Still, she worried she was crossing a line when she found Birdie’s new boyfriend’s account, @tucklaxlife05, a few months ago. As her students trickled in for her eleven o’clock lecture, she stopped one of her favorites, a redhead from Indiana who wore knee-high striped Pippi Longstocking socks, and asked her if it would be weird for her to follow her daughter’s fifteen-year-old boyfriend on Instagram. Becca gave her the best answer she could have, saying that most kids are more concerned with the number of followers they have than who they actually are, and that he honestly might not even notice, or care. It had surprised Charlotte how many followers Birdie’s friends all had, with numbers in the thousands. She checked Tucker’s account—the kid had fourteen hundred followers—so she went ahead and hit the follow button, never mentioning it to Birdie.
Today, she types Tucker’s username into the search field, and sees that he hasn’t posted anything in three days, not since the photo of him and his lacrosse teammates standing sweaty at the edge of the field after their win over W&L. But when she taps on his profile picture (a fuzzy pic of his hands gripping a lacrosse stick) to see if he’s posted any stories, a choppy video pops up onto her screen. At first she can’t tell what it is, the video is too dark, and it looks like he was running with his phone in his hand when he took it, but she realizes it’s just wet grass. Then it jerks to several silhouetted figures in the distance. All teenagers, clearly, but they’re so far away and the picture is so dark that it’s impossible to make them out. She looks at the time stamp on the video and sees that it was taken eight hours ago. After midnight, she calculates, trepidation sinking in. How am I supposed to feel about my daughter dating a fifteen-year-old boy who is out somewhere that late? She glances at Jason, to confirm his eyes are still on the paper, and clicks to move the story to the next frame, and her breath catches in her throat. It’s a foot, a boy’s sneakered foot—dirty slip-on checkered Vans like her brother wore in the late eighties—kicking a beer can. Fuck. And then in the next shot, a boy she doesn’t recognize is shown in shadow, the glowing tip of something in his hand. An e-cigarette, she realizes, and a split second later, she remembers something else her student Becca told her, how most kids have “private” stories, too, that only close friends can see. If this is what Tucker is posting in public, then what is he posting privately?
She clicks to Hannah’s account. Nothing new since her last post, from around 8:30 last night, when she posted a photo of herself with Birdie and two other friends, the four of them standing outside of La Moo, a local ice cream shop, arms wrapped around each other’s waists, all four of them in oversize T-shirts and those high-waisted mom-jean cutoffs that Charlotte thinks are horribly unflattering even on beautiful teenage girls. See, she thinks, an angry pulse beating behind her ears, Birdie should be dating a boy who posts pictures of ice cream, not—
“Stop spying on her,” Jason suddenly says. When she looks up, his eyes are still on the newspaper.
She taps quickly back to Tucker’s video and holds her phone out to him.
“What?” he says, throwing his hands up like she’s showing him something she just found on the floor.
“Look.” She nudges the phone toward him. “Look at what Tucker posted last night.”
He takes the phone and shakes his head, confused. “What are you—”
“Here.” She takes the phone back and taps the screen to replay it, pointing at the evidence. “Do you see that?”
“Are you sure that’s Tucker?” he says, squinting at the screen.
“It’s his account,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s his foot kicking the can but he posted it.”
“Yeah, but . . . show it to me again,” he says, and she studies his face as he watches it a second time. “For all we know, it’s not their can. It could be something they found on the ground.”
“Jason, come on. Look,” she says, tapping to get to the kid with the Juul or whatever the stupid thing is. “It’s an e-cigarette, Jason. Do you know what those do to kids? To their lungs? Kids end up with irreversible damage. They end up in the ICU. They did a whole thing about it on the Today show when I was there last week. I was in the greenroom with the doctor.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. They’re fifteen.”
“Jason.”
“It’s not good. I’m not saying I like it, but at least the kid holding the vape pen isn’t Tucker.”
“But what about the beer can?”
“I don’t know.” He rubs his hand over his mouth. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“He’s dating your daughter,” she says, and when he doesn’t react, she repeats herself. “He’s dating your daughter.”
“I’m not saying I like it, Charlotte, but this . . .” He sighs. She can tell he’s more rattled than he wants to let on. “This is our reality now. Teenagers do stupid shit. We have to accept that fact a little bit, right? Not every kid she dates is going to be an Eagle Scout.”
“Why is your first instinct to protect him?”
“Why is your first instinct to think the worst of him?” He picks up the newspaper.
“Forgive me for parenting,” she says under her breath.
“What?” He drops the paper.
“Never mind.” She walks to the sink to rinse her coffee cup. She does not have the desire or energy to fight with him today.
“It would be awesome if we could make it to lunch without you telling me something I’m doing wrong,” he says.
“Jason, please.” She turns off the water. “You started this.”
“Just give her some space, Charlotte,” he says. “Or spend some actual time with her, instead of spying on her through your phone.”
She freezes. “What did you just say?”
He stands, his eyes boring into her for just a moment before he looks away and walks with his dirty plate in his hand to the sink, where he lets it clatter into the basin.
“Are you actually accusing me of not spending enough time with Birdie?” she says to his back. He’s standing in front of the refrigerator, filling his glass from the water spigot on the door. “Because I’m pretty sure that I’m the one who picked her up from practice twice this week, once on a day when I had to leave a department meeting early to do so, not to mention all of the lunches I packed, the dinners I made, and the clean laundry folded in the basket in the hall upstairs—”
He holds a hand out, stopping her. “I’m so sorry, Charlotte,” he says. “How could I accuse you of anything? Not when you were actually here last week.”
She clenches her teeth, feeling a familiar anger build inside her. “I do not neglect Birdie,” she says evenly. “You know that. My entire life is this family.”
He turns to her, making a face like what she’s just said is incredibly amusing, and her stomach goes hollow. They both know that her schedule would suggest otherwise. Since the book came out, she’s been on the road constantly, slotting speaking engagements into the open spaces outside of her teaching schedule. The university has been happy to accommodate this. Actually, they sort of insist on it, realizing the opportunity that her newfound popularity presents: The more attention she gets, both in the classroom and on the road, the more they can use her as a selling point to get wealthy alumni to donate money to the school.