Things Jolie Needs to Do Before She Bites It

by Kerry Winfrey

  My mood is, apparently, pretty obvious to everyone in my family. Abbi asks me what crawled up my butt and died (charming), and even Mom relaxes her hands-off parenting approach to gently chastise me.

  “Once you’re done familiarizing yourself with the couch,” she says one day while I’m sitting on it and mindlessly deciding which prestige television show I should binge next to take my mind off my surgery anxieties, “maybe you could actually go outside and get a little vitamin D.”

  I scoff and burrow farther into the couch. “It’s way too late to turn me into a nature lover. You raised an indoor kid.”

  “Maybe you can watch videos on your phone while you sit on the porch. I’ll take anything at this point, as long as you’re not moping in front of the TV.”

  I look up at Mom, who has her arms crossed over the St. Vincent T-shirt I bought her for her birthday last year. Between the way she dresses and the artfully rumpled non-style of her hair, she could easily pass for twenty-five if it weren’t for the wrinkles around her eyes. She’s beautiful, just like Abbi, and I find myself wondering once again if she’s embarrassed by me.

  “Come on,” she says, grabbing one of my hands and pulling me up. “We’re going out.”

  “You’re not going to make me experience the great outdoors, are you?” I whine.

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re eating sprinkle cones in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen.

  “We haven’t done this since I was, like, ten,” I say with a mouth full of ice cream. “You used to take me out for ice cream whenever I was upset to get me to talk about my problems and—Hey, wait!”

  Mom smiles behind her cone. “Ah, you’ve discovered my evil plan.”

  I frown. “This ice cream tastes like deception.”

  “You don’t have to talk about anything if you don’t want to,” Mom says casually. “But I’ve noticed you haven’t been spending a ton of time with your friends lately.”

  “Evelyn’s busy with her new girlfriend,” I say.

  “Okay. And Derek?”

  “He’s … um…” I try to think of a way to get out of talking about this with my mom, but honestly? I’m tired of being alone with this. “Derek said he liked me, and I yelled at him because he won’t talk about his dad, and now we’re not speaking.”

  I take a deep breath. Whew.

  Mom nods. “Derek likes you, huh? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. He’s always looking at you.”

  “Lots of people look at other people,” I mutter. “That doesn’t mean they want to make out with them.”

  Mom shrugs. “Yeah, but the way he looks at you is different. How do you feel?”

  “Oh no,” I say, crunching the last bite of my cone in my mouth. “Don’t school-counselor me. I’m not falling for this.”

  Mom puts up her hands in surrender. “I’m speaking as your mom, and as someone who’s been on both sides of a one-sided crush many a time. I’m taking off my counselor hat, promise.”

  I sigh. “I don’t know how I feel. There’s a lot going on right now. Junior year just ended, my surgery is next week, Abbi’s about to have a baby … The last thing I need is romantic confusion.”

  Mom smiles. “Unfortunately, love is pretty much always confusing, and it doesn’t ever show up at a convenient time.”

  “Well, that’s stupid,” I grumble.

  “But why the confusion?” she asks. “What’s not to like about Derek? He’s a nice-looking young man. He’s polite. You seem to like hanging out with him.”

  I have to hold myself back from rolling my eyes. “‘A nice-looking young man’? Please tell me you don’t talk to other high school students like that.”

  “Not the point.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I like Derek,” I say, ripping the napkin that came with my cone into tiny pieces. “It’s just that he only likes me because he knows I’m going to be fixed.”

  “‘Fixed’?” Mom repeats, raising her eyebrows. “Wait, did he say that?”

  I shake my head quickly. “No. He … okay, well, he said he’s liked me basically the entire time we’ve been friends. But if that’s true, then why didn’t he do something about it before now? Why wait until right before I get surgery?”

  “If it was that easy for everyone to talk about their feelings, then I wouldn’t have a job,” Mom says. “But back up. Who told you that you’re going to be ‘fixed’?”

