But more importantly, he’s a good kid. He may not be the sharpest bulb in the pack, but unlike a lot of the kids at McKinley, my kid isn’t an entitled brat. I handed him his report in the car, and he grunted out “thanks” between bites of his breakfast. The paper looked suspiciously clean, but luckily that lovable doofus hasn’t figured out how napkins work, and his report was instantly smudged with grease stains. Most Arby’s don’t open until ten AM, but the cashier at the Marshall Street location is an old “friend” of mine, and since he sleeps in the parking lot, he doesn’t mind making my boy a couple beef and cheddars before school.
McKinley is a circus when we arrive. There are dozens of vans idling in the street in front of the school, and the traffic cop, whose only job is to keep things moving, has given up entirely. He stands there, dejected, in the middle of the street, not even bothering to direct the moms who refuse to even notice his orange traffic flag. The whole drop-off line is dumb as hell. They expect you to just inch forward in the right-hand lane until your car reaches the front of the school. They even marked the left lane as “NO DROP OFFS,” painted repeatedly in giant yellow letters right on the road. But fuck that. We’re late, and there’s still a whole line of mom-mobiles moving so slowly they’re probably in reverse. I whip up the left lane, ready to plead illiteracy to anyone who gives me shit and slam the car into park. “Love you,” Jaxon mumbles, kissing me on the cheek with his greasy mouth. Jaxon lumbers away from the car with his bag of Arby’s and a backpack that will probably never see an actual book. I don’t bother trying to take a photo, they do those at school anyway.
I swear, Back to School is like a drug for these moms. And I say “moms” only because the pickup and drop-off and PTA and volunteers are a solid 95 percent female. And not single moms, either. I’m a weirdo here, a complete outlier. Most of these broads have perfectly able-bodied husbands who all seem to have a disability that prevents them from doing jack shit for their kids.
McKinley is known for the smoking-hot moms, and I say that absolutely including myself. Now, for my taste, most of the McKinley moms are a little uptight. Nobody who runs without an assailant behind them can possibly be very good in the sack, but the men in our suburb seem to get the appeal of a skeleton cased in a very slender, very tan meat sack and wrapped in lululemon.
The McKinley dads, though? They don’t get enough credit. I know because I spend forty hours a week waxing their wives’ labia and trimming their cuticles, and all these bitches do is complain about their husbands. Keith is too fat. Jonathan is distant. All thirty-seven Matts seem to be unable to tell the difference between Real Housewives of Orange County and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Kevin’s bonus wasn’t as big as they’d expected, and now Tabby has to break it to the kids that they won’t be going to Nantucket for the summer. Instead, they’ll be slumming it in Door County, Wisconsin. It’s going to be humbling.
None of these dads are Vin Diesel, but the men of McKinley have their charms. And even though I definitely could, I don’t sleep with married men. And I don’t have sex with them, either. Dom Toretto said it best: a man’s gotta have a code. Dom Toretto is Vin Diesel’s most popular character—from the Fast & Furious filmography, obviously. He’s why I bought my car. I met Vin at a bar in the city one night, and he was selling his favorite street-racing car because he just had too many, and wanted to spread the love of racing. He had me pay him in cash, so he could protect his privacy. All I have to remember him by is this car, and the four hours we spent in the backseat together. Oh, and a selfie I took with him right before we banged the first five times. I wish I hadn’t been so drunk, because it’s too blurry to really tell that it’s Vin. And I’m 90 percent sure it was him. 70 percent sure. People act like he’d have no reason to be in the Midwest on a Tuesday in February, but people are dumb as hell.
But back to dads.
A Jock Dad looks great but is usually too insecure to have any fun. Jonathan spent the entire ten minutes we were together looking at his own abs in the mirror.
A Boring Dad is kind of perfect if you just want a warm body on top of you, and someone who agrees to bring a tray of take-out nachos with him when he comes over.
My personal favorite is a Sad Dad, one whose divorce is fresh, like Keith. Keith is a little chunky, but since the divorce, I’ve seen him at the karate studio nearly every day, working out his rage issues. He’s still got a potbelly, but what’s not to like about a guy who makes you look fitter the moment he takes off his shirt? A Sad Dad’s standards are low enough that anything you do will be considered off the charts hot. They’ve been poking around in the same vagina for at least a decade, so you don’t even need to do anything. You can just lie there, bite your lip, and say a few curse words and they’ll think you’re a sex goddess.
And then there’s the holy grail: the Widowed Dad. You get all the benefits of a divorced dad, but without a crazy ex-wife to deal with! We only have one at this school. So far, at least. I mean, anything can happen. Jesse would be the hottest dad at McKinley even if his wife were alive, but the fact that he’s grief-stricken and hot just makes his stock soar. I swear, when he walks into a room, you can hear the other moms wishing their husbands would die. Not painfully, just . . . in their sleep, maybe? And I don’t blame them. I’m not usually into extremely handsome men with flawless bodies—aside from Vin, of course—but Jesse releases a special pheromone that makes all the moms want to heal his broken heart with sex. Nobody, to my knowledge, has accomplished this yet.
Once, Jesse was wearing his daughter’s Frozen backpack at drop-off, and the moms lost their shit over her two perfect French braids. They were good braids, but these bitches acted like they’d never seen a braid before. They wanted to know everything: What hair products did he use, and did he watch a YouTube tutorial or was he just a natural? Even their compliments sounded like questions. And the giggling. It was nonstop. You’d think Jesse was doing a stand-up set and not just . . . standing up. Jesse makes all these women completely insane. I don’t see them tripping all over each other like “Jennifer, that braid! Amanda, you packed a lunch!” I’m not saying that Jesse isn’t a good dad. I’m just saying that Jesse is treated like a living saint for just doing shit a parent is supposed to do. The same women who look down on me and Jaxon, who I know whisper about how I dress and why I don’t have a ring on my finger, think that Jesse is some kind of hero for doing the same shit we all do every single day.
The mom groups are breaking up, and the traffic cop is showing new signs of life, attempting to guide the minivans into my personal fast lane. I rev the engine of my Trans Am and peel out, watching in the rearview mirror as each mom’s head snaps in my direction.
Show’s over, ladies.
4
Kiki
7:00: Wake up
7:05: Start coffee
7:10: Shower
7:20: Wake up Kent and kids
7:25: Feed kids
7:30: Get dressed
7:30–7:45: Get kids dressed
7:50: Leave for school!
8:00: Drop-off/first-day photos
8:05: Talk to Gwendolyn
8:15: Special coffee date with Gwendolyn??