“Okay, warrior. Try not to eviscerate anyone on the way to the bus.” With that, she turns and walks her long-legged walk over to her mom’s Honda Odyssey with the delicate elegance of royalty as the door automatically slides open to receive her. She is a shining star and I suck. I am a puddle of guilt and regret. I’ve shut her out, hidden all the things that are making memeright now away from her. I need to tell her everything. If only I didn’t hate the everything so much.
The key to communicating with my mother is timing. It is unwise to tell her anything when she’s just woken up and tired, or when she’s going to bed and is tired. She’s tired, like, a lot. It’s also not advisable to tell her anything when she’s rushed, busy, or hungry. Or sick. In fact, I’ve found the best time to talk with her is when she’s folding laundry. The rhythm of it seems to calm her, like she’s meditating or something.
I don’t know when the best time is to tell my dad something because I try not to tell him anything. He’s too unpredictable, too rigid, too caught up in his own moods. But my mom seems to have some secret tactics with him, so I tell her all my mistakes and then wait for her to pass them on, like a depressing game of telephone. That’s the other key to my parents. Avoidance.
The first thing I do when I get home is dump the contents of my hamper into the washing machine with a couple of detergent pods and start the cycle. Then I unload the dishwasher and wipe down the kitchen counter, hoping to score some extra points. By the time my mom walks through the door, I’ve already moved my clothes to the dryer. I put in three dryer sheets, which I know my mom will say is wasteful, but I can’t resist the smell. When she hears the dryer singing its little “I’m finished” song, she wanders to the laundry room like a mosquito to a porch light. So predictable.
This is the time I’ve so carefully planned; I won’t get a better opportunity. But I feel like my pink shag carpeting is quicksand. I have to steel myself the way we do at the beginning of the summer when we’re jumping in the unheated park pool that’s just been filled with freezing water straight from the hose.They can find out today from you or tomorrow from the principal.
I lurch forward and careen into my parents’ bedroom, where my mom hovers over a mountain of socks and jeans, startling her. She touches her chest to indicate I could have given her a heart attack.
“Where’s the fire?” she asks, recovering.
“Mom, they might cancel the play because some kids were caught smoking weed which breaks the behavior code so they can’t participate and I broke it too with a beer so you or Dad need to call Mr. Pinski about it in the morning,” I say, all in one breath.
“They might cancel the play?” she asks, stuck on the first thing.
“It’s being discussed. With Mr. Price,” I say.
“What did you do with a beer?” she asks, sort of catching up.
“I drank it,” I say, still agitated and jumpy, as if I’m late to an appointment and I don’t have time for these trivial facts.
“Oh,” she says, perching on the edge of her bed, concern in her eyebrows. She takes a deep breath, slowing my energy. “When?”
“On the ski trip.” I’m tracking her expression, hoping she won’t cry. “I’m sorry,” I say now, feeling present in the room for the first time in the conversation. “It was a mistake.”
“Yes,” she says. She seems unsure of what to say next. She looks in the laundry basket for the answer, then picks up a T-shirt and starts folding again. “Does your father know?”
I bite my lip. “No. Can you tell him?”
She deflates, immediately appearing older, like she’s been folding this particular load of laundry for twenty years. I’m a real shit. First, I break the behavior code, then I make my mom do my dirty work. And she clearly hasn’t even recovered from the meeting with Dr. Porter; she looks as dazed as she did last week in Syracuse. I’m a disappointment on so many levels. But I still wait for her answer.
“Of course,” she sighs. “I guess we’ll discuss what the consequences are after we talk to the principal.”
Consequences. What does she mean? My parents have never been big on formal punishments, but this seems right for a first time. I deserve it. Besides, where am I going? I’m apparently no longer in the play, I don’t have a boyfriend, and I’m nevergetting a driver’s license, so me and these four walls are probably going to get real comfy with each other.
I’ve done what I can now, anyway. There’s nothing left to do except wait to see what Mr. Pinski says, what my parents say, and what’s left of my life after all the adults finish having opinions.
The next morning, I snooze my alarm more times than I can afford, but I can’t talk myself into getting out of bed. Yesterday, I jumped out of bed feeling like things were finally getting better, but each day seems to bring some fresh hell. Why should today be any different? But staying in bed all day would invite more trouble. I don’t think my mom would buy another random, nonspecific illness that causes me to be bedridden. I have to at least pretend I’m still on track, rather than completely off the rails and requiring additional scrutiny.
I drag myself to the bathroom, brush my teeth and hair, and decide that what I wore as pajamas last night (sweatpants and a long-sleeve V-neck) is low-wrinkle enough to keep on as clothes for the day. The house is silent. I check the clock. I’ve missed the bus. My dad has already caught his ride to work; my brother is off to school with the neighbor kid. Normally, I would wake my mom up now to drive me. Sometimes, I even miss the bus on purpose because when she takes me we almost always stop at Burger King to get a Croissan’wich and hash browns. But today, I’d prefer to walk. I put on the eighty-six layers required to be outside for more than five minutes at this time of year.
My boots crunch the frost on the sidewalk, and my body immediately sets its internal GPS toward school as my mind starts to wander. Mason’s house is 0.3 miles away from mine(we measured it once), so we ended up walking this route together dozens of times when we both ran late. Well, walk is a euphemism for what we did. It was more of a stumble spin on the way to school, me giving him a little shove when he said something snarky, him overreacting and pratfalling to the ground, then jumping back up and air boxing a 360-degree circle around me until I pushed him again. Needless to say, school would be over by the time we got there if we kept that up the whole way, so at some point in every walk we’d race. It was always neck and neck, and we kept a running tally of our victories, adding them to the totals from Ping-Pong games in his garage. I had been down 23-24 when he died. Guess I’m the loser for eternity.
It’s just starting to crystallize that since Mason was taller than me, faster than me, and head and shoulders above me in Ping-Pong ability, he might have been keeping it close intentionally, when Mason falls into step next to me.
“You’re a bad girl,” he says in the way that makesbadsound very, very good. “Naughty.”
“So are you just stalking me twenty-four seven or is God sending you, like, mobile alerts on everything that’s happening to me when you’re not around?” I say this as if I’m teasing him, but I’m really curious.
“Maybe both,” he says without missing a beat. He starts to whistle, seeming to rub it in that any further information he might have about the existence of God is on a need-to-know basis and I definitely don’t. I decide to press. He didn’t show up on this sidewalk tonottalk to me, after all.
“I may be naughty, but you could still do a friend a solid. I mean, I would think there’d be a few perks to knowing someone from the afterlife, like maybe I could get a heads-up on trouble barreling my way. No? No warnings? Nothing?”
“No, not nothing. I told you about human aspartame. You didn’t exactly sprint away from him after that.”
“Well, I didskiaway from him, eventually.”
