The Takedown(18)

This year, when Audra declared she was ignoring the holiday entirely, we other three girls all immediately said it was fine by us. If it weren’t for the Community Club’s holiday party—the best day of my entire year three years running—I’d also prefer to ignore Christmas entirely.

“Want me to do the back?” Mom asked.

“Sure.”

I handed her the comb and sat on the tub. For a minute we were quiet as she divided my hair into sections. Minus lots of laughter, this almost felt like old times.

“So why would someone do this to you?”

And this felt like new times. Now we were on our regular footing. Maybe Mom believed I hadn’t slept with Mr. E., but she sure as H-double-L believed I’d done something to deserve the attack.

I often wondered who was more upset by the fact that Mom didn’t like me anymore. Me or Mom? I’d go with me.

The thing is, back when Mom was in high school, she was essentially the same as me—driven, top of her class, and geeky about her extracurrics. The only difference was that Mom had glasses the size of hubcaps and she crocheted most of her clothes. Today, she’d have been (and was) an e-fashionista. But back then, she had no friends, spent lunch in the art room, and was ruthlessly picked on by the popular girls.

Never mind that Mom turned out a thousand times more successful; I still caught her browsing her old nemeses’ profiles every so often, wine in hand. If we saw a group of attractive in-crowd kids on the train, her go-to reaction was an eye roll. She wouldn’t watch any shows with me if the lead teen character wasn’t a social moron. In a thousand little ways, my mom was prejudiced against popular.

So imagine her horror when her own daughter escaped bad vision and turned out hot. (What? It’s okay for girls to say they think they’re ugly.) Imagine her double horror when her daughter shed her lifetime best friend and gained three gorgeous crazies instead. Never mind that the girls and I were nothing like those nasty losers who had abused Mom.

My whole life we’d been close. Now we were this.

I groaned. “Mom.”

“Kyle, there must be some reason someone would do this to you.”

“Clearly, because I’m an evil, awful person.”

She wrapped a strand of my hair a little tighter than it needed to be.

“What did Mac say about the video? I’m surprised he’s not glued to your hip tonight.”

I forced myself to take a deep breath. Audra would be thrilled if her parents showed this much interest in her life.

“He thinks it’s true.”

Working to keep her expression blank, she reached around me and took another bobby pin off the sink ledge. Mom had been so grateful for her high school boyfriend that she’d dated him into her late twenties. I was barely out of the womb a decade later when she began telling me what a mistake that was.

“Before I met Daddy I dated a lot of jerks,” Mom said.

“We weren’t dating,” I clarified, again. “And Mac’s not a jerk.”

“All I’m saying is there will be other boys.”

Like Mac? I doubted it.

But I didn’t say that; instead I went with “Duh, Mom. I’m seventeen. I know how upgrades work. Why settle for a Series Twenty-One when you can get a Series Twenty-Two Invisible?”

It was Audra’s line, not mine. And it couldn’t be further from how I felt. I figured Mom would whap me in mock disgust and then we’d both laugh. Dad would have laughed. Mom would have too, a few years back. Now she scraped the last bobby pin along my scalp.

“Ow.”

“Oops. Sorry. Well, I’m glad you have it all figured out.”

She thought I was serious. As if she couldn’t stand one more second of my presence, she sloppily made one last huge pin curl, then left with a “Don’t stay up too late.”

Frowning into the mirror—because I refused to cry over this again—I separated the last giant curl into four normal ones.

“Kisses.”

I’d never felt so lonely in my life.





I was in bed by nine. For maybe the first time in my life, I didn’t call out good night to my parents. I just shut my door and turned off my light. Then with the covers over my head and Teddy wedged beneath my chin, I hesitated only a click before whispering, “Call Mac.”

Fine. Somewhere in the world a feminist was gagging on her coconut water because I was calling the boy who’d just about cursed me out on the street, but would it have been better if I’d waited for him to call me? Eighteenth-century was more like it. Sometimes need ruled out circumstance. And Mac danced with me anywhere, anywhere—subway, street, cafeteria—if he knew it’d make me smile. He took me for mystery bike rides that ended in tacos and chocolate–peanut butter ices. Mac thought I was a good person, just the way I was.

Or at least he used to.

Our origin story went like this: I’d crushed on Mackenzie Rodriguez since the first day I laid eyes on him our freshman year. Forget his perfect bone structure, that soccer body, and those curls; he was mysterious, aloof, and rumored to be some kind of mathematics savant. The entire school crushed on Mac our freshman year. Nobody launched a Bet on who he’d pair off with, but considering the interest, someone should have.

And I’d have put every last credit on myself.