I’m here with your mom. I heard. You . . . fell?
I sigh, reading her text and typing my response.
Long story.
She shoots back a laughing emoji, but she has no idea what a mess this is.
My mom is standing at the front desk when I walk in through the side doors. She’s wearing one of her cotton T-shirt dresses, so at least she changed from what I saw her wearing this morning, and her hair in a twisted knot on top of her head. When I step through the glass doors into the lobby, she rushes to me and holds both sides of my face, smooshing them with her purse and phone still in her hands.
“June Mabee, you have a black eye!” She tilts my head down and steps up on her toes as if looking at it from above makes it seem somehow less of an injury.
“I’m fine.” I shake my head, glancing to the side to meet Abby’s gaze. My friend’s eyes are narrowed, but for a different reason. Abby’s taken a punch or two in her life. She’s given her fair share of black eyes, too. She’s not naïve, so I shake my head slightly once my mom lets go as a signal for her not to question—not right now.
I shift back to meet my mom’s waiting stare. She’s so broken, and I’m to blame for a lot of that.
“Kristen,” Maggie Williams’s familiar voice draws our attention to the main desk. My mom hesitates for a moment. In the past, when she’s run into Maggie with me, there have been hugs. Right now, though, my mom is embarrassed. Here I am, black eye and all. It’s awkward.
“I guess there’s a form?” My mom moves around the desk to take the seat Maggie has pulled out for her.
“It’s just a formality,” Maggie says, sliding the already-prepared document around for my mom to review and sign. She leans into my mom and whispers loudly, “It’s so you don’t sue the school.”
“Should I?” My mom leans back, holding the pen away from the signature line.
“No!” I blurt out.
I cover my face and Abby slides over to stand at my side.
“Well, I don’t know,” my mom continues. There’s a deep wrinkle on her brow as she turns her focus to me. I can no longer tell whether she’s serious about suing or using the threat to bait me into spilling my guts.
“Please,” I beg. I’m sweating, which probably makes me look even more banged up, but it’s because I really just want to be done with this.
My mom studies me for a few seconds then pinches one side of her mouth, clicking the pen in and out a few times before finally leaning forward and signing her name to the line.
“Thanks, Kristen. Hey, we should get together for real sometime, ya know? Like in a place where we can have booze!” Maggie’s raspy laugh sparks a brief smile on my mom’s lips and she agrees that sounds nice.
I walk out toward the parking lot, ready to bolt for Abby’s car, but my mom is one step ahead of me. We barely get through the doors before she catches them behind us.
“June? The van,” she says, pointing to where she parked along the curb in front of the office like an ambulance.
I breathe in long and deep but nod. My friend gives me a hug and whispers, “Call me” in my ear. I dump my bag on the back seat before climbing in the front. My mom is already waiting for me, and she eyes my movements like a hawk as I fasten my buckle.
“Do I at least get to know what happened to your face?”
It’s hard to look her in the eyes. I tell her everything, basically. It’s just that I have this horror that she hasn’t been keeping up her end of the bargain. I can’t fathom her keeping secrets from me, but a secret that big . . . she would have to.
“No,” I answer, finally. Her eyes curse at me just before her mouth snaps shut in shock.
“Okay, then.” She flips her gaze to the front, cranking the van and shifting into drive without hesitation. “I guess you can get used to me driving you to and from school for the next month.”
Her tone is clipped.
“I guess,” I say coolly, lifting my towel-covered icepack to my face and holding it in such a way that I block my mom’s view of me.
This has to end. I need to tell her everything Lucas told me so she has the chance to either verify it, or not. Maybe she’ll lie, but at least I won’t be holding this feeling in anymore. Then I can tell her about my face and what happened with Ava, and about Lucas’s interview today. I know she would be proud. My mom loved Lucas, to the point of teasing me when she knew I had developed a crush. Of course, now that I threw the little V-card announcement at her, she might look at him differently.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, June, but I won’t just sit back and let you fall into yourself. You can be mad. I’ll give you time. I’ll even give you a break about today. I’m not stupid, and it’s pretty clear to everyone that you have a black eye. I just hope you aren’t in a situation where someone . . .”
Her voice trails off and I know it’s because the thought of me letting a guy hit me touches a raw nerve in her heart. My dad never laid a hand on her directly, but he threw things when he got angry. And from the few things she’s told me about her high school boyfriends, I think she’s faced worse than my dad’s keys being thrown at her face.
“I’m not being unsafe,” I finally say, relenting and dropping the ice pack from my eye as we pull into our driveway. My mom stops the van just past the curb, and I expect to find her eyes waiting for me as I face her. But when I look, I find she’s not looking at me at all. Her focus is glued straight ahead and her mouth hangs open wide, anger reddening her cheeks and shaking her clinched jaw. I snap my gaze to her sightline, and at first what my eyes take in seems too enormous to be real.
The word WHORE is spray-painted in red across our garage door. The can used to create it is left abandoned in our driveway, its lid a few yards away. On instinct, I crank my neck to the left, searching the Fuller house for spying eyes. The garage is closed, as is the side door and all the shutters. But something this bold isn’t Mrs. Fuller’s style; she abhors confrontation. Asking her husband and son to ignore our existence seems more like her. The message written on our house, it isn’t for my mom. It’s for me. And I have an eye that matches it perfectly.
Chapter Twenty
“Someone doesn’t like me.”
That’s all I say as I exit the van, slamming the door closed behind me. I grab some acetone and some of my dad’s old rags from the garage, then immediately start scrubbing the word off the garage door. My efforts fade the color, but the word is still there. It is still very much there.
My mom helps for a while. She keeps her promise of not prying into more today, though I can tell as she scrubs next to me that she so badly wants to. I can’t really mask my tears, but I wear the grit on my face right along with the pain, which makes open, honest conversation less approachable.
That word isn’t going away without paint. If I had my way, I would go buy a gallon of whatever’s on hand and roll it on. My mom says she’ll do it in the morning, after she drops me off at school.
She is still my ride, to and from, until I do something to make it otherwise.
Lucas will see it. I’ve been sitting in the center of my bed with the lights off for two hours, waiting for his practice to end. I only now locked my bedroom door. I want to make sure my mom won’t try coming in, though if she does and is met with a lock, she’ll flip her lid even more than she already has. She’s worried. I’m worried, too. Somebody hates me, and somebody knows things meant to hurt me.