I go completely still as Tess’ gaze flicks my way. With my eyes, I plead for Maxx to keep a secret. The last thing I need is for Bio Mom to find out about Maxine. If she knows I saw my sister—and will continue to see my sister—things between me and Tess are going to get real sour, real fast.
“Not really,” Maxx replies carefully, mulling the words over as his eyes find mine again. Tess giggles—legitimately giggles—and then gives the three of us a coy look that very likely means something I’m going to hate.
“Are you interested in anyone in particular?” Tess continues, her gaze flicking between me and Maxx. Parrish makes a sound behind me, somewhere between a sigh and a scoff.
“Mom, this isn’t going the way you think it is,” he says, but she waves him away with a hand, her eyes glinting mischievously.
“You can’t protect your little sister forever,” Tess replies with about as much subtlety as a dump trunk. There’s nothing about that sentence I like. It smacks of this wistful dreamy quality, of a life where I’ve always been here, where I’ll always belong, like Parrish really is my big brother instead of … whatever it is that he is.
“Protect my little sister?” Parrish echoes as I glance back to find his face rife with confusion. He blinks a few times, and it fades away into a scowl. He gives me such a strange look, one that’s brimming with red-hot … something, that I’m not even sure how to respond to Tess’ statement. “Oh, that’s right. Mom, Maxx and Mia are dating.”
“It’s Dakota,” I snap back, my cheeks flaming a brilliant crimson as Tess nods her head once and Maxx lets out this sexy little male laugh that very clearly communicates his discomfort with the situation. Pretending Maxine doesn’t exist is one thing, but I cannot and will not pretend to date him. “And we are not going out.”
“We should probably talk about the rules anyway,” Tess says, giving my crop top a displeased flick of the eyes. “But I won’t embarrass you in front of the boys.” She gives me a wink, and I’m instantly reminded of that meme from the movie Mean Girls. ‘I’m not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.’
Cue internal groaning.
“Thanks?” I reply, with a very clear question mark at the end of the word. Back home, the rules for dating were pretty simple: hit age sixteen, introduce your love interest to the grandparents, and suffer a humiliating lecture on safe sex. I have no idea what Tess’ rules might be, but I can take a guess: I’m not going to like them.
“No boys in your room unless the door is open; that’s one I should probably mention straight-off though,” Tess muses, and Parrish narrows his eyes to slits. He seems to do that a lot when he’s having trouble controlling his emotions. But I already know that rule, obviously. She freaks out if she finds that Chasm’s closed the door during our study sessions.
“No worries on that one. I really do have to go,” Maxx says, but I feel that strange heat in my chest, the fire that demands I rebel against this woman who claims to be my mother but really, in all reality, is just a stranger to me.
Besides, I’m so salty about the talk show thing that I could be sprinkled on fries.
“Why can’t I have a male friend in my room?” I query, as if I don’t understand the implications. “What about a female friend?”
“Well, no girls for Parrish and no boys for you,” Tess says, as if that’s the most reasonable statement in the whole world, as if it’s just a ‘duh statement’.
“What if I like girls, too?” I ask, because I do consider myself about a two on the Kinsey Scale of sexuality, meaning bisexual with a stronger preference toward boys. “Can I still have girls in my room?”
“Shit,” Maxx murmurs, rubbing at his mouth to hide his smile. He gives me a sidelong look which I ignore in favor of staring at Tess.
She looks completely dumbfounded by my question.
“I …” Tess starts, while I just stand there with my hands clenched tight by my sides. I cannot even believe that she cares so little about my wellbeing that she’d force me to participate in a talk show, of all things, when I explicitly told her that I didn’t want to do it.
Just more proof that my wants and needs don’t matter. It’s all about her.
“I guess no girls in your room either,” Tess spits out finally, a deep frown forming on her prettily painted lips.
“Why?” I continue, just as Kimber comes into the room and pauses to look between the two of us. You’d have to be denser than a box of bricks to miss the tension brewing in that room. “Because of the sex thing?”
