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“She sent you a bikini picture,” I say, because this is the honest truth. I walked into the living room to find Frankie on my phone, texting Caroline, who’d just shared a vacation snapshot of her with her arm slung around a chunkier girl, her sister Janelle. Both of them in bikini tops with wet hair, smiling.
I need to stop texting her. Stop looking at that picture.
I need to draw better lines in my life, because this is what I’m supposed to be worrying about. The problems in this kitchen. How Frankie’s getting C’s in school and doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word privacy. How her boobs are growing and she’s wearing a bra and shirts that advertise that fact for the world to see. My head should be on whatever’s going on between Mom and Bo and whether Wyatt Leavitt has anything to do with it.
On how, when I asked Mom if she’d seen him, she said no, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and then she went all falsely cheerful like she gets when she’s lying to me.
I’m not supposed to be worrying whether Caroline’s having any fun in the Caribbean, thinking about when I’m going to be able to steal twenty minutes to call her, if there’s some way to get her alone behind a locked door when the house is empty so I can talk dirty to her, unzip my jeans, take myself in my hand.
“Let me see,” Mom says.
“No. ”
But Frankie’s coming up behind me, her fingers dipping into my back pocket for my phone, and I’m not fast enough to stop her. I grab her, tickle her, reach for the phone while I pinch her ribs just hard enough to make her squirm away, saying, “Ow!” even as she’s laughing.
“Catch, Mom!”
She tosses the phone, and I get a glimpse of the screen with my text app open before the case hits the floor and skates across it. Then I’m down on my knees, scrambling with my mom, Frankie at the periphery, and it’s the weirdest thing, because they’re both laughing, but when Mom puts her hand out and pushes me away, she pushes hard. When she gets the phone and vaults to her feet—runs across the kitchen, saying, “Keep him off me, Frankie!”—it doesn’t feel like a game.
It’s not funny.
I dodge around Frankie effortlessly, grab my mom’s wrist, wrench the phone out of her hand. My chest is heaving. I’m hot, out of control, full of misdirected rage, thwarted fury.
“Christ, West, lighten up,” Mom says. But her eyes are glittering, offended and prideful, and when I look at Frankie she flinches.
I want to storm out of the house. Take a long walk out to the highway and along the road in the gathering dark. I want to fume, but I’ve got nothing to be pissed off about except my own failure to make the lines in my life black enough, dark enough to keep this kind of shit from happening.
I take a deep breath and let it out.
This is my family. My place.
These are my people, and this is where I belong.
If it doesn’t feel that way, I’m doing it wrong. Closing myself off. And I can’t do that, because if I lose this, who am I?
I thumb through a couple of screens on the phone and hand it back to my mom, whose expression softens at the peace offering. “The one on the right, or … ?”
“The pretty one,” I hear myself say. “Her name’s Caroline. ”
What r you doing?
She texts back right away. Nothing.
What kind of nothing?
Laying on couch watching a movie.
What movie?
Breakfast Club. I’ve seen 400 Molly Ringwald movies today.
Why?
They were my mom’s. I watch them sometimes.
A pause. My dad’s at work. I’m bored. Break sucks.
Yeah.
