“I’m not going to jump.” I kinda don’t want her to be up here with me, but I’m tired. It’s been a long night. I feel a little punch-drunk. She can sit if she wants to.
“Oh, thank heaven.” She exhales. “What are you doing? Where have you been? I’ve been up all night, worried sick, driving around looking for you. What happened?”
“I had to do some stuff. Then I came home,” I say. Everything is opaque, my eyes are so tired. “Have you ever had that walk-into-traffic, but just-kidding, but not-really feeling?”
“Dylan.” Mom grabs my arm. “You’re scaring me.”
“Don’t be scared. I’m not talking about for-real walking into traffic. Just like, I don’t know, that blink-and-you-miss-it wave of zen shit. Like a peace treaty inside yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you’ve felt lost, right?”
She loosens her grip. “Of course.”
“You have that unbelievable failure, the kind that smells like burnt hair, and it’s awful. But then it’s over.”
“Have you been burning hair?” she asks with concern.
“No. I haven’t slept in twenty-five hours and I’m loopy as hell. Indulge me on my shitty metaphors.” I laugh. “But like, that place where there’s no fighting. There’s nothing to fight over. Everything is done.”
Mom frowns. “Then I suppose you’re lucky to have reached that point. I have not.”
“You haven’t? Ever?”
“No, everything is burnt hair for me,” she mumbles.
“Nuh-uh,” I say.
“I’m a thirty-nine-year-old college dropout and a single mom with a son who wants to wander into traffic. Obviously things are not okay.”
“You’ve got to trust. And not bug phones.”
“Oh.” She pats me on the knee. “So that’s what this is about. Well, I won’t apologize for that. I need to know you’re safe. And you better believe if I see that little blue dot of yours standing still in the middle of I-5 in the future, I’ll come running. That’s that.”
“Take it off my phone.”
“Who’s paying for your phone?”
“Trust the process of life, Mother.”
“It’s hard to be trusting when said child skips school, has grown-up sleepovers, and stays out all night. Trust is earned, Son.”
“Fair point,” I admit. “Let’s compromise.”
“I’m listening.”
“That thing comes off my phone and I start paying for the bills.”
“I don’t want you getting a job. School is too important.”
“Football will cost money,” I say. She flinches. “How about I call if I’ll be late.”
“How about you’re supposed to do that anyway?”
“What’s it going to take?”
She sighs. “Finish out sophomore year with good grades and no more of this funny business that’s been happening since fall, and then we’ll talk about removing it for junior year. I need to see progress.” Mom hugs me. “And let me in. Talk to me. I want to be in your life.”
“You are.”
“Dylan.”
I look up at the sunrise. Low and lazy with February’s tilt. “I love Jamie.” There. It’s said. “But she doesn’t love me and I have to accept that.”
“Oh, sweetheart.”
“I lost the greatest girl I’ve ever known because I wasn’t okay with myself,” I say. “And now I’m past the burnt hair, I aired out the room, it sucks I’m never going to see her again.”
“Maybe we can have her over for dinner some night.”
“She won’t come.”
“You need to put up a fight! Girls like effort. Go in there and make sure she knows that you’re—”
“Jamie knows what she wants and it’s not me, and I can’t say I blame her,” I say quickly. Mom looks all crestfallen. I put my arm around her. “Don’t be sad.”
“I want so badly for you to be happy, though.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “So that’s where I was all night. I needed to apologize to her.”
“I guess it didn’t work.”
“Does it look like it worked? I’m here all alone without a time machine.”
“If you could go back a couple months, what would you fix?”
“When I learned she was trans, I would say, ‘Cool.’ And then we would go get a pretzel.”
“And what am I up to in this do-over?”
“You’re into it. The omnipresent worrying is at bay.”
“But you know why I worry, right? It’s what moms do.”
“Most moms,” I say, feeling for JP.
“Maybe I’m not supposed to admit this, but in junior high when it appeared you were into girls, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Not because being gay is bad or anything, but because you don’t want your kid’s life to be any harder than it has to be. People can be so heinous,” she says. “When I was out in the car with Jamie’s mom, Jessica, she was telling me how scared she is for her daughter. How much she loves Jamie and how every night she loses sleep worrying that bad things are always waiting around the corner. That she worries all the time about how hard Jamie’s life might be. I…didn’t want you to be involved in that. I wanted you to stay away to make things easier for you. It was wrong. Will you forgive me?”
“I guess so. It’s awful, but I get it.”
“So I want in on this do-over too.”