“Yes, because of the ‘sex thing’,” Tess replies, making quotes with her fingers. She’s getting angry now, all of that playful coyness from earlier erased. But she didn’t really think she could force me into this interview without some repercussions? Just thinking about it makes my anxiety spike to ultra-high levels. Already, I’ve got nervous butterflies and nausea stirring.
“Why can’t I have sex if I want? It’s my body.”
Maxx keeps his hand over his mouth while Parrish’s eyes go from slitted to wide-eyed and Kimber makes a strange yelp of surprise.
Tess, well, I’m not really sure what her expression is supposed to be, caught somewhere between a cringe and a glower.
“Until you’re eighteen, it’s my body; I made it.” Tess stares me straight in the face as I grit my teeth.
“So that’s what it all comes down to then? I’m your property. My body isn’t mine; it’s yours.”
“Precisely,” she replies, crossing her arms over her chest as my anger burns into a wild inferno.
“I had plenty of sex back home,” I blurt out, which is actually a total lie. I haven’t had sex at all, ever. But I want to see her reaction. I want her to hurt and burn the way I’m hurting and burning. “What do your stupid rules matter to me now?”
“What an ugly lie to tell,” Tess blurts back, abandoning her coffee as she storms over to me, holding out her hand. “Give me your phone. And once you get upstairs, you can give me your laptop and your PlayStation, too.”
The color drains from my face as I back away from her.
“No.”
I’m already lonely. I’m already sad. I hate it here. I hate it, and I hate her, and I hate Kimber, and I really hate Parrish who’s staring at me like he’s never seen me before. If I give her my devices, I’ll lose my connection to the world at large, to Danyella, to Lumen, most importantly to Maxine.
“Now, Mia. You can have it all back on Monday provided you’ve given me a proper apology.”
“I said no,” I repeat, taking a step back as everyone stares at me. “You can’t offer me plastic surgery, tell me I can’t date, and then shame me for challenging your rules.”
“I said I was sorry about the plastic surgery thing,” Tess snaps out, but like she isn’t even sorry at all, like that moment we shared outside of the country club meant literally nothing. “Give me your phone, Mia, now.”
“My name is fucking Dakota!” I scream back at her, and then I’m turning on my heel and running for the stairs as fast as I can. Just before I duck into my room, I notice that Parrish’s bedroom door is open. Without giving myself time to question the decision, I chuck my phone onto his desk and then slip back into my own room, slamming the door and locking it.
As I expected, it doesn’t take Tess long to appear with keys in hand, Paul hovering just behind her. The way he frowns at me and pushes his glasses up his nose, I can tell that he doesn’t like me, that he maybe hates me, that he most definitely wishes I didn’t live in his house.
“Phone, now,” Tess snaps at me, red-faced and tear-streaked. She storms over to the TV and yanks out the power cord, collecting my PlayStation and my laptop, too. I let her take those things because I know I can only push this so far. “Phone,” she repeats, but I just shake my head, grabbing my hoodie off the bed and tossing it at her feet. I even turn out my pant pockets.
“I lost it,” I tell her, and then I just stand there as Paul and Tess proceed to tear apart my room, emptying th
e almost-empty drawers on the dresser, digging through the nightstand, dumping my backpack on my bed.
By the time they’re done, I don’t even feel like a person anymore, just a thing.
That’s the issue with being a teenager: you need guidance and help, but you don’t need to be torn apart, ordered around, and dehumanized. Why the fuck don’t parents get it? Why, why, why?
“If I find out that you’re purposely hiding that phone from me,” Tess begins, letting out a harsh laugh before she rubs at her face and Paul puts his arm around her shoulders. “Keep this up and we’ll start stripping privileges one by one.”
She turns and takes her husband with her, leaving me alone in the middle of my trashed but nearly empty bedroom. As soon as she’s out of sight, I sink down to the floor, crying into my palms in as silent a way possible.
When I hear movement, I lift my face up and find Parrish standing in my doorway, staring at me.
He doesn’t say anything, but I brace myself for an onslaught of meanness and petty bullshit. Instead, he moves over to the bed and starts picking things up, putting odds and ends into the nightstand drawer before refolding the clothes.
