Populazzi

Chapter Twenty



Oh God. OhGodOhGodOhGod.

This was not supposed to happen. My mom does not shop at Wegmans on Monday afternoons. She has a very specific shopping schedule she picked up from some self-help organize-your-life website, and she follows it religiously. Sunday night is for clipping coupons, planning the week's menus, and writing up the shopping list. Monday night after dinner is for shopping. By that time in the evening, most people are long since done running errands, and she can get in and out with ease. My mom is very proud of this schedule and its efficacy, and she would never dream of messing it up by doing something wild and crazy like shopping between the hours of four and seven— prime shopping hours for people on their way from work or school.

And yet here she was.

I had no idea how I was going to explain the way I looked. None. Every synapse in my brain was tap-dancing, but I was coming up completely blank.

This was so, so bad.

"Hi, Mom," I said with a weak smile.

She smiled back.

Wait—she smiled back?

"Cara, you surprised me! What are you wearing? Is this for your French final?"

I couldn't believe it. It was just like in old cartoons. The sky opened up, the sun shone its light on me, and a choir of angels sang "Hallelujah." My mother—my wonderful, loving, trusting, incredibly perfect mother—had given me a way out. She was getting the best Mother's Day present ever this year.

I released all my tension into a laugh, hoping it didn't sound too maniacal.

"Oral presentation," I said. "French pop culture. There's this whole 'emo' movement going on there. It's here, too, but bigger over there." I gave a sweeping gesture to indicate my raccoon-makeup eyes, my clingy tee and hoodie, my black skirt, my fuchsia zebra-striped leggings, my boots, and my wrist warmers. My abused blanket of a coat was back in the car. "I figured I'd add visual aids."

"I hope you got a good grade, because you look ridiculous. What would someone think if they saw you?"

"That I obviously had some kind of school project?" I offered.

Mom laughed. "Come on, let's go home. You'll want to wash up before Karl sees you." She started pushing her cart, then remembered I'd been headed inside. "Did you need to get something?"

"Just a snack."

"Don't bother. I got all your favorite things." As I accompanied her to her car and helped her load the bags into the trunk, Mom explained the inexplicable. "Shelley got a twofer coupon to P.F. Chang's, so we made a day out of it. Manis and pedis, then lunch. Very decadent. I knew I wouldn't want to come back out later, so I decided to suck it up and shop a little early. It really was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be."

For me either, I almost chirped. Somehow I refrained.

I cranked the radio on the ride home, singing and dancing along in a state of sheer euphoria. Claudia didn't answer her phone, but I left a giddy voice mail. I swore Karl should take me to Atlantic City immediately and pass me off as twenty-one, because I was clearly the luckiest human being in the world.

I pulled into the driveway right behind my mom and grabbed two grocery bags to take in. I could've carried thirty—to me they were light as air. We walked into the house laughing about some ridiculous story Shelley had told Mom about the cockatiel Shelley's husband was trying to get to speak, but the moment we stepped over the threshold, Karl boomed from upstairs.

"Harriet?"

A cold shower of fear washed over me, and my laughter dried up in my throat.

Karl never called my mother Harriet. He loathed the name. That's one of the main reasons he jumped at the "Helloooo/ Lo-Lo" thing. He so actively disliked my mother's name that he couldn't say it with any kind of affection whatsoever. If Karl was calling Mom Harriet, things were about to get very ugly.

Mom and I exchanged a worried glance, then she called up as brightly as possible, "Yes?"

"Please tell me when your daughter gets home," he said.

The wave of fear became a tsunami, and I suddenly couldn't breathe.

He'd referred to me as "your daughter." My mom's daughter. Not his. And in that moment I knew exactly what had happened. It was so stupid. I knew it was out there—a time bomb waiting to explode in my face—but I'd been so wrapped up in the drama and excitement of Archer and Nate and the Ladder that I honestly hadn't even thought about it.

Karl had opened the credit card bill.

Mom looked confused. She turned to me. I must have looked as nauseous as I felt, because her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "She's already here," Mom called.

My outfit. My makeup. OhGodNo—Karl could not see me like this. I had to wash my face. I had to change. I had to move. I staggered toward the bathroom. "I'm just going to—"

"Stay right there," Mom warned.

