Mom sighs. “You know what my least favorite thing about Hunter is?”
This feels like a trap, but I answer anyway. “I’m assuming the ‘lied about me in middle school’ thing.”
She shakes her head, pressing her lips together in a grim line. “You’d think so, but no, it’s not that. It’s the effect he has on you. In all our years, we’ve never encountered anything that made you keep secrets from me, not until him. Remember the year you accidentally found one of your Christmas gifts in the closet? I didn’t even catch you, still you came into my room near tears because you ruined the surprise. You told on yourself. And when Hunter first happened, I thought, hey, you know, she’s growing up. Maybe this is just how it has to be now. She’s becoming a teenager, maybe she needs to keep some secrets, have some areas of her life that are only hers.”
I sigh, but I don’t bother interrupting.
“But then he left.” Her eyebrows rise. “And with him went the secrets. You didn’t keep it from me when people started treating you like shit at school, you didn’t hide it when that awful, awful girl made up the lie about you and your history teacher… And then another boy came along. Finally. A nice one. And you didn’t keep things from me about Anderson. We talked about him, you let me in on things… and now, Hunter’s back,” she says, her voice dropping low with disappointment. “And with him, the secrets.”
I feel somewhere around three inches tall.
I stand there wordlessly, holding my books and refusing to meet her gaze, but in my mind I can see the three shopping bags I have hidden in my closet.
The replacement purses.
The party.
Sex with Hunter.
No condom.
She’s right. The living room is standing room only if you account for all the things she doesn’t know.
I swallow past a lump in my throat, but still I don’t look up.
Mom sighs. I can tell I’ve disappointed her—she doesn’t even know how much—but she doesn’t push. “Well, maybe he’ll leave again,” she says.
I keep my gaze down and don’t speak.
“In the meantime, I hope you change your mind,” she adds. “I know he’s been a sore subject for us in the past, and I won’t pretend I like the kid—you wouldn’t believe me even if I did—but if you want to talk to me about him, you can. You can talk to me about anything. I promise to have an open mind. I don’t care about him, I care about you. That will always be the case, nothing could ever change that, and if you’re going through something, you don’t have to go through it alone.”
Her words intensify my guilt, but they also send a fearful chill down my spine.
This could be like that night she already knew I went to meet Hunter, but she was waiting for me to come clean to her about it.
I want to believe the gossipy PTO moms have better things to do on a Tuesday night than discuss my sex life, but… well, historically speaking, that hasn’t always proven accurate.
I can’t tell her, though.
It’s not even that I don’t believe her when she says she can be open-minded about it, and I know she would be there for me no matter how badly I screwed up. She may have freaked out four years ago when she thought I might have slept with Hunter and she searched my bedroom for a condom wrapper, but she was caught off-guard then. If she’s asking about it now, she has prepared herself for it this time. Even if I told her I was stupid enough to have unprotected sex with a guy I’m not even dating… she wouldn’t flip out on me, no matter how strong the impulse was.
But telling her makes everything more real.
I’ve been avoiding it as much as possible because that’s what I need to do. It’s what I’m going to keep doing until I get my period.
Then I’ll deal with everything else. Once I know I didn’t completely fuck my life up—only a little bit.
I can handle making one stupid mistake.
I can handle a bad senior year; I handled a bad junior year.
I just can’t handle… that.
If I tell my mom about that night, I’ll tell her everything. And if I tell her everything, then it’s real, and it’s all I’ll be able to think about.
So, it’s not that I don’t want to tell her. I can’t.
I also can’t explain that to her, so as much as I hate it, as horrible as the sinking feeling in my stomach is, knowing I’m continuing to disappoint her, I force a smile and dodge her gaze. “I know, Mom.”
She watches me, her mom-gaze inciting a wrathful labor of moles in my gut. That’s how it feels, anyway.
Resisting the pull despite that gnawing feeling, I turn around and flee to my bedroom.
I sigh as I shut the door. I relax a little now that I’m in my bedroom away from her probing, but I still feel pretty awful.
I drop my books on the bed and grab my cell phone off the charger. I had to plug it in when I got home from school earlier and I haven’t checked it since.
It shouldn’t surprise me, then, that I have a bunch of missed notifications now. A couple texts from Anderson, but I don’t prioritize reading those. When I texted him yesterday about keeping things quiet for a couple of weeks, he never texted me back. I know he started typing something because I saw the bubbles, but when I checked my messages after class, nothing.
He has texted me a few times since with small talk, but the fact that he avoided responding to the text I sent him hasn’t done anything to build my confidence in our second chance. And that was before Hunter’s performance in English class.
I don’t know if Anderson has heard about that, we haven’t mentioned Hunter again, but I do know avoiding the subject will never foster closeness between us. If this is how he’s going to approach our second chance, it’ll likely end before anyone even finds out we tried again.
I also have a message from a local number that isn’t saved in my phone. I scowl at the prospect of a stranger texting me and check that one first.
“Are you home tonight?” the message reads.
I scowl harder and type back, “Who is this?” Then I navigate back to my main message screen so I can read the ones I missed from Sara.
The first couple of messages are commentary about our English assignment and the painful reading experience Mrs. Dowd is forcing on us. I’m ready to send back a sympathetic, “Ugh, I know,” but since I was away from my phone for so long, I missed my chance. Sara has already finished her homework and moved on to cyber stalking, apparently. She sends me another screenshot from social media. It’s a post by someone neither of us really knows, but she’s apparently in my English class with Hunter.
My eyes widen when I see a picture of me with the Chanel bag on my desk and Hunter standing right beside it. The way the photo was timed, it looks like I’m reaching into the bag and drawing out the purse—I was actually putting the purse back into the bag—and Hunter is watching me open the present he bought me.
Her caption reads:
When the hottest guy in school buys you the classiest handbag
#boyfriendgoals #notjealousatall #HunterMaxwellhasgreattaste #BetHeTastesGreatToo ;) #ImSingleIfShesNotInterested #jk #notreally #callme
“Oh my God, what?” I mutter, swiping the picture off my screen and going back to Sara’s message.