“You don’t have to do that,” I whisper, my voice cracking. I feel strung-out right now, empty. And so, so freaking sad.
Parrish scoffs at me and then gives a violent scowl.
“And you don’t have to pretend like you don’t need the help,” he snaps back at me. He pauses for a moment to dig around in his hoodie pocket, withdrawing my phone and then moving over to stand in front of me. He hands it out, and I sit there for a minute, just staring at it. “You shouldn’t trust me. I’m likely to tattle.”
I take the phone carefully from his hand, my fingertips sliding across his palm. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I’m almost certain that he shudders at the touch.
“They shouldn’t have trashed your room like this,” he murmurs, which is up there in the ‘nicest things my stepbrother has ever said to me’ category. I mean, other than, “Your nose looks good to me.” That was a real one-liner right there. Almost dropped my panties to the floor.
“I want to go home,” I say, my voice husky and broken. I’m not sure why I say it to Parrish of all people. Like he even cares. He pauses near my dresser, putting a stack of refolded clothes in the top drawer before turning to glance at me. I can’t bear to look at him anymore. He’s too pretty and too mean, and he confuses me with the things he does. One minute, he’s tearing my grandparents apart with Chasm’s help. The next, he’s helping me clean my room.
“I know, but that isn’t going to happen.”
My head snaps up and I stare in his direction, feeling the jagged pieces inside of me shift around and cut. But Parrish doesn’t look mean right now, just contemplative. He moves over to stand beside me again, crouching down so that we’re eye to eye.
“When I told you that Tess was never letting you go, I wasn’t just being mean.”
“I hate her,” I tell him, and he looks away, toward the windows and the weak flicker of sunshine on the surface of the lake.
“You shouldn’t,” he says, his voice this deep but apathetic drawl. Just a boy with too much money and idle hands. I suddenly want to kiss him because I must be a goddamn masochist. “She’s a good person, a good mom.” He looks back at me then and his pretty eyes drop to my lips, taking them in like he thinks I might have some pretty features, too. “Usually,” he adds, standing up suddenly.
I follow after him, wringing my hands.
“You know, girls are conditioned to be people-pleasers,” I start, and Parrish gives a small smirk.
“Well, you could’ve fooled me.” He says it in just such a way that it straddles the line between insult and compliment. I take a deep breath as I move over to my backpack and lift it from the floor by a single strap. It’s ripped, too, sewn back together by my grandfather’s careful hand. I added a piece of hot pink duct tape to keep it altogether. When Tess saw it, she cringed.
We don’t understand each other, like, at all.
Two sides of one coin, the faces forever separate, never able to look one another in the eye.
“But I’m so tired.” I rub my hand over my face before tossing the empty backpack on the end of the bed, bending low to gather the emptied contents. It’s like a timeline of my life at the Banks’ house: the stuffed unicorn I’ve had since the day Saffron brought me to her parents, a framed picture of my first camping trip when I was seven, a sweatshirt from my middle school. Go Lions! “I know I should be able to be happy here, with such a big house, and I mean, they bought me a freaking sportscar—”
“If money and things equaled happy, then my dad wouldn’t drink a fifth of scotch every Friday night and Tess wouldn’t have spent every February twenty-seventh crying over a cake with the words Happy Birthday, Mia written on it.” Parrish shoves the top drawer of the dresser closed and comes over to stand just behind me. Too close, really. Way too freaking close. I can feel his warm breath stirring my hair, that fresh citrus and clovers scent giving way to goose bumps on both of my arms. “Just let me know when you’re ready for that design, Dakota. My ink is ready.”
Parrish moves away from me, heading into the hallway before I can think up a reply, and closes my door behind him. I wait a moment, text Chasm a quick I’m sorry and curl up on my bed for the rest of the day.
The Martina Cortez Show is the most watched talk show in the world with over four million viewers tuning in via live stream, daytime television, and app viewership; it’s propped up by the host’s granddaughters and their famous TikTok channel. They have more followers than any other account in creation.
I am not happy to see them waiting when we arrive on the set.