Karl's footsteps thundered downstairs. I could see the credit card bill in his hand. He stopped halfway down the steps, his piercing eyes taking me in. Then they shifted to my mother.

"How long have you known?" he spat.

"Known what?" Mom said. "Cara told me she got dressed up for an oral presentation as part of her French exam."

Karl walked down the rest of the staircase with me fixed in his glare. "So you lied to your mother. Very nice," he said.

I could never be a criminal. The torture of waiting for Karl's revelation and everything that would come next was unbearable. Karl handed Mom the bill and watched my face as she read it.

"I don't understand..." Mom began.

"Of course you don't," Karl said. "Luckily, I'm smarter than the both of you, so I do. The biggest bill is the hair, which we knew about but which you never told us cost anywhere near this much. I'd expect more responsibility from you, Cara. At least I used to expect more responsibility from you."

"Karl, I'm sorry. I—"

He held up a finger. "Did I say I was done? Now, the second highest bill is from a store called Hot Topic. It's not one I frequent, so I used something called 'the Internet' and looked it up. Turns out the store has some very cute clothes. That made me think, 'If Cara bought some very cute clothes—even if she spent a little too much money on them—why wouldn't she show them to her mother and me? After all, she always shows us when she buys something she's excited about.' So I poked around the store's website a little more, and I realized that in addition to some very cute clothes, they also sell some very inappropriate clothes. Could Cara have bought these inappropriate clothes—a very sizable amount of these inappropriate clothes—and hidden the purchase from us?"

My mom's eyes were wide now. "Cara?"

Karl shook his head. "Not yet, Harriet."

He turned back to me. "So I went through your room. And sure enough, tucked away behind other things in your drawers and your closet was a whole other wardrobe of clothing. Clothing not dissimilar to what you're wearing now. Of course, not all of it was put away. Quite a bit of the clothing was balled up in your closet—dirty, one would imagine, from being worn. Now, until this moment, I haven't seen you wearing any of this clothing. Harriet, have you?"

"No," my mom said, looking at me with a terrible mix of anger and brutal disappointment.

"Which can only lead me to believe that you've been fooling us, wearing one set of clothes when we've seen you and another when you get somewhere else. Presumably to school. Would that be correct?"

There was no point in saying otherwise. "Yes," I admitted.

Karl smiled, triumphant. Mom looked like I had punched her in the stomach.

"So our whole conversation ... you were lying to me? To my face?" she asked.

I couldn't answer out loud. I just nodded.

"Excellent." Karl beamed at the confession. "So here's what I've done so far: I've confiscated all your clothing and all your makeup."

"You... what?"

"When you want to get dressed in the morning, you will ask your mother to pick you out an outfit. If you want makeup, your mother can apply it for you."

"Karl—" Mom said, but Karl shut her up with a glare.

"Since you have proven you can't be trusted with privacy, you'll notice your room no longer has a door," Karl said. "Your bathroom does have a door, but that door no longer can lock. Both rooms are subject to spot checks at my discretion, and I reserve the right to confiscate whatever I see fit. For example, the pile of diaries under your bed is now mine, and I look forward to perusing them at my leisure."

"You took my journals?"

"I don't see that I had a choice," Karl said. "I have a stranger in my house. That's a dangerous situation for me. The only way I can protect myself is to find out everything about her that I can."

"Dangerous? Karl, you've known me since I was four."

Karl shook his head sadly, but his voice remained impassive. "The girl I knew—the girl I was willing to take on as my daughter—would never betray me the way you did. I've been breaking my back to try to get you into Northwestern. You think your teachers will recommend you now?"

"The way I dress shouldn't matter to them," I said.

"But it does. You think they'll want you on a college campus looking like that?"

We were having the wrong conversation. I wasn't a real emo girl. I would never dress like this at college. But no explanation I could offer would make things any better.

"Maybe," I said. "Colleges love diversity."

"Do they love drug addicts, Cara?" Karl asked. "Do they love alcoholics? Do they love teen pregnancies?"

What?

"Karl, that's not what I—"

"How do I know? I don't know who you are anymore. I don't know what you're doing. I don't know what you've done. How long have you been sneaking around behind our backs, Cara? What else have you been lying about?"

