“Yeah, I know. Sorry.” I’ve learned that it’s better to head her lectures off at the pass. I sit up and unwrap my hair to relieve the pressure and see what kind of mess I’ve made.
“You know, I thought you were dead.” She’s exaggerating—by a lot. She must need something.
“Surprise! I’m not,” I say, clutching my towel together at my chest while I drag my body and the discarded wet one from my head back to the bathroom. “I think I figured out how to make beachy waves, though.”
Combing through my hair with my fingertips, I wait for the big ask that has to be coming any minute now. After several seconds of silence, I stop noodling with my head and hold my phone out to see if Abby hung up.
“You there?”
“Yeah, I’m waiting. Beachy waves,” she says, annoyed I haven’t told her yet.
I cough out a short laugh and go back to pushing around loose hairs. My head is still super wet, but maybe an entire night in the towel would do the trick.
“I was kidding, sort of. I slept in a towel,” I say.
“Oh. Well that’s not a very big breakthrough. Look, I need you to do me a favor.” And there it is.
“Sure,” I agree. This is a mistake.
“Awesome. So Friday, after the game, we’re going to this place off the Interstate about fifteen miles or so. The road is dirt, so if your mom will let you take the van—”
“Hold up,” I break in, snapping out of the beachy waves trance to realize the details of what she’s signing me up for. “No more parties. I did a party.”
“June, you barely did a party. And senior year is not a single-item checklist,” she says.
“Yes, it is.” I’m quick. “And that last party was pretty close to a low point.”
“Ha, no way,” she says. “I refuse to let you diminish what you achieved.”
My friend is moving around while she talks, and sometimes her face muffles her words, but I get the gist of her argument from a few keywords—“stood up to her” and “made friends.”
“I made some enemies too,” I argue. I’m being contrary, but I also just woke up and everything from a few hours ago is resurfacing in my thought pool.
“You already had those enemies, so nothing new. Now, Friday. Do you want to pick me up and drive us to the game? Naomi and Lola are in too, and there’s a lot of room in the van. That way we can go right to the creek—”
“Abby!” As if shouting her name has ever gotten her to give up a fight.
The line is silent for a few seconds. I finally accept that she is not going to give in and I am going to another party.
“You know minivans aren’t off-road vehicles, right?” I wait through more silence from her, finally giving in with a sigh. “Yeah . . . I’ll pick you up before the game.”
“Stellar. Okay, see you in the morning.” She ends the call without giving me a chance to reverse course.
The smell of burnt tomato is carrying upstairs, which means my mom must be home and attempting to cook. My dad was a griller. He still is, I guess, for another woman and kid in Florida. When he left, he took everything remotely culinary with him, which was fine because mom and I really only know how to make sandwiches and heat things up. Over the last year, though, Mom has been ambitious, with little to no improvement on her cooking skills.
I drop my towel and slide into my favorite sweats and long-sleeved T-shirt, then stop in my room to put on some flipflops and grab my keys and wallet. I have my supplies list memorized, so I leave the papers behind and rush down the stairs in time to move the pot from the burner before marinara sauce bubbles through the lid.
“Mom! You ruined dinner . . . again!” It’s not a mean thing to say. It’s a common thing to say.
“Damn it! Sorry!” My mom’s voice is faint through the garage door.
I turn the burner off and note the still water in the pot she never turned on, curling my lips on the right side in amusement as I shake my head. A thud against the garage door pulls my attention away, so I leave the burnt sauce to cool and open the door for my mom, her arms weighed down with two cases of water. I take one from her and plop it on the counter just inside.
“Thanks. They had a two-for-one so I stocked up. I booked two shoots this weekend! One wedding and one family session.” Her grin is so high it lifts her eyebrows. She’s proud, and so am I.
“That was fast!” I say.
She nods after dropping the second case on the counter near the other one. Hands on her hips, she blows up at the dark brown cut of bangs that’s grown long enough to hide her eyes. They part with her breath and she turns her focus to the stove, sighing.
“I’ll order in,” she says.
“Actually”—I touch her shoulder just before she moves to the drawer that holds our takeout menus—“I have to run out for school supplies. I’ll pick up. Pizza?”
“Perfect.” She looks relieved, and tired. She’s spent the last few days calling every client she ever had at the studio and putting cards and flyers in every coffee shop within a ten-mile radius. My mom is incredibly talented at portrait photography, but the hustle part of the business doesn’t come naturally. Hustle ranks right up there with cooking. Two jobs in one weekend—that’s huge for her, and vital for us.
I leave my mom as she’s pulling the smoldering pot away from the stove, slipping out the door before guilt tricks me into offering to clean that, too. I hate wet food, even crusty sauce bits singed onto metal.
Not paying much attention on my trip out the garage to my car, I press the unlock button on the key fob, triggering the honking sound and scaring the father-son duo playing hoops in the driveway just a strip of grass away from ours. The ball bounces away from their game, through the grass and toward me while they both stare. I stop it with my foot and glance up to meet their uneasy eyes.
I’m one-hundred percent certain this is weirder for me than for either of them. I was never really close to Lucas’s dad, Todd, mostly because of his work schedule and how little he’s home. But I would wave, he would wave, we’d pass pleasantries and make jokes and say hi. That little bit of banter ceased when Lucas pulled away. They’re like a team, but I don’t get the game we’re playing. Every accidental interaction has been strange over the last two years, but now, I have the advantage of knowing what a scumbag Mr. Fuller is. And Lucas is blissfully ignorant.
I could crush them right now if I wanted to.
Without weighing the post part of my actions, I bend my knee and kick the ball back at them, punting it with the top of my bare foot hard enough that I’m pretty sure a bruise is forming. The airborne ball sails about two dozen feet to the right, up the property line and down the slope of our back yards into the thick weeds that Mom and I need to pull someday. It gets lodged under the crooked bumper of the old Buick my dad left behind, and it’s rough arrival sends a flight of birds flurrying out of the yard.
Fuck. That was dramatic.
“Oops,” I say, my eyes off in the distance, still watching the last few birds flap their wings and leave the premises. I can’t believe I did that. I wonder if this is what my mom means when she utters “hormones” under her breath at me.