“Regina!”
“Fine.” I sighed. “I was with Snake.”
Her scowl all but froze her face. She wasn’t shocked, though. She knew. Moms always know. “Where did you go with him?”
“We were out having sex and doing drugs . . . and something with machine guns—”
“Reggie,” my dad interrupted. He yanked the lever on his chair to push himself up. He frowned at me the way he did when I’d lied to my mom about stealing the communion bread at church or when I’d called her Jezebel because I thought it was the absolute worst Bible insult I could dish out. “Tell your mom the truth, and you won’t get in too much trouble. I promise.”
Truth. Honesty. Authenticity. If only Dr. Rachelle were there to applaud my efforts. “Snake showed up after prom and asked me to help him film some shots for a movie he’s making,” I explained. “We went to his backyard and filmed the lightning storm, and he brought me home. That’s it.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yeah, Mom. I made up that incredibly lame story because holding a giant hunk of metal in the middle of a lightning storm makes me sound like such an intelligent individual, and I thought you’d be impressed.”
“He didn’t try anything with you?”
“I guess you missed the having sex part.”
“Be serious, Reggie.” She rubbed her eyes and smeared leftover makeup across her cheeks. “I don’t trust that boy. I’ve heard rumors about him in my ladies group.”
“What your mom heard has been very unsettling for her,” my dad added. It didn’t slip past me that he emphasized the her in that explanation. I never heard a me. “She has a lot of concerns.”
“What about you, Dad?” I asked. “Do you have concerns?”
He blinked at the ground, his brow wrinkling. “I suppose I do, yes,” he mumbled after he gave it some thought. But I wasn’t sure he meant it. He wasn’t good with humans, especially ones like Snake and me. Unlike dead animals, we weren’t so easy to repair. “If it’s true, of course.”
“And these rumors are . . . ?”
He looked to Karen for support. She sighed, sitting next to me hesitantly. She paused for a moment and kept her eyes on the ketchup stain on the carpet as she said, “I heard he’s the boy who got little Carla Banks pregnant.”
Little Carla. Ever since we were kids, my mother had always referred to her as Little Carla. Why wasn’t I friends with Little Carla? Why didn’t I ever invite Little Carla to my house? Why didn’t I ever want to go to Little Carla’s parties? I imagined it was hard to see Little Carla as Pregnant Carla or Mommy Carla or Less-Than-Perfect Carla when my mom had always not so secretly wished her daughter were more like precious Little Carla Banks.
I looked directly into her nervous eyes as she waited for a response. There was no point in lying to defend Snake. He was who he was. And if he’d been beside me in that moment, he wouldn’t have made a single excuse for himself. He would have owned his wrongs. He would have enjoyed the ensuing scorn. I had to respect his absence, the mistakes he made to keep himself sane.
“Yeah. He is,” I admitted.
Shots fired. Karen down.
Her skin flushed red. She crawled through the steps of the premental breakdown breathing routine. My dad stood up and walked to the couch to lay a hand on her back, but she only shook him off.
“Listen to me, Reggie,” she choked. “I don’t want you to see that boy again. He’s a bad kid. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re better than that. I won’t have my daughter getting involved with someone like him. Do you understand me?”
“You don’t know him.”
“I know enough.”
“You know one mistake.”
“It’s a very big mistake, Reggie.”
“You don’t know him!” I shouted, the pent-up bitterness from every judgmental look and raised brow seeping through my teeth as I confronted her warped conclusion about the boy I knew. The boy she wouldn’t bother to understand.
She didn’t know Snake the way I did. She didn’t know the way he grinned with only part of his lips, or the way he spoke about whatever random thought popped into his mind in a passing minute, or the passionate way he filmed the dullness of our lives, or the way he cared about everything, no matter how ineffective he knew it to be. She didn’t know the Snake I knew.
“It’s my job as a mother to protect you from people like him,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
“Guess what, Mom? I am a person like him. He’s as bad at being human as I am. But I guess that just gives you another reason to resent him, doesn’t it? It certainly gives you plenty of reasons to resent me.”
“I’m not going to deny that you struggle, Reggie. But you’re better than him. He’s not a good person. It’s as simple as that.”
I stood up, my fists clenched at my sides and my bones rattling. I was having a near-Hulk experience. “Because you’ve never screwed up, right? You’re so damn holier than thou, it amazes me.”
“Don’t talk to your mom like that,” my dad interjected. His tone was too soft and unimposing to be taken seriously.
She jumped off the couch, standing nose to nose with me. “You sulk around and make your smart-aleck jabs and pay no mind to anyone else, and I’m sick of it. Start behaving with some respect.”
“Give me something to respect!” I yelled back desperately. “All you ever do is judge me, judge Dad, judge Snake, judge his moms, judge, judge, judge, and I’m the one who’s sick of it. How about you stop acting like you were directly appointed by God to be everyone’s keeper, because you’re no better than anyone else.”
As I tried to move past her, she stepped in front of me and grabbed my wrist. “You are not to leave this house for two months. Only school and work. I hate to do this, Regina, but I’ve had as much as I can take. I don’t know what made you this way. I don’t know why you can’t just . . . just be normal.”
She was staring straight into my eyes, like she knew the parts of me that were in the blue and nothing underneath. I saw a distorted image of myself in the lens of her glasses. The truth of it was, there was too much underneath for her to know. For me to fully know myself.
My dad sat down on the couch. He stared at the wall like he couldn’t comprehend what was going on. If I wasn’t so fully hating, I might have tried to explain that none of this was his fault. But I was so far past being reasonable.
I jerked out of my mother’s grasp and stormed up the steps. When I made it to my room I slammed my door, nearly knocking it off the hinges.