“You mean Ailey? I know you liked her, but she drove me crazy, Mom. I’m your daughter.” A huge sob escaped me. It was only through force that I continued speaking. “You’re supposed to go along for the ride with me, no matter what. You’re not supposed to pick some other kid over your own.”
This was a conversation we should have had over a nice calm mother-daughter lunch. I’d been imagining how it would play out for years. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be nasty.
“I’ve never preferred Ailey.” Mom kept wiping at her eyes. “I just don’t like—”
“Me,” I finished for her.
She didn’t correct me, but instead said, “I worry everything comes too easy for you.”
“Too easy?” I hiccupped a laugh. “I’ve watched you like me a little less every day for three years. I’ve tried to excel at everything to make you proud and make you change your mind. Instead you hate me. Tell me how that’s easy?”
Tears streamed down my mom’s face; her shoulders shook with her effort not to break down and sob. Add this to the list of things that made me a terrible person: on the day after Christmas, I made my mom cry. I bolted down the stairs, and ran right into Dad.
“Kylie…”
Wiping my eyes, I grabbed my EarRing from the hall table, dodged him, and hurried out the door.
I understand if you don’t want to keep reading. When I get to this point in the story, I hate me too.
Question, oh silent, unseen reader. How am I supposed to act? Because I don’t know anymore. If I’m only sweet and endearing, you’ll never respect me. If I take charge and am in control, you’ll think me aggressive. If I embrace my sexy, I’m a skank. If I embrace my inner dork, I’m ostracized. If I’m wildly popular, it’s the same.
Minus a couple of hiccups, I thought I’d been acing this teenage stuff by me being me, but then I got this for it—see previous 209 pages—and everyone rejoiced.
So you tell me. How will me being me offend you the least?
A tap of my Doc and I was through the turnstile and on the train. And today I didn’t care who Hey, Neighbor!-ed me. I was all-caps PISSED. So I ignored the golden rule about sending angry txts and didn’t wait a twelve-hour period before letting my thoughts fly AnyLies’s way. And the whole time I txted, all I could think of were those pics of Jessie in Istanbul. AnyLies or not, she got to traipse around Europe/Asia, probably filling suitcases with wonderful trinkets and fashions, spending time with her whole family. Meanwhile, my family’s busy schedules meant half our conversations were over txt and most meals—even when we spent them speaking—were eaten at separate times and in separate rooms. Thanks to her private driver and elitist lack of presence online, Jessie could escape RL and her online worlds whenever she wanted. There was no escape for someone like me. Jessie had it made. And what was she doing? Moping.
I don’t want to write what I said to AnyLies. Or admit that I sent a similarly nasty stream of txts to Jessie. It’s too shameful. I will say that the first txt in the AnyLies series was:
moi Hey, hater, FCK you.
I continued that I bet she was the kind of person who commented on her own posts with fake profiles so it looked like she had friends. I accused her of all the issues that might prompt someone to make a video like that in the first place—mommy issues, daddy issues, self-image issues, social issues. It went on and on, only becoming more juvenile and mean. I could feel her reading it. So I was as hurtful as possible.
Yeah. I know.
But wasn’t this what everyone expected of me? Why keep trying to exceed my mom’s expectations, when I could just live down to meet them? And no, I didn’t feel bad about it. AnyLies took me on, remember? She’d asked for this.
Seventeen stops went by on the Q train as I txted her. When I looked up I was in Coney Island, two stops past where I was supposed to get off.
It was dark out when I left the Slope, but as I stood alone on a nearly empty Coney Island train platform, it felt like an entirely different kind of night. Like the it’s-too-quiet scene in a zombie flick right before all the undead came pouring out. And it was freezing. The two previous warm days must have been a citywide hallucination. Because tonight there was no doubt it was winter. It was so cold my anger couldn’t burn it off.
In my dramatic departure from home, I hadn’t grabbed a coat. All I was wearing was a light wrap. As I made my way down to the street, I was shivering so badly, my EarRing kept popping off. Still, when I got to Brighton Beach Avenue, the sidewalks were littered with groups of loitering men. At first I felt relieved to see bodies, but five minutes into my walk, I quickened my pace and turned off automatic Translate, wishing it also shut off all the multilanguage catcalls I was receiving.
“Distance to destination?” I asked, as my EarRing told me to turn right.
“Twelve blocks,” the GPS calmly responded as three guys in heavy parkas broke away from their street corner and started following me.
“Excuse me, miss,” Camo Parka called. “You cold? You look cold.”
I swiped into the 911 app on my Doc. My aching, frozen thumb hovered over the dial button. I was surrounded by stores, but at seven o’clock on a Sunday most of them were already shuttered. A train rumbled past on the elevated tracks overhead. GPS told me I had eight more blocks. This was karma. Mugged was what I got for being terrible. I walked faster. The parkas kept up. I remembered Mom saying that before EarRings, people used to look at their Docs to follow GPS. How before that, people didn’t have GPS at all.
“What would they use?” Kyle had asked, taking the bait.
Winking at me, Mom had replied, “Actual. Paper. Maps.”
“That’s just stupid,” Kyle had said, floored.
Let’s talk about men for a minute. Normally, I didn’t subscribe to the all-men-are-pigs theory because I had three men in my life who proved it very wrong. But men could act like cave dwellers with no repercussions, while I had a hater after me because, best I could piece together, I was conceited.
“Hi, gorgeous.”
“Hey, beautiful.”
These guys weren’t like the stalker outside my house. They didn’t know me from the video. They were just jerks. How would they feel if they walked down the street and women aggressively solicited them? Didn’t they go home to girlfriends, wives, mothers, daughters? Didn’t they know those women in turn dealt with this shitey male attention?
“Five hundred feet until you have reached your destination,” my Doc calmly said.
“Excuse me, miss, you lost? You need some help?”
“You need a boyfriend?”