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“What are you doing?”
“I have to check in with my Tok-ers.”
“Your what-ers?”
“TikTok, Carly.”
“What?” Her response takes me aback. I know what TikTok is, of course, but I’m fucking floored that my seventy-year-old mother does too. “You’re on TikTok?”
“Uh-huh. I love it,” she says, fluffing up her hair and making a kissy-face toward the screen of her phone. “Every day, I post a dance for my followers. Usually, I do it in the morning, but I’m sure they’ll understand why I’ve been MIA the past few days.”
“Mom, you can’t dance for a TikTok video right now. That’s, like, the exact opposite of lying low!” I hop up from the love seat and stride right over to her, snagging the phone off the coffee table before she can stop me.
“Carly, I have to. My followers will be worried about me.”
“Nope.” I shake my head and hold her phone behind my back. “No dancing. Only sitting.”
“Give me my damn phone.” She huffs out a sigh and holds her hand out for me to obey her demands.
“I will,” I say. “Once you sit back down on your donut.”
She glares.
I glare right back.
She huffs again.
And while I wait patiently for her to sit down, I take a quick glance at the screen of the phone where her TikTok account is front and center.
Stella Got Her Groove Back.
That’s her account name.
I almost burst into laughter, but it gets stuck in my throat when I see how many damn followers she has—over two hundred thousand.
“What the hell?” I question just as my mom decides to give it up and ease herself back onto her donut cushion.
“What’s wrong?” she questions, her face pinching up in pain with the downward movement toward the couch. “You didn’t accidentally delete one of my drafts, did you?”
“No. Mom. You have a crazy amount of followers on here.”
She nods. “I went viral when I did the ‘WAP.’ It’s built pretty quickly from there.”
Instantly, my eyes go wide. Please tell me that’s not what I think it means…
“When you did the what, Mom?”
“The ‘WAP’ dance,” she says and reaches up to grab her phone from me. She scrolls her fingers across the screen until she finds what she’s looking for and hands it back to me. “This one.”
And right there, on the screen, is everything I didn’t want to come true.
Only, it’s even worse than I imagined.
Pretty sure anyone witnessing their mom engaging in a dance that involves twerking and pelvic thrusts would want to stab themselves in the eyeballs just like I do right now. My mom is definitely spry, but still, she’s seventy. No one her age should be doing the things I’m currently watching her do in this insane video.
“It turned out well, didn’t it?” she asks, voice proud.
“Oh yeah,” I say and shut my eyes as I hand the phone back to her. “So good that I’m probably going to have to seek out a therapist to help me work through the trauma of seeing it.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic, Carly.” She laughs. “I didn’t raise you to be a prude.”
I’m not a prude and I definitely get my free-spirit tendencies from her, but no child should ever have to witness their parent doing this. I glance down at the video that’s still playing, and my eyes widen. She’s just gotten to the humping-splits, and hot sauce and chicken wings, she’s really fucking flexible.
I smile then, despite all the odds, as I think about the one person whom this will traumatize exponentially more than it does me.
“Mom, does Willow know about your TikTok fame?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, well, you should probably keep it that way. Or else we’ll probably have to plan her funeral after she sees that profile of yours.”
My mom just smirks. “Willow is downright neurotic about sexuality. She could learn a thing or two from my TikTok.”
I strongly doubt Willow would learn anything from our mom’s dirty dancing, but Stella is right about her personality. Willow has always been more like our late father. Focused, determined, and very organized, she thrives on plans and stability.
Though, if our father were still alive today, I think he’d get a kick out of his wife doing shit like going viral on TikTok for a dance to a song that’s an acronym for wet-ass pussy. Ronnie Page might’ve been more uptight than his wife Stella, but he loved that she was the one who always got him to loosen up.
The mere thought of him causes a hint of sadness to swim around inside my chest. It’s been over three years since I got the call from my mom that my dad had a massive heart attack, and still, even though I feel like I’m through the initial grieving process of his unexpected death, it doesn’t mean I don’t still miss him every day.
