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“I’ll figure it out. Thanks,” I say.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Has it ever occurred to you we might’ve played better? Just because Penn says something doesn’t make it true.”
“It doesn’t make it untrue either,” Jaime points out.
“You should show more loyalty to All Saints, Dad. You’re an alumnus. And you”—she turns to Mel for the first time this evening—“you were a teacher. Before you got fired for sleeping with your student.” Daria licks the last of her ice cream and tries dumping it into the trash can, like her dad. She misses, and it falls on the floor.
“Daria, you’re being Hulky again.” Jaime pins her with a look, like she knows what the hell that means.
“Why? Because I brought you and Melody up? It’s okay to say gross things to her in public, but I can’t point out that you’ve ruined my life by sending me to the same school—the same class, by the way—you hooked up in?” She juts her chin out, standing up.
“Don’t excuse her behavior, Jaime. You invented the Hulk because you wanted to separate Daria from her bad behavior. The truth is, she needs to learn to rein in her anger when she’s upset,” Mel says, and this is going off-track, fast. I scan the Followhills individually, assessing the situation. Bailey’s eyes are glued to her iPad, and she looks like she doesn’t have a care in the world. The kid’s used to this fucked-up dynamic. Daria’s eyes are locked on her mom’s.
“Mother.” Daria plasters an arsenic smile on. “Do we have a problem here?”
Melody sits back and folds her arms over her sensible cardigan.
“Why can’t you be a little more like your sister?”
Daria’s physical reaction to those words suggests she’s been shot. She darts up from her chair, and it falls back from the momentum. Everyone around us snaps their heads to our table. Melody jumps up from her chair, too.
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t.” Daria lifts a finger. Her eyes are shining, but her face is stoic. She shakes her head. “Don’t say you didn’t mean it, Melody, because every fiber of you did. And maybe I should be more like Bailey. But you? You should be more of a mom.”
She turns around and storms away, taking the three stairs to the sidewalk and running to the street. She flings herself toward the boardwalk, bursting into traffic, and when a car brakes and honks at her, she jams her fist on its hood.
“Fuck you! This is Todos Santos. Your daddy will buy you a new one,” she screams.
My mind is telling me to sit this one out and let the shitshow unfold without my intervention. But my legs are assholes and so is my rusty conscience because they carry me down the stairs. Mel warns my back that when Daria’s Hulky, she doesn’t like to be interrupted. I think she needs some tough love and to be grounded until the next decade. She needs to be asked some hard questions. Questions like:
Are you fucking your principal?
Is your foster brother fondling you in the locker room?
Are your friends assholes who run betting rings in an illegal fight club?
What in the actual fuck is Hulky?
At the risk of sounding like a Dr. Phil wannabe, I keep this shit to myself. Jaime and Mel are still ten million times better than my parents. They care. Mel is just scared of her daughter, and Jaime…well, Jaime is a dude.
The light turns red, and I have to wait for cars to pass before I can cross the road. Unlike Daria, I don’t have a good health insurance plan and can’t go around slapping moving vehicles. I spot her sneaking into the dwindling line of the Ferris wheel and buying a ticket. She slips into a seat. My eyes flicker back to the traffic light. When it turns green, I sprint across the road. Since I left my wallet—which Jamie padded with a couple of hundred—at the house, I hop over the fence and slide into her booth a second before she closes the metal bar and locks it. The guy operating the wheel has already pulled the handle, and the wheel starts moving. He shoots me a look and shakes his head. I don’t mean to laugh in his face, but he should thank his lucky stars that Kannon and Camilo are not here with me. We’d have found a way to steal the entire Ferris wheel and sell its parts to travelers.
“What are you doing here?” Daria looks the other way toward the ocean. She is holding the metal bar in a chokehold. The wheel moves slowly, and our cart sways back and forth.
“Shit was getting real, so I decided to split.” I take out my pack of cigarettes, and she knocks it out of my hands, letting it fall to the abyss of tourists underneath us.
