It should have bothered me more that I didn’t even consider telling part of the truth.
She had two fingers at each temple, massaging a small circle. Soon, she’d move to her cavernous purse and pull out the Advil.
Because it was the obligatory parental question, she asked about boys. Unfortunately, Erin decided that was the perfect time to step in.
“She has a boyfriend, Aunt Carrie.”
I bit my tongue, trying not to accidentally contribute something about naked pictures and the basketball team captain. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The second one just leaves you a little bit more satisfied.
“Yeah.” I anticipated the next question, swirling a straw around in my Coke. “His name is Devin. He’s from LA.”
“Bizza, that’s great.” Now it was Mom’s smile that was fake. “Is he in any of your classes?”
Brace yourself. “Only one. He’s a senior.”
“Oh.” The teeth on the edge of her smile, slightly yellowed by years of coffee, tightened slightly and some of the wrinkles around her eyes released. “Does he know where he wants to go to college?”
I pursed my lips around the straw and didn’t look up. “UCLA if he can get in. Maybe UC Santa Barbara. He wants to stay in-state.”
There was a pause as my mom struggled to find a response. The smile that threatened at the corners of my lips was more than a little bitter. She had been expecting Princeton, Harvard, Stanford at least, the places I was supposed to go. Ivy, Ivy, proto-Ivy. Too bad for them I didn’t really care. Didn’t they realize it was just a football league? No one in my family even watched football.
“That’s great,” Erin volunteered. It was an effort, but it didn’t really help.
Awkward silences are like fat people on airplanes. They sit there, taking up more space than they should, squishing the people next to them and making the ride uncomfortable. And even though everyone knows the facts, no one ever says anything.
Fortunately, our waitress, a local high schooler named Brenda who Alec hit on every time we were here, arrived to take our orders. Once she left, we started talking about my dad’s department at the hospital: podiatry. I was happy to pick at my grilled cheese and make appreciative noises at appropriate times. That is, until Erin excused herself from the almost empty plates to use the bathroom.
It wasn’t really surprising when my mom leaned on her elbows and looked at me in the way that mothers always look at their kids when they want something they know they have to pull. Unlike my loose teeth, there was no handy doorknob. The look, however, promised just as much pain.
Then she reached for her purse and I knew I was screwed. Two red dots fell into her palm and then her mouth. She swallowed them dry.
“What time do you need to be back to school?”
I swirled a fry in ketchup, writing Help Me in letters that faded away in seconds. “I’m meeting Dev and some friends at four.”
She shook her head. “We’re not leaving until five. That boy can see you once we leave. We only get today with you until Thanksgiving.”
That boy. Figured.
My sigh was long and drawn out. “Mom.” It was an effort to restrain myself from dragging her name out into the three-syllable whine of a little kid.
She didn’t say anything, in that quiet way mothers have that lets you know without a doubt that they disapprove immensely.
“Mom.”
Her sigh was wearier than mine. “Bizza, sweetheart. This boy is…” She struggled to find an appropriate word. Unacceptable? Underachieving? “Surprising.”
My arms folded over my chest and I leaned against the smooth plastic of the booth, all but braced for a confrontation. “Because he’s not on a fast track to the Ivies?”
Her silence was all the confirmation I needed.
“Mom. He’s my boyfriend and I like him.” So much that I had sex with him last night. “So what if he’s not curing cancer?” Sex is better. Sorry, Mom.
“It just doesn’t seem as though you have similar interests.” She was trying for political correctness, I think.
Translation: Your boyfriend is an idiot.
“So my IQ is an interest?” My laugh was bitter. She didn’t know me at all and she thought she did. And people wondered why I thought boarding school sounded like a good idea. “That’s like saying I should only date people with brown hair or who can’t kick a ball to save their lives. Intelligence is genetics, not interest.”
“Sweetheart, you know that’s not true.”
I resisted the urge to make faces. It was hard.
“You have always had such intellectual curiosity.”
There were many examples of my curiosity in the last few months. Intellect didn’t exactly feature.
“Combined with cutting that class a month ago, which is so unlike you, I can’t help worrying a bit.” A concerned smile flickered across the straight, stern set of her lips. “That’s my job.”
“Mom. That’s not the point.”