  “No one,” I say. “That’s just the truth. Next week when I get surgery, Dr. Kelley is going to fix my face so I don’t look like this anymore. I’ll look like you and Abbi and every other woman in the world who doesn’t have an underbite.”

  Mom’s brow furrows. “You think you’re getting fixed?”

  “I mean…” I turn in my seat to face her. “Yeah. That’s what’s happening.”

  “No,” Mom says forcefully. “That’s not what’s happening. You’re getting a surgery to make it easier for you to eat, and talk, and to avoid more pain and inconvenience down the road. You’re not getting this surgery because there’s something wrong with you.”

  A ball of emotion starts to well up in my throat, making it hard for me to get the words out. “Um, okay—easy for you to say. Because there’s nothing wrong with you. You and Abbi are perfect and pretty and—”

  “Wait, is this what you’ve been thinking this entire time? That you need to get surgery to make yourself pretty?” She practically shrieks the last word, and I’m afraid the people inside the Dairy Queen can hear us.

  “I just … I just want to be pretty for once in my life, okay?” I say. “I’m tired of feeling like the weird one, and I’m tired of being the smart one, and I don’t want to be self-conscious anymore! You never, ever tell me I’m pretty, and I just want to hear it once, okay?”

  I lean back in my seat, breathing hard.

  “Jolie.” Mom leans forward to catch my eye. “I don’t talk about your appearance with you because I’ve never wanted you to think that’s all you have to offer. You and Abbi are both smart, and kind, and funny, and a whole lot of other things that matter way more than being pretty.”

  I swallow hard and stare at my lap.

  “But if it makes a difference—and it probably doesn’t, because I know I’m just your mom—I think you’re one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen. Top two, for sure.”

  I look up and give her a tiny smile. “Thanks, weirdo.”

  She crumples up the napkin in her hand. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, you know—your surgery.”

  “But I’ve been working toward this for literally years,” I say. “The braces, the palate expander, the second round of braces—”

  Mom shakes her head. “That doesn’t matter. It’s your life, and it’s your body, and you can call it off at any point, right up until the second they put you under, okay?”

  I nod, and watch a family sit down at a table on the Dairy Queen patio. I could back out—I could just stop worrying about dying and pain and everything else and forget about this.

  But is that what I want to do? Do I actually want to face a life with not only more pain and difficulty, but a life where I’m afraid to take a chance?

  “I’m gonna do it,” I say.

  Mom raises her eyebrows. “Yeah?”

  “I want to,” I say firmly. “Really. It’s my decision.”

  “Okay.” Mom gives me one resolute nod. “And what you want is what I want.”

  She backs out of the parking lot and merges onto the road. She turns on the radio, and I assume we’re done talking as she quietly sings along, but then she says, “It’s okay to be scared, you know.”

  I look out the window and watch the Brentley spring greenery rush by—the trees and grass and wildflowers that have just started to bloom. “Yeah, I know.”

  “I was scared to get into a relationship with your dad,” she says, her eyes still on the road. “He had to propose to me three times before I said yes.”

  My head
whips toward her. “Wait, what?”

  “I was scared about what it would mean if I got married,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You know, would I be changing who I was if I decided to marry this guy instead of making out with a different person in every city when I was on tour?”

  “Mom.” I cover my face with my hands. “No part of me wants to know these details.”

  “But finally, what I realized was … I was changing. I loved being in the band, but then I just didn’t love it anymore. I didn’t want to spend every night in a new city or every day traveling in a van full of empty fast-food bags. I wanted to stay in one spot, with one person. I was still me, it’s just that what I wanted changed.”

  “Right,” I say slowly. “Wait, are you trying to trick me into thinking about my feelings?”

  She laughs, a deep throaty chuckle. “I’m not trying to trick you. But you’re my daughter, and I know you’ve always been a little bit afraid of taking chances.”

  “Please don’t bring up the Great Birthday Tricycle Incident again.”

