Distinction: The Distraction Trilogy #3 (32 page)

As I headed back to my house I heard a sound behind me. Turning, I realized that the old bat had opened up a window and was leaning out waving at me.

“See you tomorrow, Alex.”

I waved weakly at her. Alex? What the hell? I shook my head and continued on my way home, with the sound of her laughter ringing in the air. So she decided to change my name and inform me that I was going to be returning there tomorrow. Fat chance, lady. I’d had my fill of crazy for the month. She had some serious balls to think she could pick my name for me. I mean, really, Alex? As if I didn’t have enough problems with people thinking I was too ‘tough’ and ‘hard’ to be carrying a girly name like Vicki.

I walked into my house, welcomed by the incredible aroma of my mom making dinner. I stood there, just enjoying the feeling of being in a home for a few seconds before I closed the door and faced the onslaught of questions. I asked the universe the same question I asked almost weekly. Why couldn’t we be a normal family?

As soon as she heard the front door close, my mom popped out of the kitchen and she smiled at me expectantly.

Here it comes,
I though.

“Hey sweetie, how was your day?” Mom walked over and gave me a huge hug.

“Good.”

“You’re home a lot later than normal, is everything okay?” Ugh.

“Yeah, mom. I told you, I was hanging out with friends.”

“I know you
told
me that, Vicki, but usually that means you are walking around the neighborhood a few streets away, trying to get time to pass before you come home and can safely run upstairs without any questions.” Mom gave me a sad smile. I guess I wasn’t a great actress after all. So much for my Hollywood aspirations. Yeah, right.

“Wha…what do you mean? I was with friends.”

“This is
not
a very big town, and it’s an even smaller neighborhood. People talk. And when a young girl is walking around alone, talking to herself, it tends to create a buzz.”

“Oh.” Busted.

“So, who were you with.” Finally, a question I could answer truthfully.

“I was with Nonna.”

Mom shot me a look that could be interpreted as either ‘are you crazy’ or ‘do you think I’m freakin’ stupid’?

“What?” I hated that look.

“Vic, you were with Nonna?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

“Your grandmother lives in Texas. There was no way you were with Nonna. And why the heck have you started speaking Italian? Are you learning that in school? I thought you were taking French.”

It was my turn to look at her in confusion.

“Nonna means ‘grandmother in Italian.” Mom was talking to me as if I was a little slow. That just pissed me off.

“Well, I asked her name, that’s what she said her name was. It’s not
my
fault that she has a messed up name.” My arms were crossed and my body vibrated with growing annoyance. Mom
knew
I couldn’t stand being talked to like I was stupid.

“One of your friends from school is named Nonna?” I cringed.

“Um, well, she’s doesn’t exactly go to my school.”

“Does she go to East Providence or something?”

“She doesn’t exactly go to high school, mom. Well, I mean, she probably did once…”

Mom squinted her eyes at me. Uh-oh.

“How old is this new ‘friend’ of yours, Victoria.” Eek, full first name. Full first name usually means I’m headed towards being in trouble.

“I really don’t know, you always told me it was rude to ask someone’s age.”

“Only if they are much older.” I sort of bit my lip and smile at her sheepishly.

Mom’s eyes bugged out a bit and her jaw slackened. She blinked a few time, and looked like she was trying to get her mouth to work.

“Victoria Alexandra Edwards! How old is this friend of yours?” Oh man, full name time. And her volume increased every third word.

“I imagine she’s probably at least seventy, but it’s kinda hard to tell. I mean, she could be in her sixties but had a really rough life, or in her eighties and lived well. I just don’t know. When I asked her name, she said it was Nonna. I just thought it was a really wacked name. I guess it makes a little more sense now.”

Mom didn’t have much more to say, I guess, because she got very quiet. She looked like she was still sort of processing that I had found someone to hang out with and it just so happened she was a lot of decades older than me.

“Vic, I’m not so sure I’m comfortable with you spending time with someone so much older than you. How are you ever going to make friends your own age if you don’t hang out with them? You keep telling us you don’t fit in wherever it is we live, but hanging out with someone older than your
grandmother
is not going to help.”

My eyes started filling up. I was so freaking tired of this conversation. So freaking tired of hearing about how I needed to fit in. How I needed to have friends my age. How I spent too much time alone and didn’t try hard enough.

“Well, you know what else doesn’t help me fit in,
Mom
? Moving every three years and having to say goodbye to whatever friends I managed to make doesn’t help me fit in. I’ll always be a freak. I’ll always be weird. So why even bother. It’s not going to happen.” The tears were threatening to spill so I whirled away from her, grabbed my book back and headed up the stairs before she could see me cry.

When I got to the top of the stairs I risked a look down and saw her standing there with her arms crossed and her head and shoulders slumped forward. Great. I was a disappointment once again.

I got to my room and flopped down on the bed. I knew that a normal teen would have slammed the door, but in my family, that would mean sure death to my non-existent social life. My dad was a morning radio show host, so he was asleep right now. He took naps in the afternoon, and always woke up in time to have dinner with mom and me. I love my dad to death, but that job of his was the reason we never stayed in the same place twice. He used a different last name on the air, which was good, because it delayed the amount of time it took people to figure out my dad was
that
Bryan Shawn. Eventually people would figure it out, he mentioned me by first name all the time; so it would start to click with my classmates. After that, my ‘weirdness’ factor seemed to grow exponentially among my peers. You’d think that being the child of a local celebrity would make my life easier, right? Wrong. So very wrong.