“I understand, Bizza. It’s just…” I could see her shifting tactics. “He’s a senior. What about when he leaves at the end of the year?”
I huffed air out my nose. Why was everyone so obsessed with what would happen seven months down the road? Dev couldn’t even convince me to agree to come to LA with him over spring break. He called it pessimism. I still argued realism.
“Mom, it’s not like we’re getting married. We’re just, I dunno, dating. I don’t even know if we’ll be dating in June.”
It was so tempting to imagine walking into prom with his arm around my waist or kissing him as the clock counted down the seconds until the official end of the school year. It would be a lie to say my fingers weren’t itching to look for internships in California this summer. But it would not only be lying but stupid to say I was counting on that possibility.
“Besides, I’m not even sure I’d want to date a college guy. Just drop it.”
That was actually true, as much as my mom might preach the virtues of long distance phone bills making the heart grow fonder. She just wanted me in a relationship where I couldn’t actually touch anybody. If only she knew. They hadn’t even given me The Talk until eighth grade, still stuttering over “condom” and “birth control.” That was the one time in my life I was thankful for cramps. They saved me from the awkward “so I need to go on The Pill for no reason at all” conversation.
“Honey, I’m not saying you shouldn’t make friends.”
Just not boy ones.
“I’m just worried.”
“Mom!”
“Back!” Erin slid into her seat next to me, the proverbial saving bell. Thank God. For some reason, I had hoped that having sex with Dev would make me feel more adult, more able to deal with my parents. Right now, though, just felt the same as ever and I was so tired of having a conversation that just went in circles.
“Pass the ketchup?”
Erin and I hung back, walking back to school. I could see the tension in my mom’s shoulders, the determined pace of her stride, and for a moment I did feel guilty. My distance, my carefully measured personal space, was somehow succeeding in shutting her out. But that shut me out, too, and, for a moment, I almost regretted it.
Then Erin started talking about something and I moved on, shying away from things that fell in the category of serious, difficult thoughts. There had been enough big things for one weekend.
It did occur to me that she knew much more than I had told her. She was my mom, after all. They always have their ways.
So she probably knew that she wasn’t the person I curled up with to talk about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Maybe she wasn’t the person who I went to when I had a bad day, or who made me hot chocolate when it rained. But I hoped she knew enough to know that this wasn’t permanent, irrevocable distance. This was me-trying-to-figure-out-my-life distance. Me-trying-to-grow-up distance, because at least so far I needed the distance to run into walls, whether I bounced back or fell down on impact. I needed space to skip homework and watch movies and have sex and drink too much caffeine and just drink too much and make my own decisions. Even if they were really shitty decisions.
I wondered if she would tell me that she told me so. She would definitely think it. But somehow, I didn’t think she would actually say it.
The walk back to campus felt shorter than the walk into town and I was hoping too soon that we weren’t about to run into Dev. That would be awkward. Beyond words.
When my mom hugged me before she got in the car, I felt like I should have some kind of definitive emotion. But she got the same casual embrace you give grandparents you don’t see very often and teachers who have to congratulate you in the sweaty heat of graduation. As I watched her and Erin pull away from the curb with the crunching of loose gravel and the low groan of the engine, I didn’t really feel anything. Part of me thought it was because she was my mom and she saw through all the growing up I was trying to do. Part of me suggested that it was just because she didn’t know me at all anymore. I didn’t even know what I wanted the answer to be.
She cared what I did and it sucked sometimes when she just didn’t understand. But it was enough that, instead of calling Dev when I got back to my room, I left a message for my dad, to ask him to tell Mom to call me once she made it home. Just to be sure. And I told him I loved him. Then I called Dev.
Nothing got done in the days before Thanksgiving break. Seniors were running around with college applications, but it wasn’t like the week before break where everyone freaks out about finals. We were only going to be gone for five days.
Cleo’s eighteenth birthday was the day before Thanksgiving break, so Amie and I snuck into town on Sunday and bought cake mix. It was a valiant struggle not to eat the batter as we threw in a little less egg and a little more butter than recommended in her dorm kitchen that night. I was just glad I wasn’t the one whose desk it had to sit on all of Monday. If it had been my responsibility, there would have been no cake to surprise Cleo with in the dining hall when Dev brought her in.
