“Clearly miserable her.” I flung a hand at Jessie.
I could practically see my profile on her screen.
“Nah,” Mac said. “This isn’t Jessie. Jessie’s messed up, but I mean, she’s not a bad girl.”
He said it like he held some deep understanding about the inner workings of the beast. I thought back. Wasn’t there a rumor that Mac and Jessie hooked up, when was it, sophomore year? At the Halloween dance? Oh, yuck. As if Mac could see me working through my memories, he quickly pushed on. All eyes flicked to him.
“Isn’t it obvious what the connection is?” As if he were on a job interview, he sat up straight and folded his hands in his lap. He cleared his throat. “I mean, running the odds alone…the similarity is the guys. Both are teachers, both are young, both were caught with students, and both are in situations where they had to be aware the videos were being filmed.”
“What are you getting at?” I said.
“Bonita, you’re too innocent for your own good.”
“I happen to like her that way,” my dad said, straight-faced.
“Me too.” Mac wiped his hands on his pants. I could see the sweat beading on his forehead from across the room. “All I meant was, Kyla, you keep assuming that because it’s not you in the video, it’s also not Mr. E. It isn’t like someone captured vid of Mr. E. shooting hoops and overlaid it on some porn star doing it. That’s him in the classroom with a girl. You’re spending all this time looking for who made the video, but you haven’t once considered that it could have been the person who participated in it.”
“Whoa,” Kyle said.
“I always did think Mr. E. had a crush on you.” Fawn nodded.
Mac continued, “Is there a way to find out if the other profess taught any extracurrics? I bet you anything he did video effects like Mr. E. Maybe they’re old college buddies that send each other vids of themselves with their hot students.”
“Mr. E. teaches video effects?” I asked. “How didn’t I know this?”
“B-slash-C the only electives you take lead to you in the Oval Office,” Sharma said, looking at me over the bridge of her glasses.
“But then who’s AnyLies?” Mom asked. “Mr. Ehrenreich couldn’t have wanted this out there. Whoever made the video has an issue with you.”
It was a good point. And almost exactly what I had been thinking, but when Mom said it, it was attached to her same refrain of what has my daughter done to deserve this.
“Mama,” I said. “Let’s pretend not everyone hates me and look at this objectively.”
Mom’s eyes narrowed. She collected a few plates, then left the room. Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. Yup, I was going to get it later.
Into the ensuing tension, Mac shrugged. “Who knows what Glamour Stubble does outside Park Prep? He used to date Ms. Valtri, but I guess recently he’d been going out for happy hour with Ms. Tompkins.” That I didn’t know. “I mean, double-dipping in such a small pond? That’s just estúpido. Anyone could have found this video and run with it. Take your pick of girls at school who are jealous of you, Kyla.”
“Or maybe Mr. E. got hacked,” Dad said.
From the kitchen came sounds of plates being slammed into the dishwasher.
“Right.” Mac cleared his throat. “All I know is these videos aren’t a hundred percent fake. Never mind Ellie Cyr’s footage. You gotta find the original source videos of the men. I’m telling you. Mr. E.’s no innocent victim.”
I looked at Sharma. She didn’t crush on him like I did, but Mr. E. was her favorite teacher too. She sighed and pushed up her glasses.
“I’d say not enough data. But regardless of what the connection is—teachers or students—maybe there’s more of these videos out there.”
Once everyone left to get back to their post-Christmas afternoons with their families, we four Chengs went to a strained Sunday dim sum brunch out in Flushing. Thanks to my earlier snap, Mom was full-on silent-treatmenting me. I thought a noisy, crowded banquet hall–style restaurant would be the perfect relief, but even in that delectable chaos of steamed buns, squeaking carts, and multigenerational families, I could feel the tension crackling between us. Though we ordered equivalent amounts of food, in comparison to all the other families ours seemed small and unhappy. So I waited until we got home, having spent an appropriate amount of awkward time silently window-shopping in Queens, before I tried to escape. I found her in her office.
“S’okay if I go to Audra’s to work on my college essays?” I lied.
“Do whatever you like, Kyle,” she said, keeping her back to me.
“Sorry I snapped at you,” I said, still from the doorway. “I’ve been stressed.”
“I never use that as an excuse to snap at you. And it’s not only today. Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know my own daughter anymore.” Whose fault was that? She shook her head sadly. “What will happen when you go away to school?”
Remember how I wrote that I didn’t bumble my words around cute boys? Well, unfortunately, I didn’t bumble them around my parents, either.
“What are you afraid will happen, Mom? I know you think I can’t possibly get worse.”
“Kyle…”
“It’s true,” I said, suddenly shaking. “I know you think I’m like Violet Mitchell and all those other girls you despised. I’m sorry I’m not some nerd, that we never got to bond over how awful high school is. But now you can be happy. I’ll officially be haunted by it for the rest of my life just like you.”
This didn’t come out as cleanly as it’s written. My eyes started to tear up and my voice turned shrieky the first sentence in. Beneath her now-fashionable hubcap-sized glasses, Mom’s eyes went wide with shock. As much as I’d been thinking Mom looked older of late, she suddenly looked very young and innocent and wounded.
“And you wonder why I worry about you?”
“Now that you mention it, I do. I don’t feel like I’ve changed all that much.”
Mom laughed once: “Ha.”
“I think I’m a good person who tries to make good decisions. In fact, I’d have thought I was doing pretty okay, until you started making me think I wasn’t. So what is it, Mom? What is it about me that you don’t like?”
Mom reached for a tissue, shook her head no, like she wasn’t going to humor this line of questioning.
“Oh, great,” I goaded. “That’s helpful.”
“It’s how you treat people,” she burst out. “As soon as you met the girls it was like everything about your old life just wasn’t good enough anymore.”