rent a robe to wear, and while I found the combination of black and green ghastly, I had to wear it to, from, and during the entire ceremony, to represent the school. Just before we left the house my mom hovered by the front door, regarded me, and said, "you look really beautiful," like it was fact, more than opinion, and when she disappeared outside I lingered by the coat rack for a few seconds to regain my bearings, unsure whether I was really awake.

Mom even looked proud at the actual ceremony. Not smiling, of course, but she was sat upright with her hands folded in her lap, and her attention was fully on the stage. For a moment I felt guilty that I was getting drunk behind her back every night, but the guilt soon passed, because all she would have had to do to find out about it was knock on my door and talk to me.

Katie was there, too. Her brother was graduating. She was sitting next to the girl I had only seen pictures of, the online friend she had been planning on dating and was now, presumably, dating. I couldn't remember the name but I remembered the face. She had short blonde hair but a long fringe partly obscuring one of her blue eyes. She was pretty. They looked happy. Katie caught my eye and smiled; I smiled back. Then the guilt set in again, because I hadn't spoken to her since the start of summer, even though she had left comments on my Facebook posts - inconsequential one-liners that screamed TEXT ME.

With graduation came the parties. Everybody and their dog wanted to host the ultimate end-all bash, everybody wanted the last word of the senior year, so I attended quite a few. I remember it hit me one night in an acquaintance's kitchen that here I was, turning up to underage teen's houses and guzzling their alcohol, and I had no idea how they were getting it. They couldn't have all had dead fathers and a freely accessible liquor cabinet. I asked around and it turned out there was a liquor store in town that was manned by the owner's son on his weekends home from college, and being a former GF High student who had already survived the tribulations of illegally acquiring booze, he was often lenient with his ID checks.

The parties died out when everyone dispersed elsewhere in the state, the country, or the globe, for college. It was the last breath of summer, and on my runs by the lake I'd slow to a walking pace, let the sun wash over my arms, and I'd look out over the water and see the families swimming and the kids playing and I'd know I had so much life ahead of me, and I felt at peace with the world, and at war with myself. I was living a double life. By day I embraced the outdoors, devoted my time to keeping fit, and by the night I'd grow restless and lecherous and I'd drink and trawl the internet for cheap thrills in the form of young women.

And then every once in a while I'd step out of my own body and look down on myself, and think of Mabel, think that she'd be disappointed in me if she could see me now. Just as quickly as the thought would arrive it would dissipate, and I'd think of contacting her, sending her a rude message letting her know I was actually better off without her, but my disorderly hair and the bags under my eyes and the drink on my breath were dead giveaways that that was a lie, so I never did.

The other problem I had with keeping up my drinking habit was that I soon became broke, and there were only so many times a week I could run to my mom for money for "new clothes" or "to see a movie," so on my way to the accredited liquor store one Saturday I hatched the most shameful idea I had ever come up with.

The college boy was called Chris. He had blonde, slightly shaggy hair, and always the same amount of chin stubble, like he never shaved and it never grew. He was well-built, and attractive, in that gruff kind of way. He always wore flannel shirts and it took me several weeks to notice that he reminded me of a male Wendy, and another few weeks for that to stop creeping me out.

I don't know if Chris was attracted to me or just bored, but all I had to do was lean over the counter and tenderly explain that I was short on cash but that I could offer an alternative form of payment, and his eyes went wide and a smile crept up on his lips, and that's how I started walking out of the place every Saturday afternoon with my backpack stocked up on whatever bottles I wanted. I never enjoyed it, because he didn't have boobs, but I didn't hate it either. His room upstairs was small but the bed was cozy. He made me laugh a lot. Sometimes when we were finished he'd light a joint and we'd take turns filling the room with smoke. At the time, our arrangement felt healthy.

It was sometime in late November that I saw my dad's gravestone for the first time. I was thinking about him in my room and I decided I'd take the trek to the top of the hill at the cemetery to see him, a hip flask in the pocket of my jeans, because although my transformation to a shameless slut was nearly complete, even I could recognize that walking around a graveyard with a brown bottle dangling from my fingers lacked class. When he was buried there, I had stayed in the car, fiddling anxiously with the hem of my black dress, because the thought of seeing an unfinished grave - watching a person be lowered into the dirt and then covered up, for all eternity? It creeped me out. Made me a little sick.

The tombstone was so flashy that I laughed, either derisively or wistfully, I didn't know. An immaculately carved hunk of marble, like a traditional arched gravestone on top, but like the lower half of a pyramid on the bottom. It stood tall over its neighbors - even in death Dad was saying look up here, bitches, this is how much more important I am than you. Either he had requested it specially or my mom had picked it out.

I probably stood there for ten minutes in silence, wringing my hands, my eyes flickering back and forth between the surrounding hills and the gray sky and those terrifying carvings in the stone, my own last name. I hadn't come there to talk to him but I felt the words fall out of my mouth anyway.

"I didn't cry at your funeral," I confessed out loud, before scanning the graveyard to make sure I was alone. "I thought you should know that. Mom did. I'm not sure why. I guess... I guess she fell in love with you once, right? Maybe she was mourning that ancient version of you. The one from before when I was born."

I swept strands of hair behind my ear at a sudden gust of wind. "I've been down to the golf club a couple of times. Played a round by myself. It's, um, it's hard to find people my age that are interested in playing.

"This feels stupid," I said, refraining from kicking the dirt. "I don't know what to say to you, Dad. I really don't. I had things to say to you, when you were still alive. Things that I was sitting on, waiting for a burst of strength so I could say them out loud. And I only knew how much those things were eating me up inside after you left. And now... all I can do is stand here, and say them into the ground, like a fucking lunatic." I let out a shaky sigh. "But it's better than nothing, I guess.

