I don’t answer, but I bet she already knows. She rubs my back and I let her.
“Well,” I say, my voice pitifully clogged with snot, “you got what you wanted.”
“Eva. This is not remotely what I wanted.”
I don’t want to believe her — I want to wallow in my teenage self-pity — but she doesn’t look smug. She doesn’t look happy.
“He dumped me. And not because I couldn’t touch him, like you thought. No. Because I sacrificed something for him. What the fuck?!”
“Eva.” Her voice is stern. I don’t usually swear in front of adults.
“No, Mom. Seriously. All my life I’ve been preached to about sacrificing. Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice, right? But I sacrifice and what do I get for it? Kicked to the curb.”
“I don’t think giving up your future for a cute boy is exactly what Jesus would do.”
I try not to lose my temper. “Wow. You guys all must really think I’m an idiot.”
“We don’t —”
I cut her off. “I didn’t give up the scholarship because Zenn is cute. Give me a little credit. I did it because he needs it more than me. He deserves it more than me. My life has been a cakewalk compared to his. He basically lost his dad, too. And his mom, really, and he didn’t have you and dad to rescue him. And now he has a chance to start over, to have a future. And I could maybe help give that to him. Why is that such a horrible thing?”
My mom doesn’t answer.
“Seriously. I may not have learned a lot from church — hell, I don’t even believe most of it — but I learned that love is putting someone else’s needs ahead of your own. It’s what Jesus did. It’s what you did for me. Is it all just a load of crap?”
My mom sighs and strokes my hair. “No. You’re right.”
I look up at her through tears. “I’m right?”
“You’re right. That’s what love is. It’s what we’ve taught you. It’s what we’ve tried to live.”
“Yeah,” I say sarcastically. “You also taught me about forgiveness. And how’s that working out for you?”
“One lesson at a time, Eva.”
I smile a little.
She sections my hair and starts to braid it, like she used to. I close my eyes and wish I were little again, back before love and heartache and complications.
“I could touch him, you know.” I surprise myself by saying it out loud. I hadn’t planned on telling her, but something about her braiding my hair makes me feel young and safe, like back when I would tell her everything. And what does it matter now, anyway? My days of touching him are over.
“Hmmm?”
“I could touch him and he didn’t give me fractals.”
Her hands still mid-braid. “What? Are you serious?”
I nod and watch a hundred different emotions cross her face: confusion, joy, fear, panic.
“Nothing?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
I wait for her to process what I’ve said because I know there will be a lot more questions: what we’ve done, how far we’ve gone. But she surprises me. She doesn’t dive in to the parental inquisition, just thinks for at least a full minute and then asks rhetorically, almost as if she’s asking herself, “Why him?”
There is a trace of jealousy in her voice. All these years she has wanted me to be able to reach out and hold her hand. All this time she has tried so hard to help me with my fractals, and here this boy — whose dad killed my parents — is the one I can touch.
“I don’t know. The only thing I can think is that he was there the night of the accident. His mom was pregnant.” Am I about to cry again? “She held me, did you know that?”
A tear rolls down my mom’s cheek and she swipes at it with one hand.
“She held me until the police came, and Zenn was …” Now a tear slides down my cheek as well. “He was there. Inside her, I mean. And I know it sounds weird and impossible and just … crazy, but maybe he comforted me? Like, maybe she held me against her belly and somehow …” I can’t finish the thought because I’m full-on crying now, and so is my mom.
“I didn’t know she held you,” my mom says through her tears. “I didn’t know that.”
I nod, and my mom wraps her arms around me and I press my face into her softness.
“They are so sorry, Mom. All of them.”
“I know,” she says. “I know they are.” And I can tell she believes it, finally.
She holds me until eventually our tears subside.
“Do you think he can … cure you?” she asks.
It’s not something I’ve even thought about.
“I mean, do you think him not giving you fractals is a start? Like maybe, eventually …”
I shrug. I’m still getting fractals, but they don’t bother me as much now. They are the stories of people’s lives and maybe it’s better to know people’s truths than the false faces they sometimes put on. Maybe I should just embrace the fractals a little. Let them help me understand people better. A few years ago I saw a meme that said, Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. At the time I bitterly thought, Yeah, no kidding. But maybe it’s okay to know what battles people are fighting. Maybe that’s how it should be — all of us with our struggles on display.
My mom is waiting for my answer. I touch her arm and her fractal is still there. But it feels different somehow. Some of the yellow — the bitterness — has mellowed to a softer gold. Some of the red anger is just pink now. Her fractal is changing, not my ability to feel it.
“They’re still there,” I tell her, and her hopeful look disappears. “But it’s better, Mom. I’m not really afraid of them anymore.”
I lace my fingers through hers, something I haven’t done in years.
She clears her throat. “I wasn’t going to tell you this.”
I let go of her hand to wipe my nose with a tissue. “Tell me what?”
“Someone from the Telegraph called. They want to run some kind of story about us, about how your parents died and I adopted you. How you and Zenn became friends without knowing how everything was connected. I assume someone from the scholarship committee put two and two together and they thought it would be a good ‘human interest’ story.”
My mom does sarcastic air quotes, and I can tell she doesn’t like the idea of our story being used as some kind of bait for people to buy the newspaper.
“Anyway, I was angry. I was trying to figure out why you would give up the chance at a huge scholarship to stay here for the son of the guy who killed your parents, and I told the reporter, ‘Well, you know how teenagers are when they think they’re in love.’ And I’m not proud of it, I’m not, but I was angry and frustrated and I suggested that maybe Zenn convinced you to —”
“Mom! He had nothing to do with it! He didn’t even know!”
“I know. Honey, to be honest, at that point I didn’t even know he was one of the other finalists. I just thought you gave it up so you could stay here and be near him.”