“You know I hate when people take pictures of me.”
“Hear me out,” she interrupts. “Jamie said it was the first time she’s seen you without a big puss on.”
“A big puss on.” I fold my arms. “Again…Seriously?”
Mom’s eyes shoot to the ceiling. “Okay, that was my way of putting it, but fine. Jamie said it was the first time you didn’t look like a sulking axe murderer. Then she asked if she could take some pictures. Said she forgot her camera but her phone would do in a pinch.”
So she Instagrammed me. I’ve been filtered.
“She showed me, and I asked her to send some to me because I am your mother and you are my son and I have no pictures of you. None. You haven’t let me take your picture since you were in the fifth grade.” Mom turns her head away, dabbing the corner of her eye with her knuckle.
“You don’t have the right.”
“Well, maybe you don’t have the right to pretend you don’t exist. Did you ever think of that? Because for your information, you do exist. And you have people who love you.” She stares down at the phone resting in her clasped hands. Sticking it in my face, she clicks open a picture with her thunb. “Look.”
It’s a shot of me. A close-up. Very still, very quiet. My eyes are closed, and the shadows hovering around the rambling bedrock of bones that make up my face are soft.
“Look how handsome you are,” Mom says.
“It looks like I’m waiting for a plaster death mask to be poured.”
Mom pulls her phone away and tucks it inside her palm. “Oh, for crying out loud, it does not.” She runs her finger down the side of her phone. “I think she captured you.”
“Delete it.”
“No.”
“How did you get that picture anyway?”
“Jamie texted it to me.”
I wedge myself up onto my elbow. “You have her number?”
Mom looks up at me with a glint in her eyes. “I have her number.”
“Give me her number.”
She grins. “Well, look how it’s suddenly not so annoying for your dear old mom to be friendly with your friends, huh?”
“Mom…”
“Suddenly that picture I have on my phone is looking pretty good, isn’t it?”
“Don’t make me beg.”
“All right.” She twirls the phone in a loop. “I have a proposition for you.”
“What?”
“If I give you her number, I get to keep this picture.”
“Fine.” Gimme, gimme, gimme. I have daisies to discuss.
“And,” she adds, “any other future pictures she takes of you.”
“There won’t be any.”
She smirks.
Commence eye rolling. “Deal. Text it to me.”
Her little firefly fingers go to work, and my phone buzzes. I snatch it off my bedside table. Mom gets her coat on. “You must be hungry. I’m off to get a pizza,” she says.
I wave goodbye. At least, I think I do. I’m busy working on what I hope is the perfect first message. Hey, Jamie. It’s Dylan….
ELEVEN
Thursday. It’s the last class of the day, and all I can think is Jamie, Jamie, Jamie….
“Dylan?”
Except I’m still in English. I look up from doodling Dr. and Mrs. Ingvarsson in the margins of my notebook and scribble it out so hard it rips the paper. “Yeah?”
Mrs. Steig waits patiently, but annoyed. “Your thoughts on The Scarlet Letter?”
“Which part? The slut-shaming part? The Victorian era masquerading as the Puritans? The familial guilt from Nathaniel Hawthorne for his ancestors being jerks in Salem?”
Mrs. Steig’s so sick of me doing this, but she’s smiling because she loves me, so I just wait for her to sigh and throw her hands up, and she does. Right on cue. “Have you read the book, or is this tangent time?”
“Yeah, I read it.” In like the eighth grade because I was bored once, but whatever.
“I take it you’re not interested in The Scarlet Letter,” she says.
I shrug.
Mrs. Steig looks at the clock. Ten minutes before the bell rings. “All right, go ahead.”
“So it’s not really about The Scarlet Letter, right? Because that book’s been beaten to death. We get it. It was amazing at the time, revolutionary, a big slap in the face. Everyone is a hypocrite and no one’s better than anyone else, so quit judging, but it was a major coincidence for Hawthorne because it was almost foreshadowing the time to come, both his and in the book, you know?”
She folds her arms and smirks. “How so?”
“It lines up perfectly with the holding country, England, as a last gasp before the Restoration, when everything pulled a one-eighty once Charles the Second came back on the throne,” I say. “Like, we’re all talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne using Hester as a metaphor or a trope or an analogy or whatever, but did you know that one of the most prolific and bestselling authors in Britain during Hester’s time period, mostly, was a woman named Aphra Behn?”