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“You don’t have to sleep with anyone, Mom,” I said. “I really appreciate you driving all the way out here to fellate my way to freedom, but Ian’s father is going to take care of everything. We’ll both be out of here in less than two hours.” I turned to my cellmate. “Right?”
Ian was just staring at us, speechless. I tended to forget that my mother and I didn’t exactly have what you’d call a traditional parent-child relationship, and that it was fairly rare to hear a daughter saying,Thank you for trying to fellate my way to freedom, in response to a mother saying,I drove all the way out here to fuck the arresting officer.
“It’s always like this,” I assured Ian. “Really, we’re best friends. Come here, I’ll introduce you.”
He walked over and stood beside me. Now that he was seeing my mother up close and personal, he looked even dumber than he had when he first saw her picture. When he continued to just stand there like an idiot without introducing himself, Mom picked up his slack. “Hello, Ian,” she said with her most charming smile as she put her hand through the bars for a shake. “I’ve heard more about you than I ever wanted to know.”
Without ungluing his eyes from her face, he accepted her handshake. “You’re an extremely beautiful woman,” he said.
“I am,” Mom said. “Thank you for noticing.”
She let go of his hand and turned her head just enough so that he couldn’t see her face. “Is he deaf?” she mouthed to me in stealth.
“Yes,” I said, annoyed at how distracted he was by my mother in her skintight dress. “But at the moment his biggest issue is stupidity.”
“Can you ask him to give us some privacy?”
I looked over to Ian and nodded not-so-subtly at him to step back and give Mom and me a moment. He looked around the one hundred square-foot cell, confused. “Where exactly am I supposed to go?” he said.
Mom answered his question by sticking her pointer fingers in her ears. He obediently returned to the bench and plugged them.
Mom lowered her voice to a barely audible whisper. “You’re not really expecting Ian’s father to be on your side, are you?”
“I trust Ian,” I whispered back. “If he says we’re getting out of here, we are.”
“Trust him all you want,” she said. “But you of all people should know not to trust his father.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” I asked, remembering back to a few hours ago when she’d said those exact same words.
“Saying what?”
“That I of all people should know not to trust Daniel Dunning. I’d never even heard of him until today.”
“Really?” she said. “The words ‘stop this fracking asshole’ don’t sound familiar to you?”
“What’s that got to do with—” I stopped in the middle of my own question, suddenly understanding why it was I should know not to trust Daniel Dunning. “Holy shit,” I said. “You mean Daniel Dunning is—”
“The face on the milk carton? Yes, Clara,” Mom said. “Ian is the son of the man whose company you and your friends at Eco-Justice are suing for fifty million dollars. If I were you, I wouldn’t count on him doing you any favors.”
We both looked over at Ian, who was still dutifully sitting with his ears plugged.
Shit on a stick. My mind started racing. There was no way Ian’s father could figure out I was a member of Eco-Justice, was there? We had something like fifty thousand members, of whom I was just one.
But I wasn’t just any member. I was a team leader and one of the most outspoken voices of the entire organization. Worst of all, I was the one who designed the T-shirt. I was personally responsible for over ten thousand people walking around in public wearing a picture of Daniel Dunning’s face under the word “Asshole.”
I felt like I was going to cry. “What do I do, Mom? I really like Ian. And he really likes me.”
She reached through the bars and stroked my hair. “I don’t know, pumpkin,” she said. “Even I can’t fight off the Daniel Dunnings of this world.”
“Do you really think he’ll find out it was me?”
“I don’t know, Clara,” Mom said. “But I’d think that a man with Daniel Dunning’s resources could find out anything about anybody if he really wanted to.”
I glanced back at Ian. When I held up my pointer finger to indicate that Mom and I needed one more minute, he gave me a really weird-looking double thumbs-up in response.
“You really like him?” Mom said.
“I really do,” I said, feeling hopeless.