Once it was figured out who my dad was, I was pointed at, whispered about more than usual, and overall avoided. Unless they wanted something. I remember one time there was a concert coming around and his radio station was giving away tickets. Suddenly, I went from sitting alone reading a book at lunch to having about forty people trying to cram around the table I was sitting at, prepared to be my new best friend.

I remembered that one time a year ago I got asked out on a date. My
first
date. Matt was one of the cutest guys in the school, and I’d had a crush on him for just about as long as I’d been at that school. I couldn’t believe it when he asked
me
out. I thought finally,
finally
my luck was turning. Mom and I spent so much time finding the perfect outfit. I even went to get my hair trimmed for the date and a little makeup lesson. Mom was in seventh heaven seeing me act like a normal girl. I couldn’t lie, I was enjoying it too.

He was sixteen and had a license, so he came to the house to pick me up. He went all fan-girl when he met my dad. He proceeded to spend the next thirty minutes telling my dad every part of his show that he loved. I was standing there, ready to go, looking better than I ever had, and he didn’t even acknowledge that I was there. Finally, my dad managed to encourage Matt to leave with me. This is where the date should have improved, right? In my head he was going to hold my hand, compliment how nice my hair looked. We would hold hands as we walked into the restaurant. At the end of the night, he would give me my first kiss. That was how it was
supposed
to go.

Instead he walked over to his side of the car as I stood in shock. Wasn’t he supposed to open my door for me? He leaned over and opened it from his side, pushed the door open so hard it almost hit me in the knees.

“C’mon, get in.”

I shook that off a bit, and climbed into the car, careful not to mess up my outfit at all. I could believe that he hadn’t bothered to clean out his car. So I was sitting amongst sports equipment, soda bottles and a few fast food bags, trying not to gag at the smell of his cleats in the back seat. I would have thought he’d have cleaned the car for our date. He should have done that. Or at the very least, put everything in the trunk so that I had the impression that he tried.

I decide to ignore it, chock it up to him being a teenaged boy and obviously a little clueless as to how to romance a woman. I smiled at him across the car, mentally willing him to reach over and hold my hand. He gave me a half smile, turned on the car and started driving. He barely said a word to me until he started asking me about my dad and the famous people he must have met in his life. I answered the questions with enthusiasm at first, but it didn’t take too long before I was starting to get really pissed off. I tried to relax, this being my first date ever and all. Maybe I was in the wrong. Maybe this is what most first dates were like. Maybe I’d watched too many romantic movies, so the bar had been set way too high.

I was shocked when he pulled up to the Burger World downtown. Really? My first date ever was going to be at a greasy fast food restaurant with questionable meat products making up their hamburger patties? I got a new outfit and had my hair done for a fast food dinner date? Looking around Matt’s car, I got the impression he was quite the regular.

He got out of the car and started walking towards the restaurant, leaving me in the car. He stopped, finally, when he realized that I was not walking next to him. Turning, he gave me the ‘are you coming, or what’ look. I scrambled out of the car, and shut the door much harder than was necessary. I was afraid to order, because I didn’t bring any money, and I was a little worried he expected me to pay. The way he’d been managing the date so far, I really figured he wanted me to pay for myself. He asked if I knew what I wanted.

“Matt, I’m good, I didn’t bring any money.” He had the decency to give me a shocked look.

“Vicki, of course I’m going to pay for you. I invited you, didn’t I?”

“Um, yeah.”

“God, what would your dad think if I made you pay? Oh my God, he would talk about it on the air all week. I’d never get another date with any chick ever again.”

At this point it was all I could do to control my anger. Really? He was worried about what my
dad
thought?

“So, what would you like?”

“Uh, I’ll just have the first combo with a diet soda.” It was the smallest combo they had. Tiny burger, small fries. That way it would take me no time at all to finish eating and I could get out of that miserable experience.

He winked at me as he placed the order and handed over the cash. Seriously, you’d have thought he took me to a five star restaurant and ordered me the filet mignon, or lobster, or both.

When he brought the plastic tray with our dinners to a table near the window, I decided that I had to make the best of this date, because I only got one first date ever. I didn’t want it to be a horrible memory. I also didn’t want to go to jail.

He tried to talk about my dad, but I kept trying to steer him away from that topic of conversation. Finally, I’d about had it. I excused myself to use the ladies room. While in hiding, I picked up my cell and asked my dad to come get me. I slunk back to the booth and waited. Matt didn’t even notice that I’d mentally checked out of the conversation. He kept jabbering on about this bit my dad did, this funny phone call he made, some interview he’d done.

I saw my dad’s car pull in the parking lot and felt a huge sense of relief. Then anger. A lot of serious level anger. I started to slide out of the booth. This finally caught his attention.

“Wait, where are you going?”

I slowly turned at him, the fierce expression on my face made him recoil a bit.

“Where am I going? Seriously?”

He tipped his head, a look of total confusion on his face.

“Oh. My. God. You have no idea, do you? This was my first date. Ever. The first time I left the house with a boy, waved to my parents, got into a boy’s car, went to a restaurant with him and sat at a table and ate. I will never get my first date back. I will have more first dates with other guys. But I will
never
have another
first
first date. You stole that from me. I can’t believe I
let
you steal that from me. For the past hour, since we left my house, you have been talking about my freaking
dad
. If you were that in love with him, you should have asked HIM out on a date.”

With that, I turned on my heel and stormed out. The absolute silence in that fast food joint did not escape me, but I was too pissed off to even think about being embarrassed that I’d chewed him out publically. I reached my dad’s car and slipped inside, slamming the door possibly a little too hard. Dad just looked at me quizzically.