It took three lathers and rinses to wash away the creepy ick. In future debates I’d argue that a hot shower could solve most non-life-threatening problems. As I shampooed my hair into a soapy tower for the fourth time, I tried to mute the high-pitched evil doll voice I kept hearing in my head. Kisses. Kisses. Kisses. I’d tried to call the blocked number back, but it was one of those single-use, untraceable, offshore e-mails that the US government was trying to shut down for exactly these reasons. I also tried to think about all the recent lies I’d told.
I mean, “any lies unmade,” right?
Here’s the problem. I could see people calling me BTCHY (partially true, especially when uncaffeinated), arrogant (lightly true), or entitled (definitely not true), but a liar?
A requirement of best-friending Audra meant I was on a first-name basis with brutal honesty.
After my shower, I popped the door and stayed in the steamy bathroom, unable to shake the chill I felt. I was twisting my hair into pin curls when a sudden knock made me jump.
Kisses.
Mom leaned against the door frame. If my dad crushed the coolest dad category, my mom hands down won coolest human. In her late twenties, she’d started StitchBtch, an online Brooklyn arts-and-crafts collective that now had brick-and-mortar stores in almost all fifty states. She still made most of her own clothes and was cofounder of the Sustainability Now local business movement. When I was growing up, even though she was in her forties, strangers regularly thought she was my babysitter.
Now I couldn’t help mentally airbrushing her: dyeing the white streak out of her copper-brown hair, erasing the wrinkles from around her gray eyes. It was only recently that I’d started this airbrushing thing. It was only recently that Mom had started looking old. Like everything else about us nowadays, I hated it.
“I’m going to school tomorrow, aren’t I?” I asked.
“Your dad and I think you’ll only look guiltier if you don’t. Not to mention, you can’t ruin your perfect attendance.”
Tranquila, I told myself. She meant it as a joke, even if it sounded like a criticism.
“Does Daddy hate me?”
“Kyle.” Mom gave me a look. “You know Daddy: he just needs to absorb this at his own speed. Let him dredge parenting forums for a while. He’ll find someone who’s encountered something like this and be ordering apology Mexican food before the night is over. Your brother ate all the soup, by the way. Four bowls. I swear he has a tapeworm.”
“Do you believe me?”
If anyone wasn’t going to, it would be my mom.
“Did you sleep with Mr. E.?” she asked carefully.
I stopped twisting my hair. “Ew, no. No way.”
“Okay, then I believe you.”
I was so stunned I almost asked her to repeat herself. Instead I kept pinning up my hair.
“I messaged Dr. Graff,” she said. “The earliest she can see us tomorrow is second period. If it’s terrible before that, you can always leave and come home with me. And then it’s only the half day on Friday and everyone will be too excited for Christmas on Saturday to talk about that video anyway. By Monday it’ll be completely forgotten.”
Not likely.
If this were a normal year, I wouldn’t even have to go to school on the twenty-fourth as one of Park Prep’s Senior Perks. Then with a full week off between Christmas and New Year’s, yes, maybe everyone would have forgotten all about this. But because of all the days we’d missed thanks to Hurricane Riley in September, and then the October blizzard, this year our winter break was literally nonexistent. And I actually mean literally. Christmas and New Year’s fell on Saturdays. We were back in classes on the following Mondays.
Prior to the video, I’d been fine with this schedule. It would be only the second Christmas we’d be spending without my n?inai, my grandma. None of the Chengs were much thrilled by the prospect. The last thing I needed was one more day sitting at home missing her.
Plus, all the way back in October, Audra had declared a moratorium on Christmas, saying there was no possible way she’d be able to deal this year. Seasons past, the days leading up to and after the holiday had resulted in more Audra meltdowns than any of us knew what to do with. Christmas might be all about the gifts, but it’s also still a little about family. And Audra’s was awful. Since I’d known her, Audra had shown up at one or another of our houses at some point on Christmas Day, usually drunk, her face a wreck, asking if she could borrow our family and yuletide cheer.
This year, when Audra declared she was ignoring the holiday entirely, we other three girls all immediately said it was fine by us. If it weren’t for the Community Club’s holiday party—the best day of my entire year three years running—I’d also prefer to ignore Christmas entirely.
“Want me to do the back?” Mom asked.
“Sure.”
I handed her the comb and sat on the tub. For a minute we were quiet as she divided my hair into sections. Minus lots of laughter, this almost felt like old times.
“So why would someone do this to you?”
And this felt like new times. Now we were on our regular footing. Maybe Mom believed I hadn’t slept with Mr. E., but she sure as H-double-L believed I’d done something to deserve the attack.
I often wondered who was more upset by the fact that Mom didn’t like me anymore. Me or Mom? I’d go with me.
The thing is, back when Mom was in high school, she was essentially the same as me—driven, top of her class, and geeky about her extracurrics. The only difference was that Mom had glasses the size of hubcaps and she crocheted most of her clothes. Today, she’d have been (and was) an e-fashionista. But back then, she had no friends, spent lunch in the art room, and was ruthlessly picked on by the popular girls.
Never mind that Mom turned out a thousand times more successful; I still caught her browsing her old nemeses’ profiles every so often, wine in hand. If we saw a group of attractive in-crowd kids on the train, her go-to reaction was an eye roll. She wouldn’t watch any shows with me if the lead teen character wasn’t a social moron. In a thousand little ways, my mom was prejudiced against popular.
So imagine her horror when her own daughter escaped bad vision and turned out hot. (What? It’s okay for girls to say they think they’re ugly.) Imagine her double horror when her daughter shed her lifetime best friend and gained three gorgeous crazies instead. Never mind that the girls and I were nothing like those nasty losers who had abused Mom.
My whole life we’d been close. Now we were this.
I groaned. “Mom.”
“Kyle, there must be some reason someone would do this to you.”
“Clearly, because I’m an evil, awful person.”
She wrapped a strand of my hair a little tighter than it needed to be.