I roll my eyes and yank open the refrigerator. Mom’s never been shy when it comes to expressing her severe dislike for Dad. “Not good,” I admit. Dad’s been awfully quiet since Sunday, and I can’t figure out if it’s because he’s mad at me or if it’s because he’s trying to be cool for once by leaving me alone to do my own thing without him stalking my every move. It’s most probably the former.
“What happened?” Mom asks, and her voice is suddenly laced with concern.
I shrug even though she can’t see me and press my phone to my ear with my shoulder as I fumble around inside the refrigerator, shifting through packets of meat until I find the apples stored at the back. I grab one and step back. “Nothing,” I say. “We’ve just been arguing a lot.”
“About what?” Now she just sounds worried, and there’s whistling across the connection. She must be outside.
“Me not coming home,” I confess. Mom’s always been easy to confide in, always been there when I needed her, always been my best friend. I’m never apprehensive about being honest with her. “I’ve stayed out all night a couple times.”
“Doing what?” Scrap the concern and the worry, now she sounds stern. “Eden? Do I need to put you on birth control?”
For a second I just fall silent, too mortified to muster up a reply. That’s another thing about Mom: she’s very, very straightforward. “That’s it,” I say, “I’m hanging up now, bye, Mom, please don’t talk to me ever again, I can no longer make eye contact with you, it’s been nice knowing you, love you, bye.”
“Eden!”
“Yes?”
I can hear her laughing down the phone. A gentle, soft laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re sixteen and you’re getting older and at your age I—”
“Can we please change the subject?” With my cheeks flushed, I head over to the faucet, wash my apple, and then pull myself up onto the countertop and take a bite.
“Hmm,” Mom says after a long minute of hearing my crunching across the line, “you’re enjoying your summer, aren’t you?”
I take another bite and swing my legs back and forth over the edge of the counter, tilting my head to the side as I carefully consider my answer. I know for a fact that if I’d been in Portland for the summer, it would have been spent trying to hang out with Amelia, minus Alyssa and Holly. It’s been nice to get away from their constant digs about my weight for a while. I would have also probably joined the gym, maybe even studied, and I definitely wouldn’t have fallen for someone I shouldn’t have. Summer in Santa Monica has been an entirely new experience altogether.
“It’s been different,” I eventually answer.
“So you’ve made lots of friends there?”
I think about this for a moment. Tiffani has totally wiped me off her list of friends, so she doesn’t make the cut, and Jake has zero substance once you see past his smooth pickup lines, so I wouldn’t consider him a friend either, more like a douche bag who tried to hit on me. So I’m left with Rachael, who has filled Amelia’s void for the summer; Meghan, who has been consistently sweet; and Dean, who’s always been there to either rescue me from a party or brighten up my day. And Tyler, of course. Although, I think we’re slightly out of bounds when it comes to the friend zone. We crossed that line a long time ago.
I exhale. “I’ve made enough.”
“And you really like the city?” she presses, a sense of urgency to her voice. I picture her gripping her phone tightly as she holds it to her ear, the way she always does when she’s eager for gossip or yelling at sales representatives when they call first thing in the morning.
“I guess?”
“Eden,” she says slowly, and then she pauses. “What do you think about moving down there?”
I draw my phone away from my ear and scrunch my face up at the screen, wondering if I’ve misheard her. Moving? As in, living here? “What the hell?” I hold my phone between my ear and my shoulder again as I slide off the counter, staring out the patio doors. “Like, permanently? Me?”
“Us,” she corrects. She’s quiet now, but I can still hear cars whizzing past her.
“Us?”
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, and her voice rises an octave as she dives into her venting mode. “How come your dad gets to just head off and start up a new life somewhere else? Why can’t I do that? Why am I stuck here in Portland when I didn’t even want to live here in the first place? I was happy in Roseburg, but noooooo, your dad wanted the big city life of Portland!”
“Santa Monica is a city.”
“Yes, but there are half a million more people in Portland, Eden,” she informs me in her matter-of-fact voice, the same voice she uses to talk to patients. “I’ve been looking into it.”
“But why?” I almost scream the words in exasperation. For someone who hates Dad so much, it doesn’t make sense for her to want to move closer to him. “If you want to try somewhere new, move to Chicago with me in two years. Or Canada. Why do you want Santa Monica?”