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“Birch!” his mother’s screech came from across the pool.
He glanced over and met her gaze. “Hello, Mother.” He ignored the overreactive woman in the pool for the moment and lifted a hand. “You look stunning tonight.” And she did. His mother was the picture of fake beauty. She could teach Bermuda and the drunk blonde some lessons with her makeup perfect but never overdone and her dress flattering and obviously worth thousands of dollars but neither too tight or too revealing, classily highlighting a body that was still perfect due to intense exercise and near starvation.
“Thank you,” she said, even as her eyes narrowed in anger and her lips pursed. The rest of her face didn’t move but it wasn’t possible for skin to move with that much Botox running through it. Yanking his gaze from his mother’s angry gaze, he forced himself to bend down and grasp the flailing arms of the still-screaming blonde. He easily hauled her out of the water and to her feet on the pool deck. She leaned heavily into him. “My hero,” she gasped, black makeup running from her eyes and tan creamy gunk running off the rest of her face.
Birch glanced around to see everybody at the party staring at him: his mother was angry, his sister, Divine, was furious, his dad was disappointed and yet commiserated, and Bermuda looked amused.
“Oh, he’s so hot,” the brunette next to Divine said far too loud into the silence.
“He might look like a superhero,” Divine said, giving a lofty, dramatic sigh, “but he’s a jerk and he ruinseverything!”
Birch thought that may have been the nicest thing his sister had ever said about him. “My apologies,” he murmured to the entire party, at least remembering the manners his social coach had tried to drill into him from eight years old.
He helped the blonde toward the rear of the house where there would be a stack of towels, and wished he were back on the beach flirting with that brunette. The RV and traveling across the country for the next couple of months was sounding better and better. He’d get through until tomorrow night, see if he could get a number or a date with the woman on the beach that had so intrigued him, and then he was out of here. He couldn’t take the emptiness of his family’s life any longer. It’s not as if they wanted him around. One look at his mother’s face said it all: she much preferred to brag about her son putting his life on the line for America rather than have him around ruining everything.
