A minute later, the phone rings and my dad hits the speaker button.
“Hello?”
We wait. A recorded voice comes on.
“This is the Vista High School office of attendance calling to report that your child missed one or more periods today. The absence will be marked as unexcused unless we receive a doctor’s note or notification from a parent or guardian explaining that the absence was due to a family emergency.”
My dad stops stirring. My mom turns the water off. I stand with my back to the phone, chopping.
Shit. I forgot about the phone calls.
“Caitlin, did you cut school?” Mom’s voice is straining to be patient.
I stop chopping and turn around, thinking maybe they’ll feel bad when they see what their onion is doing to my eyes. But they just stare at me.
I can’t think of a good excuse, so I just tell them, “I hate my photo teacher.”
“Ms. Delani?” Mom’s eyebrows lift in surprise.
“You liked her last year,” Dad says. My parents glance at each other, but they don’t say anything. I can see my mom get frustrated. Her lips are tight and she starts taking all these short breaths. Dad sighs.
Finally, he says, “Caitlin, you can’t ditch school. There are going to be a lot of people in your life who you won’t like and you’re going to have to learn to deal with them.”
“Ms. Delani is a very, very nice woman,” my mom says. “She taught you and Ingrid so much last year.”
“She didn’t teach me anything,” I say. “I wish I’d never met her.”
I turn to look out the window but it’s dark, so all I see is us, reflected. The most unlikely of family portraits. My mother, an apron tied over her suit, her hair falling out of a barrette; my father, leaning against the oven, one hand rubbing his forehead in exasperation; and me, staring straight at the lens, onion tears drying on my face. I try to think of some way to explain this situation to them, but my mom is going on and on about the dangers and consequences of skipping school until it seems so absurd that she’s reacting like this over something so small.
“Why are you laughing?” Mom asks me, her voice hurt and angry.
“I can’t help it,” I say, giggling now. “You’re acting psychotic.”
She stops talking. She stares at me hard, then wipes her hands on her apron. Calmly, she walks to the stove and turns it off. She turns toward me and I brace myself for a hug. But she brushes past me, lifts the cutting board from the counter, and scrapes the chopped onion in the trash can.
“I’ll be in our room,” she says to my dad, and leaves the kitchen.
27
I eat three grape Popsicles for dinner and keep a few Cure songs playing over and over pretty loud so I won’t drive myself crazy trying to hear if my parents are talking about me. I don’t care about not getting along with them. I mean, it’s completely normal, right? I can’t think of anyone who always gets along with her parents. Ingrid used to fight with Susan and Mitch all the time, even though I thought they were pretty nice. Still, I keep waiting for a knock on my bedroom door because we’re just not like that, my parents and me. We snap at one another sometimes but we don’t really fight.
The knock comes about an hour later, just a light tapping on the door that I can’t hear over the music at first.
“Honey?” Mom says. “Someone’s here to see you.” I can tell from her voice that she’s just talking to me out of obligation. She hasn’t forgiven me yet.
I walk to my door and open it. My mom’s eyes are swollen and her mascara is smeared off. It hurts to look at her.
“Should I send him up?” she asks.
“Okay.” I peer skeptically at my sweatpants and ratty T-shirt; whoever it is, he is not going to see me at my best.
Mom patters back downstairs.
I hear her say, “Go on up. Last door on the left.”
Quickly, I throw the covers over my bed, trying to fake some semblance of order.
“Hey,” says a guy’s voice.
I turn around.
Taylor Riley is standing in my room.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh,” he says, looking confused. “Well, we’re having a quiz tomorrow in precalc. He just announced it today. And it’s on the homework but you don’t know what the homework is, so I thought I should come tell you. You know, in case you wanted to, like, glance over it or something.”
I don’t answer him because I’m staring at his shirt. It says, in big letters across the front, Will WORK FOR SEX.
He looks at me. “What’s wrong? Is there something on my . . .”
He looks down at himself. I watch his face turn pink and then red.
“Oh my God,” he says. “Oh shit. I completely forgot I was wearing this. Oh my God, your mom. I can’t believe she let me into your room.”
He looks so embarrassed, and I would laugh except for how weirded out I am that he came over to my house to tell me about the homework.
“Do you think she noticed?” he asks.
“It’s kind of hard not to.”
“Yeah, but does she wear glasses usually? I mean, she wasn’t. So maybe she couldn’t really read it because it was blurry?”
I say, “She doesn’t wear glasses,” and I can’t help but laugh because he’s acting so funny and his face looks red next to his blond hair and those sideburns. “So what is the homework?”