  “I won’t. You took a big chance in the musical, right? And look what happened; you killed it. I just don’t want you to live your whole life being afraid of change when you’re already a star.”

  I don’t say anything else, and we finish our drive home. Mom pulls me into a hug when we get out of the car, and I let her. We don’t tell Abbi or Dad that we already ate ice cream, and then we order a pizza, and I kind of start to feel sick. Not just because of the one-two punch of sugar and grease, but because I’m thinking about what Mom said about not being afraid, about being okay with changes.

  Maybe my surgery isn’t the only thing I’m afraid of, and maybe my jaw isn’t the only thing that has to change.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The next day, I’m in my room listening to Deep Dive, mostly because I miss Derek’s voice, but also because he finally posted that lemur episode, and I’m curious. As soon as he ends the episode with his trademark “Stay deep,” I tap out a text.

  Just listened to the lemur episode. Turns out the toilet claw was pretty much as gross as I imagined.

  I scroll through oral surgery Reddit threads that I’ve already read a million times and tell myself that I’m not waiting for his response. But of course my entire body is tensed, waiting for that text notification that never comes.

  I jump when I hear a noise, but it’s only the doorbell. I ignore it because (a) Abbi is home, and (b) the only people who ring our doorbell are the very nice but very persistent people who hand out those religious pamphlets featuring lots of drawings of flames, and I’m just not feeling up to that today.

  But a couple minutes later, I hear voices. One of those voices is Abbi’s, and she sounds angry. I shut my laptop and creep into the hallway. The voices grow louder and, yes, that’s definitely Abbi whisper-yelling. And unless she’s getting into an argument about those scary pamphlets, this is a weird situation.

  I walk down the stairs as quietly as possible, stepping slowly to minimize creaking. I pause at the bottom, where I can just see Abbi’s back as she holds the door half-open. She’s blocking the doorway, and I can’t see who’s outside, but I can see that she’s shaking.

  “I don’t want you to come here ever again,” she says in a voice that I think is supposed to be quiet.

  The person on the other side of the door says, “But I’m in love with you, Abbi.”

  My mouth drops open. Okay. So this is probably not the religious-pamphlet people (unless they’re trying some new recruiting tactics).

  “Are you still with her?” Abbi asks, and there’s nothing but silence from the other side of the door.

  “That’s what I thought,” Abbi says. “Goodbye.”

  She starts to shut the door but something—a hand, a foot?—stops it, and she shrieks, “Get out!”

  I can’t keep hiding back here anymore—if Abbi’s dealing with a persistent, romantically inclined pamphlet pusher, I have to help her.

  “She said get out!” I shout, and Abbi jumps back from the door, startled. Now that she’s no longer in the doorway, I have a good view of who’s outside. It’s a man who looks like he’s in his thirties, wearing a peacoat and a scarf. His glasses have thick frames and his hair is combed back. He looks like every caricature I’ve seen of an Intellectual. I’m not one hundred percent sure because I only saw part of the guy’s face before, but I’m pretty sure he’s the one from Gionino’s. And right now he and Abbi are both staring straight at me.

  I swallow. I don’t know why Abbi’s yelling at this guy who, frankly, seems like he’d be more into solving quadratic equations than being threatening, but whatever. “Didn’t you hear her?” I ask. “She doesn’t want you here.”

  Glasses Guy turns to Abbi, as if I’m not even here. “Is this your sister?”

  “Jolie,” Abbi says quietly, ignoring him. “Please go in the other room.”

  “But…,” I start.

  “I’ve got this,” she says, and the look in her eyes is so pleading that I ignore everything else—the weird guy at the door, her huge, vulnerable belly, the way she was just yelling—and walk into the kitchen without another word.

  A couple of minutes later, I hear the front door shut. Abbi walks in and hoists herself onto the barstool beside me with a huff. I don’t know what I should say or if I’m supposed to say anything, so I just stare at her until she turns to me.

  “So that was John.”

