Page 12 of Lovefool

As we pull out of the parking lot, my mother’s tone quivers, no longer tempered by that spit-shined, perfect persona that she feigns for the rest of the world.

“You’re playing with your life, and I’m not going to lose you too, Lake. Not ever,” she tells me, the slight nasal quality to her voice forewarning a cascade of tears that are just waiting to defile her cheeks.

My throat cinches on a fractured inhale as my pulse rabbits against the thin skin of my wrist.

She just wants me to be safe. She’s acting like this out of fear. She’s acting like this because she has a chance to protect her only daughter, and nothing in this world could get her to let her guard down.

There’s an invisible chasm between the two of us—one she refuses to acknowledge. The longer we keep feeding it, the larger it grows. And at some point, a clumsy-footed lunge won’t be enough to traverse stratified layers of pain. Volcanic, molten.

“You won’t, Mom. I promise.”

A lie.

I already died with my sister that night.

5

PUT ME IN, COACH!

LAKE

Not only did I get arrested and have to endure the wrath of Heather Capitano, but I missed my date with Sutton entirely. He’s going to think I stood him up.

Even though I’m a junior in college who should have her own apartment by now, I still live with my mom because I’m the built-in babysitter for my brother. My mother juggles quite the heavy workload at the office, and she’s not always available to pick Max up from school or drive him to hockey practice. I’m thankful for the time I get to spend with the little scoundrel, but my home life restricts me from enjoying many of the freedoms that come with college.

I don’t always get to go out on the weekend and get drunk. I don’t get to share a crappy one-bedroom apartment with Ellaria and almost burn the house down when we try to cook our first grown-up meal that’s not prepackaged. I don’t get to hook up with frat guys when I’m feeling especially lonely at night and my vibrator has stopped working.

You know, all the important milestones in a college girl’s life.

Executing my revenge plan was risky for a multitude of reasons, and I was just lucky that my brother went to sleep early and my mother is an undiagnosed workaholic. If she found out what I did at Buford’s house, she’d probably give me another one of her lengthy lectures.

I’ve been waiting for the right time to finally move out. My job—I work for the school newspaper, glamorous, I know—pays all right, and I’ve been saving funds from the other soul-sucking jobs I had before I settled on journalism.

Sephora employee. Starbucks barista. Waitress at this restaurant called The Grotto where I was the unofficial code brown inspector and had to repeatedly clean the bathrooms after Taco Tuesdays. All of them were equally humiliating, and for some reason, dealt with more bodily fluids than were mentioned in the application. Luckily for me, I have a great immune system thanks to my inherent desire to play in mud and eat bugs as a kid.

Mustang Mania—a student-run blog that’s not official by any means—is our biggest competitor. Nobody reads online news articles anymore—not when they have hot and juicy gossip twenty-four-seven in addictive, handheld devices. Gossip can be submitted anonymously, which means a lot of it is uncredible.

The paper covers more appropriate school topics. Not if Jenna Davidson hooked up with Erin Monelli’s boyfriend while said best friend took an impromptu vacation to Cabo with Jenna’s hot, newly divorced dad.

Journalism is fun, sure, but I’d prefer to be out there in the active war zone, rioting, inducting like-minded strangers into a coalescence of the fucked and forgotten (by Maple Grove’s pencil-pushing echelon of town officials.)

I thought that, above all the chaos, I was getting somewhere with Sutton. Maybe I would have if I didn’t royally piss my mom off. Now he thinks I was a no-show on purpose. I could message him on Instagram, but I’m the last person he probably wants to hear from. He doesn’t deserve to be caught in my hot mess of an exceptionally unexciting life. Maybe this is karma for redecorating Buford’s house, or for all the other impulsive decisions I’ve made that have fucked me in my puckered starfish.

There’s always a mutiny in the grayscale sky just before it rains—a wetness to the air that precedes a Minnesota staple. Slow-moving clouds form an ominous veil, hard-pressed to drench the town in darkness before noon, blotting out any other pinpoints of light for miles and miles. The weather loves to seethe for a wide-eyed audience, lowering a livable sixty-eight into post-Ice Age numbers that are still surprisingly encumbering. I coil deeper in my MU hoodie, a fallible stopgap that’s going to be rendered useless in less than ten minutes.

The sparse cropping of trees everywhere shed their leaves at winter’s command, littering the desolate ground in husks of pumpkin and persimmon. Necrosis infects what little grass is left, drying stalks out before chipping away at their unsightly defenses and leaving gaping holes of loam and resistant offshoots.

As I make my slow and depressing trek across campus to my next class—Chemistry—I feel a tunnel of wind unmoor my awareness and chill the back of my neck with an ice-cold hand, and I quite literally scream at the manifestation of my editor in chief right beside me.

“Lake, just the person I was looking for,” Tamara—the senior editor of the newspaper—says with a full-fledged beam on her face, looking far too peppy for a ripe seven in the morning.

I humor her, but I would rather be anywhere else. “Hi, Tammy.”

I continue walking east of the quad, inviting her to join me. Journalism is Tamara’s lifeblood, and she runs this operation like it’s the goddamn navy. She’s diligent, resourceful, strong-willed. She’ll do anything for the perfect story, even if that means sacrificing the well-being of her employees for an anticlimactic headline. She’s stricter than any other boss I had in the past. If anyone poses a threat to her perfect paper, she’ll go full scorched earth.

“You know how hockey season is heating up, right?”

Hockey. We meet again.