The Way You Make Me Feel(4)

“I know, right? Anyway, I wasn’t going to take it seriously until this uptight B literally ordered me to drop out. So I’m going to stay in the game.”

He closed the oven and grinned at me as he straightened up and wiped his hands on the dish towel. “Ah, my Clara, always shaking things up.” My dad pronounced my name differently from everyone else, Clahhra instead of Clerra.

“You know it,” I said.

“When’s prom?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Probably soon since school’s almost over.”

“Time flies, Shorty. I can’t believe you’ll be graduating high school next year. Makes me feel old.”

I snorted. “You’re like two decades younger than everyone else’s dads.” My dad was only thirty-four; he had me when he was eighteen, just a couple of years older than I was right now. Patrick called us the Gilmore Girls.

“You age me, every day,” he said, smacking my leg with the dish towel. “Go set the table.”

I grabbed some plates and headed over to the round dining table tucked into a small nook in the apartment. Flo finally came out of hiding and rubbed against my legs.

“Anything as epic as my prom-queen nomination happen for you today?” I asked him.

“No.” He paused. “Well, actually, kind of.”

I pushed piles of bills and mail aside. “Oh yeah, what?”

“Vivian can’t work the KoBra this summer—she got an internship at a production company or something.”

“Bummer,” I said, moving another pile of mail out of the way.

“Yeah, have to find a replacement. I wonder who?” His voice took on a singsong quality.

“Please.”

My dad sighed. “Worth a shot.” Ever since he first started running the KoBra, my dad had been trying to get me to work on it. But the idea of being stuck in a hot, cramped truck for hours on end literally made me want to die. Although my dad had turned his life around from former-punk-kid to man-with-a-dream, I was happy to be kept out of it.

“Good luck, though,” I said as consolation. Then a colorful postcard caught my eye.

I picked it up, already knowing who it was from. The front of the card had a photo of a bustling outdoor market filled with beautiful baskets and textiles. When I flipped it around, the familiar handwriting made me smile. Large, loopy, and scrawled:

M’dearest Clarrrrrrrra,

You MUST come with me on my next trip to Marrakech. It was INSANE. The hotel we stayed at—oof! Like, fountains IN MY ROOM. Tiles were bananas. I got you a few trinkets that will look GORGEOUS on you. Also, hello, the men there are no joke.

I miss you, filha. But see you SOOOOON! Tulum awaits!





X x x X x x x x X


M?e

The contrast between my mom’s life and my own was never more sharply in focus than when I got a postcard from her travels while the smell of frying fish wafted over me. She was a social media “influencer,” paid to traipse around cool destinations.

“Why is August so far awaaay?” I whined as I tucked the card into my back pocket. My mom had invited me to Tulum this summer, and ever since I got the invite I had been counting the days, minutes, seconds. Because my mom traveled so much, it was really hard to pin her down. The last time we saw each other, she was in town for twelve hours at some launch party for a purse at the Chateau Marmont. I’m not kidding.

My dad made a noncommittal noise, not looking up from cooking. While most people thought my mom’s globe-trotting life as an Instagram influencer was glam, my dad had little patience for her. Probably had something to do with the fact that she had left him to follow her dreams. First it was fashion school, which she dropped out of. Then modeling, which my dad persuaded her to quit when she started struggling with an eating disorder. And now it was having four million followers while she traveled the world looking like a babe.

Sometimes I wondered if my dad was so cautious with everything because, if you thought about it, his relationship with my mom was a big failure. And that failure had repercussions that were wide and deep for our family. My dad had been a mess for a while, overwhelmed by raising me when he was almost a kid himself. In my opinion, the level of investment needed to share your life with someone was insane, and knowing the aftermath of how it came crashing down on my young parents? I always viewed it as a cautionary tale.

“Move your butt,” he barked, walking by me with the sizzling pan of fish. Placing it on the worn-out blue trivet, my dad glanced over at me. “Did you make sure your passport’s not expired?”

“No, but I will tonight!” I said as I sat down at my seat.

I couldn’t wait. It was going to be the best two weeks of my life.





CHAPTER 3

I pinned one of Patrick’s handmade buttons onto my prom dress. It was huge, round, and filled with rainbow glitter, and featured a drawing of a tampon with the words VOTE WITH YOUR OVARIES, VOTE CLARA.

We were milking the tampon moment for all it was worth.

It was the night of the junior prom, and the past couple of weeks had been spent hard-core campaigning. There were about one billion other things I should have been focused on as my junior year came to an end, but …

Weren’t there always more important things you could be doing instead? I chose to live in the moment.