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what you have is good?

I HIT THE ALARM clock and run to the bathroom mirror.
    My lips are still white.
    Tears come in an instant.
    Was it ridiculous to hope that they’d turn back to lip color overnight? They turned white overnight, after all. What’s to say the whole thing couldn’t reverse itself?
    But it didn’t. And that’s that. Cover it up and forget about it.
    That elephant again. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.
    I finish my routine, then get dressed. When I go back to the bathroomto put on my new lipstick, Dante’s in there.
    I have the urge to pound on the door with the side of my fist. He’d do it to me.
    But I’m better than him.
    I go to my room and look in the full-length mirror inside my closet door. I open the lipstick.
    I can hear Slinky in my head. I apply it lightly. This color doesn’t look as good on me as it looked on her, but at least I now have colored lips.
    Mamma’s eyes take in my lipstick and quickly go back to the kitchen counter. “Would you like an omelet? Broccoli and Asiago?” She is not the breakfast maker. Dad is. But she’s good at omelets, and she’s offering my favorite. She feels sorry for me.
    I can ride the pity train. “Sure, thanks.” I pour a glass of milk, put it on the table, and stand beside Mamma to watch her cook.
    “Is that for me?” Dante comes in, sniffs loudly, and drops into a chair.
    Mamma slides the omelet onto a plate and hands it to me. I’m always surprised at the speed of omelets. They taste too good to be that fast. “I’ll make you the same, Dante,” she says. “Pour yourself something to drink.”
    “Already got that covered.” Dante drinks my milk.
    I keep my plate in one hand and with the other I get down another glass and fill it with milk and go to the table, both hands full.
    “You didn’t yell at me.” Dante looks at me with a milk mustache I know he made on purpose.
    “What’s the use?”
    “You’re learning,” says Dante.
    “And you never learn, Squirt. So, really truly, what’s the use?”
    “Wait!” Dad puts down his coffee. It’s in a glass. I bought him a set of four glasses for his birthday. They’re double-sided, with air between the two layers, so you can see the coffee, but your hands don’t get burned holding the outside. They’re all Dad uses now. So the design isn’t just clever, it’s better. And I can tell from the dopey look Dad has whenever he uses one of those glasses that he feels loved drinking from them—loved by me.
    I smile. “Wait for what?”
    Dad runs to the living room. Pretty soon I hear a CD. Dad comes back in. “Louis Jordan. Listen to the song ‘What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)’ It’s great. And wait till you hear ‘Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens.’” He walks around the kitchen twitchingand knocking his elbows around. I think he thinks he’s dancing. And I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be to this song or to the song about chickens.
    My father is a tall, gangly mix of Swedish and Norwegian. Mamma calls him
il mio vichingo
, which means “my Viking” in Italian. It is not a pleasant sight to watch him dance. Still, I’m grinning now. He’s Daddy, after all.
    I finish breakfast and race to meet Devin outside her house.
    Devin looks annoyed. “You didn’t answer my message.”
    “You wrote again? I went to bed early.”
    “I figured. You probably finished everything fast. Did you understand the Ovid poem?”
    “It was just the first twenty lines.”
    “Twenty lines too many,” says Devin. “What was it about?”
    “The usual invocation of the gods, to help the poet tell the story. Then stuff about what it was like before there was earth and sea and sky. The big chaos.”
    “Yeah, I got that. But what was all that at the end? It felt like a bunch of contradictions.”
    “It was. Cold and hot, wet and dry, soft and hard. The world was a mess in the beginning. Or that’s what Ovid thought.”
    Devin