Alec led “Happy birthday to you,” screamed across the dining hall. There was, of course, thunderous applause. Cleo stood on a chair until one of the dining hall staffers started advancing on us and she half fell of the chair, laughing, into Scott’s arms.
“You know.” Dev was struggling to use a table knife to cut out a piece of our cake. So far, he had just gotten frosting all over his fingers. Which meant I could lick it all off. Frosting was the best part any way. “That’s illegal now. Better hope Scott doesn’t scream rape. And forget about the freshmen behind you.” He pointed the knife at two boys too skinny, short and generally prepubescent to be anything but freshmen, three tables behind us. They were trying to pretend they hadn’t been watching us.
Cleo flipped him off and used her fingers to pull out the piece of cake he had been trying for.
Alec had his fingers in her cake and an arm over her shoulders before Dev had time to sulk about losing his cake. “Sucks for Scott. But you can buy me lottery tickets and reunite me with my Naughty Nannies.”
We ignored him. Instead, Cleo was now looking through her lashes as the two freshies watched her lick frosting off her fingers. Their wide eyes would have been more appropriate to a church service or the Second Coming or Santa Claus. I bit my lip to stop laughing and dipped a finger in the frosting. I almost wished that was how Dev looked at me when I sucked frosting off my fingers. I probably looked ridiculous.
Scott moved his lips away to let Nicky talk. He had been kissing frosting off her bottom lip.
“I know you’re excited about voting.”
Cleo turned back to Nicky and just laughed. Nicky smiled and joined in. Even if Cleo didn’t appreciate it, that privilege would be Nic’s in just over eleven months.
It really didn’t make sense why eighteen was such a big deal when you thought about it. You could buy things you could already get and punch holes in one of hundreds of millions of ballots. Sure, you could volunteer to get shot at, but that wasn’t usually my idea of a birthday present.
Maybe it was like sex, where everyone asks you if you feel different, and you don’t. It’s confusing and disappointing and kind of a relief. Because even though you don’t miraculously understand the universe or know the meaning of life, it isn’t like being on a zip line, when the rope releases with an audible snap and suddenly you’re falling, wondering what’s at the other end. In Cleo’s case, I had a feeling she hadn’t ever questioned it for a second. That or she had some way of catching herself just fine. I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Then Amie was shoving cake in my face and I stopped thinking and picked up a fork.
There were balloons and stupid party napkins and presents ordered over the Internet. Amie gave her Netflix for the year. Alec gave her free sex coupons. I licked the frosting off of Dev’s fingers and, while there was no awe, he smirked and kissed me, as impressed as he ever got. Awe wouldn’t fit him. The dining hall staff moved towards u menacingly when we started to make a mess, so we moved outside, smearing icing on the winter coats we had just started wearing.
Our group slowly broke up, Cleo and Amie going upstairs for a movie marathon, Alec skulking away to find some girl and Nicky and Scott walking off into the dark holding hands. Dev and I were left leaning against the wall behind my dorm, his warm coat wrapped around both of us, my hands tucked under his sweater to keep them warm. It was how my parents used to wrap me in blankets and call me a burrito, except that this was ten years later and much more fun. Also not exactly parentally approved. Snow melted on my eyelashes, my nose, blanketed my hair and threatened to soak into my Uggs. For the classic, every-girl-wants-it, romantic cliché, kissing in the snow didn’t seem that much different than normal kissing. Except that your ears were cold and taking clothes off was more painful.
We probably looked pretty damn cute, though, and it gave me an excuse to unzip his coat and pull myself closer inside.
On the last day, we gave up work in almost all my classes. Our math teacher tried to teach us, but we all doodled and checked our email under tilted laptop lids.
Acting was the only class that tried to be productive. Mostly it was just awkward. My drama teacher was trying to tell me how to sit on the bench in character. Dev started laughing every time he told me to hold my arms with “more languor, Elizabeth, less conscious. You are a marionette whose strings have been cut. A marionette!” I couldn’t even glare at my unsympathetic boyfriend because my head was leaning over the back of a bench. The edge dug into my neck. My eyes closed against the blinding brilliance of the stage lights. Apparently my tech buddies didn’t really have my back.