by Mia Archer
“Nothing’s wrong at school mom,” I said.
Now there was the lie of the century. Okay, maybe the lie of the decade. I was pretty sure there were at least a few politicians out there who’d probably already made the lie of the century even though we were barely a fifth of the way through the thing.
“Obviously something’s wrong or you wouldn’t be here right now,” she said. “Tom! Get in here please!”
I sighed. Of course she’d want to get my dad involved. And of course it sparked one of their usual spats. I swear. It was like they looked for any excuse to argue with each other.
“Is it important?” he shouted. “I’m sort of busy right now.”
“You’re not busy!” she shouted. “You were going over those depositions and we don’t need to worry about that for at least another two weeks!”
“They need to be finished in two weeks which means I need to worry about them now if we’re going to have anything in two weeks!” he shouted back, irritation entering his voice.
“Right. I’m going to head to my room while the two of you work this out,” I said.
My mom’s hand shot out. Her finger pointed at me and it was like she was using the Force or something to hold me in place. It was a mom ability she hadn’t used on me in awhile.
“You’re staying right there young lady,” she said. “And your father is coming in here now!”
She raised her voice for that second part. I heard my dad cursing as he extricated himself from whatever was going on at his computer screen and then he stepped into the kitchen. He blinked a couple of times in obvious surprise when he saw me standing there in the kitchen with mom looking very pissed off.
“What are you doing home so early?” he asked.
I sighed. I figured there was going to be no getting out of this. One of the bad things about having a couple of lawyers for parents was they were very good at whittling away at any resolve I might have.
Basically I knew the truth was going to come out, like it or not, and the best thing to do was get ahead of that truth and figure out how the hell I could spin it to my advantage.
“Something sort of happened at school today,” I said.
“Yeah?” dad asked, taking a seat at the table. For a surprise mom also sat down across from me. She actually looked concerned.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t entirely fair. My parents might not be the greatest husband and wife in the world, but they’d always been there for me. I shouldn’t be so down on them when they’d always been good parents.
Even if they’d shown me a terrible example of what it meant to be in love. Though from a certain point of view they’d been great parents in that regard by showing me what not to do.
“I suppose you guys are going to get the full truth at some point,” I said.
“Right,” my mom said, her tone making it clear that was a given.
They’d made it very clear when I started to enter into what they called my “difficult teenage years” that they would always get to the bottom of whatever was going on, and I could save all of us a lot of time and heartache by simply coming clean at the beginning.
And they’d been absolutely right. The couple of times I’d tried to hide something from them it’d come out. At least once they got interested enough to ask.
“So what’s going on?” mom asked.
This really wasn’t going to end well. I should’ve tried to cover it up by waiting to come home. I could’ve gone to the mall or something, though I was pretty sure there was an ordinance against teenagers being at the mall on a school day.
The point is I could’ve done something other than coming home to where I knew my parents would be working in the office at the back of the house. I'd never believed all that crap people said about criminals making mistakes because they wanted to be caught until that day.
“Fine,” I said. “I’m going to tell you everything, but I’m telling you now it’s not my fault.”
Mom hit me with a thin smile. “If I had a penny for every time we heard that in our work…”
I frowned, but I launched into the story. At least parts of the story. I had to tell them about my business on the side and everything that had happened related to that, but I wasn’t quite ready to come out of the closet to my parents just yet.
No, that was a conversation for another time. I didn’t want to confuse the issue by giving them a gay daughter and a daughter who was in deep shit at school on the same day.
When it was all done they sat there staring at me for a long time. I wasn’t sure which way this was going to go. I figured they could either be royally pissed off at me or they would be ready to kill me.
“So you’re telling me that asshole principal tried to get you to give him your phone?” my dad asked.
He looked very different from usual. Clearly he was pissed off, and from the way mom was leaning over the table she was too.
“Wait, so that’s the only thing you’re worried about out of that whole story I just told you?” I asked.
Mom shrugged. “I mean what you were doing wasn’t exactly nice, but it wasn’t exactly the wrong thing either was it?”
“Exactly,” my dad said. “It’s the same in our job. People think we’re horrible for defending criminals, but we’re doing our job to make sure the system works and keep the government honest.”
“Right. And that principal of yours asking for your cell phone so he can go searching through it? That’s not being very honest,” mom said.
“Though he’s not exactly the government,” dad said. “I mean he works for the government, but you know what I mean. I want you to go over everything he said.”
I cleared my throat. Looked down and blushed just a little. Then looked back up at them.
“What is it young lady?” my mom asked.
I pulled out my phone. Unlocked it. I probably should’ve realized the mania my parents would have for this sort of thing when they told me to always lock my phone. Always lock it with a code, even, and not a fingerprint because that was easy to spoof and apparently the cops didn’t have to get a warrant to use your fingerprint.
