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Three exams, one dress rehearsal, and one more day,Avery replies a few minutes later.
—
“I want tosee Avery’s play!” Alicia says when Ryan tells her his weekend plans.
“Too bad,” he replies. “It’s all sold out!”
“I’m serious,” she says, hitting him on the arm.
“I know. And I appreciate that. But I want some alone time with him.”
“You’re just afraid his parents will like me more.”
“And that,” Ryan concedes. “Definitely that.”
—
Oreos, he textsthat afternoon, even though he knows Avery’s probably in the middle of his dress rehearsal and won’t have his phone out like in regular rehearsal.
Frozen pizzas.
Sparkling water.
“Ryan?”
Ryan looks up from his phone, and there’s his mother, stalking him in aisle three.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. She doesn’t have a cart or any groceries.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Mom, I’m working.”
She looks at the phone in his hand. “Really?”
He puts his phone in his pocket and starts taking the bottles of Pellegrino out of their boxes, lining them on the shelf so they face perfectly forward.
She doesn’t take the hint. “This can’t continue,” she says. “You storming in every night, shutting yourself in your room. Your father wants to take the lock off your door, but I told him, no, that’s not the way to handle this.”
Ryan wants to say,Yeah, why bother changing the lock when he’ll only lie in wait for me to take a bathroom break?
His mom keeps talking. “I know you’re not a child, but you’re behaving like a child. If you want to be given independence, you have to earn it. And this is not the way to earn it.”
“Mom,” Ryan says as calmly as he can, “the thing I’mtrying to earn right now is a paycheck, and they’re not paying me to talk to you. Can you please go before my manager sees?”
His mother takes one of the Pellegrino bottles off the shelf and holds it by the neck. “I’ll say I’m a customer, and that you’ve helped me.”
“Mom, that’s not my point.”
“Ryan. I’m not leaving without a promise from you that this behavior will stop. We don’t want to ground you again, but we will.”
“Of course you will.”
“What does that mean?”
Ryan stops stocking the shelves and looks at her hard. “Are you serious? What I mean is that you are incapable of understanding that the way to help me, the way to be a half-decent parent, isn’t to confine me in the house but to actually let me do the completely nondestructive things I want to do outside of the house. You’re acting like I’m going out and getting arrested. When what I’m really doing is…wait for it…going on dates with a boy I really like.”
This is the most he’s said to her in what feels like years. He’s put it all out for her. And how does she respond?
