“Maybe Mia fell into the wrong group of friends,” I say. “Maybe I should have been more vigilant about whom she was spending her time with. What I noticed was that B-plus book reports more commonly became C-minus papers, and she no longer studied at the kitchen table after school, but retreated to her bedroom, where she shut and locked the door.”
Mia was in the midst of an identity crisis. There was a part of her desperately yearning for adulthood, and yet the rest of her remained a child, unable to think and reason like she would later in life. She was often frustrated and thought little of herself. James’s insensitivity only made things worse. He compared her to Grace relentlessly, about how Grace, now in her twenties and away at college—his alma mater, of course—was going to graduate magna cum laude; about how she was taking courses in Latin and debate in preparation for law school, to which she’d already been accepted.
Initially her misbehavior was typical teenage slips: talking out in class, not completing her homework. She rarely invited friends to our house. When she was picked up by friends, Mia would meet them on the drive and when I peeked out the window for a glance, she’d stop me. What? she’d ask with a harsh tone that had once belonged only to Grace.
She was fifteen when we caught her sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. It was the first of many escapes. She’d forgotten to turn off the house alarm and so, in the midst of her escape, the house began to scream.
“She’s a juvenile delinquent,” James said.
“She’s a teenager,” I amended, watching as she climbed into a car parked at the end of our drive, not bothering to look back as the alarms blared and James cursed the darn thing, trying to remember our password.
Image meant everything to James. It always had. He’d always been worried about his reputation, about what people would think or say about him. His wife had to be a trophy wife. He told me this before we were married, and in some crooked way, I’d been happy to fill that role. I didn’t ask what it meant when he stopped inviting me to work dinners, when his children no longer needed to attend firm Christmas parties. When he became a judge it was as if we didn’t exist at all.
So one can imagine the way James felt when the local police dragged a sloppy, drunken sixteen-year-old girl home from a party, and he, in his robe, stood at our front door all but begging the police to keep this under wraps.
He screamed at her even though she was so sick she could barely hold her own head over the toilet while she vomited. He bellowed about how insatiable reporters love this kind of thing: Teenage Daughter of Judge Dennett Cited with Underage Drinking.
Of course it never made the paper. James made sure of that. He spent an arm and a leg making sure that Mia’s name never graced the pages of the local paper, not this time or the next. Not when she and her unruly friends attempted to steal a bottle of tequila from the local liquor store, not when she and these same friends were caught smoking pot in a parked car behind a strip mall off Green Bay Road.
“She’s a teenager,” I said to James. “This is what they do.”
But even I wasn’t so sure. Grace, with all her difficulties, had never been in trouble with the law. I had never had so much as a speeding ticket, and here was Mia, spending time in a holding cell at the local precinct while James begged and blackmailed local law enforcement not to press charges or to have allegations removed from her record. He paid off parents not to mention Mia’s misadventures with their similarly disobedient children.
He was never worried about Mia and the source of her discontent and, therefore, misbehavior. He was only worried about what impact her actions would have on him.
It didn’t occur to him that if he let her pay the consequences like any normal child, Mia’s havoc might cease. As it was, she could do anything she liked and not suffer the consequences. Her misdeeds irked her father like nothing else; for the first time in her life she had his attention.
“I overheard telephone conversations between Mia and her friends about earrings they’d stolen from the mall—as if we couldn’t have just paid for them. My car would smell of cigarette smoke after Mia had borrowed it for this or that, but, of course, my Mia didn’t smoke. She didn’t smoke or drink, or—”
“Mrs. Dennett,” Detective Hoffman interrupts. “Teenagers, by definition, are in a class all of their own. They give in to peer pressure. They defy their parents. They talk back, and experiment with anything and everything they can get their hands on. The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage. Your description of Mia is not that far from normal,” he admits.