I pulled up the recorder app on my phone and hit play on the latest recording.
Sure it was a little scratchy. It was a little difficult to make out everything that was said because my phone was in my pocket, but it was clear enough that they could hear the request for my phone. They could hear him trying to threaten and intimidate me.
Basically there was enough in there to be a lawyer’s wet dream. And from the way both of their faces lit up I could tell I’d done something right.
“As far as we’re concerned you did nothing wrong,” my mom said.
“Exactly,” dad said, surprisingly on the same page with her.
Then again, they were often on the same page when it came to parenting. It was just that they couldn’t quite seem to get on the same page when it came to everything else in their relationship, which was a damn shame.
“By the time we get done with this that principal is going to be really hurting,” mom said.
“You bet your ass,” dad said.
All the tension drained from me. I’d been under a hell of a lot of stress lately, and it didn’t help having the principal threatening to get me in trouble on top of everything else.
They were being so kind, so nice to each other for a change, that I figured maybe it was time for me to admit to something that I figured might upset them. But I figured why not strike while they were obviously sympathetic?
I looked at both of them in turn. Dad seemed to pick up that there was something else going on here.
“What else?” he asked with a sigh.
Great. They thought I was about to tell them something that’d get me in trouble. And maybe it would. I took in a deep breath. Let it out in a sigh.
“Well it’s sort of about my relationship with Steve, and why I’ve decided it’s not going to be a relationship for much longer…”
&nbs
p; 29
Apologies
Ashley Timmons says
I’ve had to do a lot of a difficult things since the whole breakup artist thing hit. And it hasn’t been a pleasant experience, let me tell you.
Like facing down my parents. Realizing they had my back was nice, to be sure, but for a little while there it’d been touch and go. Basically it had been terrifying thinking that they might ground me for life, but somehow I managed to face them down.
Yeah, that was pretty difficult.
You want more difficult things? Let’s talk about coming out to my parents after I realized they were lending me a sympathetic ear. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how far we as a society have come on the whole LGBT thing. Its still terrifying to come out to your parents.
They could be the most hippy “live and let live” people in the world and you still wonder if they’re going to react poorly because there are stories all over the Internet about otherwise reasonable parents suddenly deciding it’s different when it’s their kid who’s coming out.
I’d read some of those horror stories once I realized exactly what was going on with me. Once I’d realized I was probably going to have one of those conversations with them at some point.
Yeah, I can tell you all about terrifying things. Let’s talk about facing down the principal. Standing up to him even though it was pretty clear he thought he was going to get exactly what he wanted.
Yeah, talk about terrifying. I don’t care how good of a student you are. There’s something about getting called into the principal’s office that is worrisome.
But I managed to get through that okay too.
Which brings me to the single most terrifying thing I’ve done since this whole thing started. Even more terrifying than starting this website to tell the truth, and that was pretty intimidating even though it seems to be working out.
No, the worst thing I’ve had to do since this all started? That would be telling Maddie about everything. Admitting to her that I was the breakup artist.
It went about as well as you might expect, but not for the reasons I was expecting. And let me tell you, I’d been running quite a few potential disaster scenarios through my head since this whole thing started.
This has been difficult to write. It’s part of the reason why I’m still sitting here rambling on instead of getting down to it. But I suppose I’ve told the whole story up to this point, and there’s no point in shying away from the nasty details now.
It’s time to get into the nitty-gritty. No matter how much it sucks to relive this part of the story. And it all started with me waiting around in the mall, because of course I’d be waiting around in the mall. That was where our whole relationship had blossomed, after all, so it’s fitting that our first big fight would happen there too.
So there I was waiting in the food court. Looking around and anticipating seeing her, but at the same time terrified of seeing her.
Because I knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to go well when we met. When I finally told her everything.
When I finally saw her she looked beautiful. Like we’re talking the hottest thing I’d ever seen.
Maybe some of that was that she was the girl who’d finally made me realize it was totally possible for me to have a girl crush. Maybe it was that she was the first girl I’d ever fallen for. The first person, really, I’d ever fallen for. And I’d fallen hard.
The point I’m trying to get at is I looked at her and I was astounded. I didn’t think it was fair that anyone could look that beautiful, but there she was.
It only made it hurt all that much more knowing she was probably going to be really pissed off by the time this was all said and done.
Her smile broke my heart as she walked over. She gave a little wave. Did a hypnotic sway with her hips that caught my attention. That had me thinking that maybe I didn’t have to admit to anything after all. Maybe we could forget all about this. Maybe Valerie or the principal wouldn’t go public with my secret and everything would be fine.