"Nothing! I'm sorry—I made a terrible mistake. I shouldn't have lied to you, and I shouldn't have gone behind your backs. But I swear, I'm not leading some secret double life. I'm the same person I always was."

"I don't believe you," Karl said. "But if—if—you're going to continue to live under my roof, here's what you will do: you will go to school, you will come home, you will do your homework. You will not have a credit card, a car, a phone, a television, a computer, or any life whatsoever outside of school. When you are in my house, I don't want to see you except for meals. You are to remain in your room and out of my sight."

I couldn't believe this was happening. Had Karl really said "if" I continue to live under his roof? Had I really messed things up that badly?

"For how long?" I asked.

"Lucky for me, you'll be out of the house in a year and a half, right? Now please go up to your room. After you give me your cell phone."

My insides felt shredded, but Karl looked just fine. He almost seemed happy. A smug smile played on his face. I stared at him, then handed over my cell phone and went up to my room.

My doorless, journal-less, computer-less, TV-less room. I wanted to change out of my emo-garb, but oh yeah: no clothes. Every drawer and my closet had been emptied.

What could I do? I lay back on my bed and listened to Mom and Karl scream at each other downstairs. Or to be more accurate, I listened to Mom scream, plead, and cry while Karl gave her the same disinterested attitude he had given me. At one point he even turned on the TV.

They both seemed to agree that I was horrible. It was the degree of horribleness and the extent of the consequences that had them banging heads. Mom thought stripping away every bit of choice in my life was a touch extreme. Karl thought it was the only sensible way to deal with a stranger in the house. Mom thought the demotion from "daughter" to "stranger" was also a touch extreme. Karl said if "Harriet" didn't like it, then she and "her daughter" could go live in someone else's house and leave him alone.

It went on for a really long time. At a certain point I crawled under the comforter, pulled it over my head so their voices were muffled, and cried myself to sleep.

I woke up at two. Mom was sitting on the bed next to me, rubbing my arm. Her face was puffy from crying, but she laughed when I sat up to look at her.

"You really need to wash your face. Go take a shower. We'll talk afterward."

I felt even fuzzier and drunker than when I'd had the beer with Nate, but I managed to get up and stagger into the hall. On the way, I noticed my computer was back on my desk, all my clothes were stacked on my dressers, and my door—while not reattached—was now leaning in the hallway next to the jamb. I cast my eyes under my bed and saw with relief that my giant plastic bin of journals was back in place. At least at first glance, they looked beautifully untouched.

I winced against the light in the bathroom as I peeked at my face. No wonder Mom had laughed: I looked like a badly beaten mime.

I took a long hot shower, then pulled on my favorite furry white robe that seemed to have magically reappeared on its usual hook. Mom wasn't in my room anymore, but I smelled something in the kitchen, so I padded down to find two spots set at the table: one with hot tea and one with warm milk and cinnamon, my favorite childhood drink when I couldn't sleep. I sat and sipped it gratefully.

"You missed dinner," Mom said. "Can I make you some eggs?"

I nodded, and a few minutes later Mom and I both had big plates of scrambled eggs. It was time to talk.

"He really doesn't want to see me anymore?" I asked, looking down at my eggs.

Mom sighed. "Karl..." she began, then thought about it another moment and frowned. "I want you to know that I'm not giving you a pass for what you did. Especially lying to my face. That hurts me a lot, and I'm going to have a very hard time getting over it and trusting you again."

I knew that, and it killed me. I wanted to tell her how awful I felt, that I'd do anything to turn back time and make it all go away, but it was hard enough just meeting her eyes.

Mom's face softened, and she sipped her tea. "Karl, though ... you know how he gets. He doesn't react well when he feels unappreciated."

"Unappreciated?" I asked.

"Karl does a lot for you," Mom said. "For both of us. And you repaid him by lying. You had a whole life we didn't know about: different clothes, different makeup, maybe different friends, maybe dangerous friends—"

"It's not like that. I swear, it's not as if I was skipping school and running around Philly flashing gang signs."

"That may be, but when you lie to us, we don't know. And it makes Karl wonder if everything else he knows about you is a lie and you're just showing him what he wants to see so you can get what you want out of him. It's not a good feeling, Cara."

