by Frankie Rose
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My last class of the day is Media Law and Ethics, one of my favorite subjects, but I bolt out of the building as soon as Professor Lang excuses us. Usually I hang back to catch him after class. He doesn’t seem to mind that I have an exhaustive list of questions that always needs answering. Today, though, all I want to do is get back to my place and check my phone to see if Luke has called. I need to get this over with. The calm that I’ve found in being utterly inconspicuous here is going to be ruined until I tell him I don’t want to meet with him anymore.
I take the low steps outside my building at a jog and race up the four flights of stairs to my apartment, hoping Leslie won’t be there. She spends a lot of time studying in the library, especially after class, so there’s a possibility that I’m going to have some privacy. When I burst through the door, my heart sinks in my chest. Leslie sits on the sofa with her headphones in, tapping her bare foot on the worn leather as she types on her laptop. She glances up at me, cropped brunette hair all over the place as usual, and gives me a half smile, pulling out one of the earphones.
“Good run this morning?”
I wasn’t the only person Morgan had woken up by banging on the apartment door at five-thirty this morning. I pull a sour face and throw my bag on the table. “Sorry about that. She’s incredibly pushy sometimes.”
Leslie shrugs a shoulder. “S’okay. I got up right after you left and squeezed some study in. Everything worked out for the best.”
Leslie is a New Yorker through and through. Her parents are internet business gurus who set up a dot com company back in the early nineties. They sold up about five years ago and have been comfortably living off the interest of their amassed fortune ever since. Leslie’s studying business in the hope that one day she’ll have a fortune of her own, but in the meantime she’s okay with accepting the healthy amounts of cash her mom and dad throws at her. She’s like me in some ways; her bank account is always full but her parents barely know who she is. At least she has two parents. And one of them isn’t Max Breslin.
I kick off my sneakers and flop back onto the sofa, reaching my cell on the coffee table where I’d left it earlier before classes started. I normally take it with me, but I knew I’d be looking at it every five minutes if I had it on me today. I didn’t need that kind of distraction.
My heart speeds up as I hit the start button. Nothing. No texts. No missed calls. Nothing. I blow out the breath I’ve been holding and toss my phone back onto my pillow.
“Expecting a call?” Leslie asks.
I stare up at the ceiling. There are sticky marks dotted all over it where glow-in-the-dark stars were tacked to it when we moved in. I knew I was going to get along with Leslie the moment she suggested we pull them down. “Dreading one, more like,” I mutter.
She hmms and goes back to her studies. I set myself up at my desk, placing my phone beside the keyboard so I can answer it straight away if Luke does call. He probably knew I had classes all day and he’s waiting until this evening. That thought makes my stomach roll. I spend half an hour trying to type up the vague notes I scribbled in class, but they are less than useless. I give up in the end, and I type in my email account details and decide to clear out my inbox instead. Two new messages wait for me.
The first is from Amanda St. French. My mom. She filed the paperwork to go back to her maiden name before they’d even finished shoveling the soil into my dad’s yawning grave. She didn’t go to the funeral. It was just Brandon and I. The priest banged on for twenty minutes about the grievous sins committed by people in this life, and how we needed to beg for repentance if we were ever to be accepted into heaven. That had scared the crap out of me when I was younger. My dad hadn’t been religious, and I was haunted for years by the idea that he was burning up in hell because he hadn’t had the opportunity to repent. After that, I spent a long time angry, hoping that he really was burning in hell. Now…now I just don’t know what I think anymore.
The subject bar on mom’s email is blank as usual. Her message will be the same script she sends me at the beginning of each month, detailing that she’s deposited my allowance in my account. She always manages to make it sound like I’m not grateful—not grateful that she is paying my way at college, not grateful that she finally helped me escape Breakwater once and for all, when she was the person who abandoned me there in the first place.
Aviary,
Find attached a copy of the remit for your allowance. Remember to keep hold of these for your records. I have increased the amount this month in light of the approaching holidays. You might like to do something with your friends at Christmas. I am headed to Hawaii with my sister. She’s had some troubles with her new husband and wants to go snorkeling to take her mind off things. I assume you’ll be headed back to Brandon’s for Thanksgiving?
Hope you are well,
Amanda.
Aviary? I choke back a dry laugh. She can’t even spell my new name. That error could be forgiven by the fact that it’s new and she is still learning to use it, but the other things, the other hurtful aspects of the email, make my blood boil. She’s heading to Hawaii with her sister for Christmas? Oh, I wasn’t under any illusion that I’d be spending Christmas with my mother despite the fact that we live in the same city now. No, I am more stunned by the way she said my sister instead of your Aunt Clare. And going to Brandon’s for Thanksgiving? The real piece de resistance is her sign off, though. Amanda. At least she used to admit to being my mother. Now it appears that her sister is no longer my aunt, and she is going to be Amanda from here on out. Tears prick at my eyes as I stare at the screen, refusing to blink until the text starts swimming.
I clear my throat and screw my eyes shut for a moment. When I open them, I hit the delete button. I am stronger than this now. I can’t let her affect me anymore. The next email is from Brandon. I open it wearily, and my temper spikes. Mom blind-copied Brandon into the email she’d sent me. That was obviously her way of letting him know that I was being foisted off on him for yet another holiday.
Brandon had been my dad’s best friend since elementary school. They’d played football together through college and they’d fallen in love with and married sisters. Brandon’s wife, Mom’s younger sister Melanie, died from cancer when I was two, and Mom hasn’t been able to handle Brandon ever since. She says he reminds her of Aunt Mel, so she keeps him at a distance. Apparently it’s a repeating pattern of hers, neatly bundling together all the things she wishes she could forget.