Yeah, and maybe monkeys would fly out of my butt, to quote a ‘90s classic.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked as she took a seat.
I blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“You look like somebody died or something,” she said. “You’ve been acting weird lately. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
Now there was an interesting question. Did I want to tell her what was going on?
No. There was no chance in hell that I wanted to tell her what was going on. But that didn’t change the fact that I was going to tell her what was going on.
I took in a deep breath. Let it out in a sigh.
“I suppose you know everything that’s been going on at school lately?”
“The school lunch tastes like garbage,” she said. “There’s a rumor that one of the teachers is dating a student, but nobody knows who it is or if it’s a girl teacher or a guy teacher. I think they have that rumor at just about every school though.”
“No, I’m not talking about that stuff,” I said. “I’m talking about…”
I paused. Thought about what to say next. I had no idea what to say next.
So I just blurted out. Sometimes you just needed to get it out there.
“Have you read the school paper lately?”
“As a rule I try to avoid reading the thing whenever possible,” she said. “Why? Was there something important in there I should’ve been aware of or something?”
“Well there might be something in the paper that…”
Her face split into a grin and I got the feeling I’d been had.
“I know exactly what you’re talking about. All that stuff about the breakup artist. It seems like a pretty big deal. I didn’t even think she existed!”
Again I was struck with something about the way she talked. Talking about the breakup artist as a “she.” Like she suspected maybe I had something to do with the whole breakup artist thing and now she was trying to get me to reveal something.
Or, again, maybe it was just that I was projecting. Yeah, that had to be it.
I’d always been so good about covering up exactly who I was. It wasn’t like she could actually suspect something, right?
“Yeah, well…”
I stopped. I didn’t really know how to proceed. Again, we’re talking something that was pretty terrifying. Admitting to her that I was the breakup artist? That was a pretty big deal.
And for all that I thought she couldn’t possibly know, I guess at the same time I’d sort of lost all my confidence. After all, I’d been pretty sure Valerie couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on, and yet she’d pretty much gotten me to admit everything with her mind games.
“Do you want to know a secret?” Maddie asked, leaning in closer.
I decided to play along. After all, it was a distraction from what I was about to tell her. From what I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell her.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s your secret?”
She leaned in even closer. Her eyes darted around as though she thought somebody might overhear. Not that there was much worry of that. We were at the mall on a weeknight, after all, which meant the food court was pretty much deserted.
“I might have emailed the breakup artist just to see what she’s all about,” she said.
A shiver ran through me at those words. She might have emailed the breakup artist to see what she was all about. Never mind that Maddie was obviously still digging. Trying to get me to admit something with all those pronouns she was playing with.
Yeah, that was bad enough, but admitting she’d emailed the breakup artist…
Well that might not have meant all that much if I didn’t know what I did. If I didn’t have those emails with somebody trying to get Ashley Timmons to break up with her boyfriend. I couldn’t shake that overwhelming certainty that the person who wanted me to break up with my boyfriend was sitting right across from me in the food c
ourt.
I licked my lips. “And what did you email the breakup artist about?”
Her smile took on a mischievous glint. And she leaned back.
“Maybe I’m interested in seeing somebody break up with her boyfriend,” she said. “I’ve heard the breakup artist only works with people who deserve it, seems like a pretty noble Robin Hood type thing she has a going for her, and I figure the person I want to break up with her boyfriend really needs to break up with her boyfriend. Though I’m not above admitting that I have certain selfish reasons for wanting that break up to happen.”
I leaned forward. I couldn’t help myself. Everything she’d said pointed to her being the one who wanted to employ my services to break me up, and I spoke before I thought and blew it.
“I knew it was you!”
There were lots of things I knew in that moment. I knew she was the one who’d tried to get me to break myself up with Steve. Also? I knew it was a mistake to say anything the moment the words left my mouth. Because Maddie looked genuinely surprised. I had my answer about whether she knew something or I was simply projecting my paranoia.
“What are you talking about?”
My mind raced. There had to be a way to get out of this. There had to be a way to deflect. Make her think I was talking about anything but her email to the infamous breakup artist. Only the more I cast about trying to find something the more I came up with a complete and total blank.
My brain had stopped working.
When she spoke again she sounded very serious. “What are you talking about Ashley? How did you know it was me? What does that even mean? Do you know something about the breakup artist?”
Recognition was dawning on her face. That wasn’t good. I should’ve shut my big mouth when I had the chance, but I guess my big mouth was going to go right on getting me in more and more trouble.
I was well and truly caught. Sure I could’ve taken all that advice I’d been tossing around about not talking to reporters or the cops, or somebody who wants to act like they’re the cops, but this was Maddie. I couldn’t lie to her.