Crap, crap, crap, I think as I follow Tess down a long hallway, assistants fluttering around us like birds, flapping their hands like wings and talking into microphones. My bio mom seems perfectly comfortable in this environment, strutting toward hair and makeup like she’s the damn host of the show. Makes sense, I guess, seeing as this isn’t exactly her first time being interviewed. Being the most famous crime/thriller writer since Agatha Christie might have something to do with that.
Personally, I’m freaking out on the inside. I do okay in social situations, but only ones that I choose. Being forced into a situation that I don’t want to be in gets my heart fluttering and my palms sweating. I suppose I could throw this whole thing by giving into the panic attack waiting in the wings, but I just can’t bring myself to make a scene.
That … and Parrish is here. It seems sacrilegious somehow to keep showing him all these deep emotions when he’s given me almost nothing in return. Glancing back, I see him slouching in a Whitehall Academy hoodie and slacks, hands tucked into his pockets. He gives me a look that would take a team of specially trained psychiatrists to unpack, so I just turn back around and pretend like I’m not hyperaware of his every move.
“Mia Patterson!” one of the Cortez girls says as they appear on either side of me with matching white smiles and flawless cat eyes; they’re not twins but they might as well be. “Who’s your friend?” Francisca Cortez—she’s the older of the two, the one with a pierced nose, I recognize her from her videos—says as she glances over my shoulder and bites her lower lip flirtatiously.
A small spark of alarm goes off in my chest, but I don’t look too closely into it. Doing so would be akin to admitting that I give at least a few fucks about Parrish Vanguard.
“Uh.” That’s how eloquent I am. Uh. It’s all that’ll come out as I glance back and see Parrish smiling in a way that isn’t human; it’s supernatural, how pretty he is.
“Parrish Vanguard,” he says, holding out his hand and offering a coy look to both girls. “Mia’s brother.”
I grit my teeth.
There’s no way that was accidental; he’s coming for me in a big way.
“My name is Dakota, first off,” I begin, but nobody’s looking at me. Parrish is eying up the two sisters like he’s getting rea
dy to do another bullshit TikTok on their fuckability rating. By the time he’s finished shaking their hands, I can see that he’s settled on Francisca as the better of the two. I can practically see the gears in his head turning: charm activated, debonair smile initiated, flirtatious laugh on full-power. The urge to kick him in the shin just takes over me, and I end up heeling him hard enough in the leg that he curses. “And second, he is not my brother. Stepbrother, actually.”
“Oh, stepbrother, huh?” the younger girl—I think her name is Maria—says as she rakes her gaze up and down Parrish’s lean form. “I sense a forbidden romance in the making.”
“Maria,” Francisca scolds, having apparently forgotten that I exist as she twirls some dark hair around her finger and moves in so close to Parrish that they could kiss, if they were so inclined. “Are you going to be on the show, too? Because we have our own hair and makeup people.” Francisca lets out this horrifically fake laugh, one that’s dripping with promise and innuendo.
I envy her in that moment. She seems so confident, so sophisticated and self-assured, so comfortable in her own skin. Meanwhile, I trip over shadows and spend more time plugged into online games than conversations with real people.
One quick glance between Francisca and Parrish and it’s obvious that he’s buying what she’s selling. His gaze flicks briefly back to mine, but he yanks it away just as quickly and I’m left wondering if I imagined it all.
“Last thing you need is some Millennial in skinny jeans screwing it up,” Francisca continues, hooking her arm with Parrish’s.
“How does being a Millennial have anything to do with hair and makeup?” I ask as the girls exchange looks and then laugh. Guess I just don’t get it.
“Nah,” Parrish says, smiling coquettishly. That stupid fuck! I think as the Cortez girls steer us into a smaller side room that’s decked out in horrendous shades of pink animal print. “I’m not in the show, but who cares? Pretty sure old boomers are the only ones who watch daytime TV.” My eye twitches as the Cortez girls giggle and flirt, but I take a seat where I’m told as a young girl with a shaved head and a septum piercing steps forward to take over my hair and makeup duties.
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