  My eyes widen. “The father?”

  Before I saw part of his face at Gionino’s, I always assumed John was mysterious and hot. Maybe he was a sexy one-night stand she met at a bar, or a beautiful foreign man she slept with before he had to leave the country, never to return. But I never assumed he was as thoroughly unremarkable as the man on our doorstep. He didn’t seem special or sexy. He seemed old. And, even though I only saw him for a moment, weak.

  Abbi nods, then looks startled. “Wait, how do you know that?”

  Crap. “Um, I maybe … saw your phone one day when he was texting you.”

  Abbi sighs, then thumps her head down on the island. “My life is a mess.”

  “Do you … want to talk about it?” I ask gingerly, and she opens one eye and peers up at me.

  “Not particularly,” she says, her crossed arms muffling her voice.

  Now it’s my turn to sigh. “Listen, I know what Mom says. That, like, you can talk about things in your own time. But I’m your sister. If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”

  Abbi sits up. “You really want to know?”

  I nod slowly, trying to hide my eagerness.

  “Okay,” she says. “But it’s a long, sordid, thoroughly pathetic story, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Consider me warned,” I say.

  “John was my sociology professor. I mean, at the time I called him Mr. Thomson, but I stopped calling him that once we started … well … you know…”

  “It’s okay.” I point toward her belly. “Mom told me where babies come from.”

  She snort-laughs. “So anyway, it didn’t start out as anything romantic. Like, I didn’t initially go to his office hours to seduce him or anything. I just wanted to talk about a paper, but it turned out we had a lot in common. He was … nice. So we started hanging out a lot. And then we started really hanging out a lot.”

  “Abs. I get it.”

  “Things were going really well for a few weeks. I even thought about inviting him over here to meet you guys.” She widens her eyes, like she’s astonished she ever considered it. “And that’s when I was like, wait, why do we only hang out sporadically, and why doesn’t he ever pick up when I call him?”

  “I don’t like where this is going,” I mutter.

  “Right? So I asked him about it. You know, the whole, ‘what are we, can we define the relationship’ conversation that’s so fun for everyone. And that’s when I found out that he didn’t live alone.”

  “You mean he has a roommate?” I ask.
>
  “Uh, yeah. You could say that. He has a wife.”

  “What?” I screech.

  “That’s why I couldn’t come over on certain nights. He only invited me there when she was out of town at conferences. So obviously I got super mad, and maybe I kicked in the side of his car, I don’t know.” She shrugs like it doesn’t matter. “And then two weeks later I found out I was pregnant.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He swore he was going to leave her, said he wasn’t in love with her anymore, she was more like his mom than his wife. You know, Cheating Guy 101 bullshit, like he was reading off a script from a really predictable movie. And I believed him for a little bit. But then it was like, ‘Oh, okay. Literally nothing is going to change. You’re going to stay married, and you’re going to stay an asshole.’”

  I exhale. “Wow. That sucks.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” she says. “Now my life is a complete shitshow, and I’m a pregnant, unmarried college student who lives with her parents, which, surprisingly, is not really where I saw myself ending up.”

  “We all make mistakes,” I say, thinking about my own life.

  “Have you ever made a mistake that involved sleeping with a married man and then getting pregnant?” she asks, eyebrows raised.

  I can’t exactly dispute that. “So why was he here?”

  She groans and puts her head back down on the island. “Because he’s back on his ‘No, this time, I’m totally going to leave my wife’ kick. Like, he thinks everything is going to magically work out somehow, but I’m not falling for it.”

  “Do you … want to be with him again?” I ask.

  “Honestly? No. I kind of don’t want to see him ever again. But I know that’s not possible, since I’m, you know, having his child. But until he either tells his wife about this or actually shows me some divorce papers, I’m not talking to him. I’m not making this baby be somebody’s secret.”

  I nod.

  “It’s just a mess. This situation. My life. Everything.”

  “So how are you going to tell Mom?” I ask.