"Part of me would like to tell you that I grew up without the love of my parents. And that you're to blame. Half to blame. And I'm not saying that that led to all of the problems I have today, but it certainly didn't help. I had to seek out love in other places. And I found it, in friends, and one girl in particular, but I invest too heavily in other people. I wind up depending on them too much. Sometimes I drive them away. Like, right now, I'm seeing this guy - well, maybe seeing isn't the right word - I'm hooking up with this guy in exchange for free alcohol, and I'm seriously questioning if I should give up my lesbian identity and ask the guy out just because he feels safe. His room feels safe. He treats me like he wants me around, can you imagine that? Feeling wanted? That's what you deprived me of.

"And I can't even explain the feeling, Dad, the feeling that your parents don't like you, that they'd be better off without you. I just hope that you felt it too. You never told me much about my grandparents, neither of you did, but I hope to god that the reason you were so distant with me was because you were treated in exactly the same way, and you didn't know any different. Because that's the only way that I could ever begin to forgive you."

I sucked in a breath and out of nowhere, a sob rose up through my throat. I glanced around to make sure nobody was there and wiped my eyes. "And then the other half of me almost wants to hug you. I want you to come back and tell me what was wrong. Tell me how things got so bad, that you had to... that you saw no other way out. If you had just fucking told me, if you had said to me what you said over the phone a little sooner, I could have put everything aside, I would have listened. I could have helped you.

"So I don't know. I don't know if I'm angry at you, or if I feel sorry for you, I don't... I don't think I loved you. But I think I could have loved the person you were becoming. I think it's like Wendy said, I'm grieving over the fact that I could have had a dad. And now I can't."

A nearby tree sighed in the wind, like it was sick of people showing up in its garden and delivering emotional monologues to lumps of rock. I bit my lip and a salty tear flowed into my mouth. I wiped my face one last time.

"I hope you're in a better place now, Dad," I said, and then I turned and forced the tears to die in my throat, swallowed a lemon-sized lump all the way back to the cemetery gates, and walked through town with a straight face and bloodshot eyes.

I stopped at the bar on my way home. My newly acquired fake ID proclaimed me as twenty-one years old, and I had taken to dropping by whenever I had a spare dollar from sponging off my parents. The decor hadn't changed one bit since I played piano there, five years before. The people had. I was usually served by a girl who looked no older than I did, with black curly hair and a smattering of lipstick. I couldn't decide whether I was getting gay vibes from her or not.

She was tending bar on the day that I visited the graveyard. All I asked for was a Budweiser; next I knew she was scrutinizing my counterfeit driver's license, looking up at me and tilting her head to figure me out, the way Mabel always used to.

"Is there a problem?" I snapped. "You've served me before."

"You're twenty-one?"

"That's what it says on the card."

"Don't believe everything you read," she said, like she had rehearsed it, then she passed the license back towards me and folded her arms.

"What's your name?"

"Nina."

"Nina. Hi, Nina. Let me tell you something," I said, leaning over the bar. "I've had a very rough day, so how about you do your job, and pass me one of those beer bottles out of the refrigerator behind you? That's all you have to do."

"What car do you drive?"

I hesitated. "I don't have a car."

"When did you learn to drive?"

"Three years ago."

"When you were fifteen?"

"Yes."

Nina's eyebrows floated upwards while a devilish smirk played on her lips.

I couldn't help but laugh. "Okay. That was- I'm not even mad. I'm just gonna leave." I had half a bottle of Jack Daniel's under my bed, anyway.

As I was leaving the bar, I thought I'd heard Nina tell me to wait up, but I decided I had imagined it, until I was back out on the street and I heard it again. She was running up the sidewalk behind me with her arms folded, like women sometimes do in the rain, but it wasn't raining.

"What's your name?" she asked me.

"Pacifica."

"What- that's your name?"

I frowned, readying my defenses. "Yes."

"Okay, that's incredible," she said, like it actually amazed her. "Look, I don't want to pry into your life or anything, but I've seen you drinking at the bar by yourself a few times now and I'm not convinced that that's normal for someone your age."

"Gee, thanks."

"I have to listen to... tired old men reciting their life stories, right up to whatever tragic moment led to them sitting at a bar, five drinks in, at 2 P.M. on a Tuesday. And it's so boring. But then you come along, a normal-looking girl from the same generation as me, the only person I'd actually want to talk to, and you sit there with your head down and your lips sealed."

I was fully aware of that. Why would I have wanted to talk about the most embarrassing habit I had ever developed? Every time I looked up at the haggard souls occupying the neighboring bar stools, I felt a wave of remorse that my life had taken eighteen years to take a nosedive instead of fifty.

"Anyway," she continued, and she hadn't struck me as the nervous type, but she had trouble meeting my eyes at this point in the conversation, "I've just moved back home from college, and I don't have a lot of friends that are still around. If you're going through something and you want to talk about it, I'd be really happy to listen sometime."

My face relaxed as she looked up at me, one eyebrow raised expectantly. "That'd be awesome, actually," I found myself saying.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Thank you."

She smiled and pulled a notepad and pen from her pocket. "Here's my number. Just text me when you're available, and we'll go for coffee or something."

"Okay."

She shuffled her feet around and said, "should probably get back to work. They get cranky if I don't top up their drinks."

"Or if you don't serve them."

"Yeah, that too." She headed back into the bar, waving at me before the door closed behind her.

I crossed the street, gazing at the slip of paper in my hands like it was ancient treasure. Nina had written her name in neat italics just above her number, and although that one phone number felt so much more significant than the others I had recently goaded out of other women, I never thought that two cups of coffee later, we would become best friends.