All We Ever Wanted(14)

Most of the names that filled the screen I recognized, and all were girls. A wave of relief washed over me, though the fact that boys hadn’t texted her didn’t preclude the possibility that something had happened with one of them. I tapped on Grace’s name. Her most recent message, the one that had just come in, read: Are u okay? Sorry I called ur dad but you scared me!! I hope ur not in too much trouble??

My thumb hovered over the screen for a few seconds before I really crossed the line. Trying to think and talk like Lyla, I typed: Ugh. So hungover. What happened?

   The moving ellipses appeared, then Grace’s reply came back with lightning speed: Um u don’t remember?

My heart raced as I typed as fast as I could: No. Tell me.

I held my breath, waiting longer this time.

U passed out. I’m sooo sorry I left u for so long. I didn’t know u were so wasted. What did u drink???? Did you hook up w Finch?

I don’t know, I typed.

Grace sent a sad-face emoji, and then, in a separate text: Something I need to tell you…There’s a pic of u being sent around. IDK who took it. But I think Finch.

My stomach dropped as I wrote: A picture of what? Do you have it?

Yeah.

Send it to me.

I steeled myself as an image appeared in the thread, too small to really make out. I tapped to enlarge it, then zoomed in to see my little girl, lying on her back on a bed, her breast completely exposed. I wanted to throw up, just as Lyla had last night, but my nausea turned to rage when I read the caption on it: Looks like she got her green card.

Fuck, I typed, forgetting I was supposed to be Lyla for a second, although I was sure she swore to her friends. What the hell does that mean?

IDK. He’s calling you an illegal or something. I guess because ur half Brazilian?

I’m a fucking American….And even if I weren’t…I typed, too infuriated to finish the sentence.

Grace replied: I know. I’m sorry. But at least you look hot!

I shook my head, marveling at the shallowness of the comment, and nearly outed myself—they’d both find out eventually, anyway—but decided against it. My heart simply couldn’t take any more.

   Gotta go, I typed.

K. TTYL, she wrote back.

I deleted the thread, my head filled with awful images, some of them imagined and one of them very real.



* * *



—

“YOU READY TO tell me what happened?” I asked Lyla a few hours later, when she finally emerged from her bedroom, looking some combination of queasy and embarrassed. I was sitting in our living room, where I’d been waiting for her.

“You already know what happened,” she said softly, likely because she and Grace had pieced things together. Her phone was in her hand now. She put it on the coffee table, screen down, then sat next to me, probably to avoid my gaze. “I had too much to drink.”

“One drink is too many. You’re underage,” I said.

She slid down on the sofa closer to me, then dropped her head to my shoulder. “I know, Dad,” she said with a sigh.

It felt like a ploy, a bid for sympathy. I stayed strong. “So. How much did you drink?” I asked.

“Not that much, I swear.” Her voice shook a little, though I couldn’t tell if it was from emotion or from her hangover.

“Is that typical for you?”

“No, Dad….It’s not typical for me.”

“So is this the first time you’ve gotten drunk?”

She hesitated, which of course meant that it wasn’t, but also that she was considering lying about it. Sure enough, she gave me a straight, unwavering yes.

I stood, circled the sofa, and sat in the chair right across from her. “Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said, clasping my hands together, my voice firm but not loud. “I need you to be straight with me. I won’t punish you if you are, but you have to be one hundred percent honest. Otherwise, your life as you know it is over for a very long time. Got it?”

   Lyla nodded but did not meet my gaze.

“When did you have your first drink?” I asked.

“Last summer,” she said, her eyes still glued to her lap.

“So you’ve been drinking since last summer?”

She hesitated for several seconds before nodding. “Yeah. Not all the time or anything. But yeah. Sometimes. Every now and then.”

I took a deep breath and said, “Well, let’s start right there. With drinking, generally.”

“Dad—” she said with a weary sigh. “I know—”

“You know what?”

“I know what you’re going to say….”

I stood up, calling her bluff. “Okay. Fine, Lyla. Your choice. We’ll just go the punishment route here.”

As I walked past her, she reached up and tugged on the back of my shirt. “I’m sorry, Dad. Sit down. I’ll listen.”

I stared at her a beat, then sat back down next to her, thinking once again of the birthday night Beatriz came back. She’d been drunk, of course. I made her leave, but she came back the next morning and stayed in town for about a week, promising Lyla she’d move back to Nashville—which I took as more of a threat than a promise. One night things got ugly, and Beatriz told Lyla that her dad had too big a temper problem for her to stay. Then she took off again.