I had a headache. My brain must have been swelling, because I couldn't hold my head upright. I rested it on my hands. "Okay ... so what can I do to make it better?"

"Karl needs time. You really hurt him. I haven't seen him this upset since..."

She didn't say it, and she didn't have to. I knew exactly when he'd been this upset. I was maybe eight years old and I'd been invited to Dad's for Christmas. Mom, Dad, and I are Jewish, but the Bar Wench is Christian, and they do up the holiday big-time. The house was practically ablaze with lights and decorations, including a giant singing and dancing Frosty the Snowman on the lawn. Inside, things were even crazier, but the centerpiece was a thick, full Christmas tree, nearly twenty feet tall.

I'm no fan of the Bar Wench, but she really did try to make me a part of the celebration. Even though I showed up on Christmas Eve, she had saved a whole swath of bare tree for me to decorate, and there was a stocking stitched with my name hanging from the mantelpiece. Since I clearly didn't believe in Santa Claus, she let me stay up after her boys had gone to bed and help her "prove" Santa existed. She and I shared his milk and cookies, we wrapped and put out the gifts from him, and she let me help her press rubber boots into the fireplace ashes: Santa's footprints.

In the morning, Santa had left gifts under the tree for me, too. And my stocking was as full as the boys'. All my presents that year were perfect. Dad and the Bar Wench—and Santa—had given me everything I wanted, including the gift I'd been dying for: a super-plussed-out Spin Art kit. The whole trip was magical. It was the only time I ever felt like I was actually a part of my dad's new family.

When I got back to Mom and Karl's on the twenty-sixth, I couldn't stop talking about the amazing visit, all the fun I had with Dad's really-cool-once-you-got-to-know-them family, and of course my incredible new Spin Art kit.

The more I raved, the quieter and angrier Karl got. He didn't want to hear it, and he did not want me to open the Spin Art kit. He said it was too messy. It had to go back to the store. I threw a fit; he screamed at me to stop or else; I screamed back, coming up with what I thought was a very clever line: He wasn't just a stepfather, he was a stepdownfather.

He responded by opening the Spin Art kit and smashing it to pieces in front of me, then gathering up all the gifts I'd gotten from Dad, the Bar Wench, and Santa that year and throwing them in the trash. When he was done, he kicked a hole in the hall closet door. It's still there.

That was the last time he'd disowned me. He eventually got over it, but it seriously took a year before things were normal again.

My headache was getting worse.

Mom put a comforting hand on my arm. "If you really want to make it better," she said, "prove that he's wrong. Be the best daughter you can possibly be. Lie low and don't force yourself on him; he's angry. But when you do see him, be nice. Ask him about his day. See if he needs anything. Let him know how much you love him. He might not respond right away, but he'll come around. He always does, right?"

"Yeah ... he does."

Mom nodded, then took a sip of her tea. When she finished, she sighed and studied my face.

"What?" I asked.

"I still don't understand, Cara ... why did you do it? Did you get in with a bad crowd? Were you trying to express something you felt you couldn't talk about? Were you..." She looked achingly concerned as she turned my hands palm-up and carefully scanned my wrists.

"Mom, no. I wasn't cutting. At all. I'm fine. I'm happy. I'm not in with any kind of bad crowd. It's so much littler and stupider than any of that."

"Then, what?" I could see she really wanted to understand, to break through and talk about my inner turmoil, whatever it might be.

"It was for a guy," I said. "He only likes girls with that look. That's all. I promise."

"What kind of a boy only likes girls who dress up in costume every day?"

"It's not a costume to the people who are into it. And the guy ... he's a friend of Archer's. That's how I know him."

I knew this would give Mom pause. She loved Archer; could any friend of his really be that bad?

She shook her head. "I'm surprised. But you should know any boy who's worthwhile will like you for you. Not the way you dress."

"I do know, Mom. I told you, it was stupid."

"And if he does only like you for your clothes, he's going to be sorely disappointed. I didn't put everything back in your room. Some things we're giving to Goodwill."

I had an image of a large group of homeless people clad in fuchsia zebra-striped leggings and chain-embossed tees and laughed out loud.

"I'm absolutely fine with that," I said. "I'd already planned to break up with the guy tomorrow."

"Good, I'm glad," Mom said with a smile—then a moment later she burst into tears.