Pretty Reckless (All Saints High)

by L.J. Shen

  “Why do you think I have a hold on Penn? You said it yourself. He is in love with someone else.” I turn to him. Ripping my gaze from Penn and Adriana is like taking off a Band-Aid. I can hear her laughter bouncing on the trees. It’s everywhere, and I can’t escape it. Her happiness is my misery.

  “Because”—he turns to me—“you’ll tell the whole world he lives with you if he doesn’t. You will blackmail him, my darling.”

  My mouth falls open. The consequences are clear.

  He’ll lose his captain badge.

  Get kicked off his football team.

  And his friends and peers would hate him for living on the right side of the tracks without fessing up about it.

  “Sylvia told Gus about her brother’s little secret,” he explains calmly. “Teenage hearts are highly traitorous, but it worked to my advantage in the end. See, after your stint in the girls’ locker room, I sent the message across to lover boy that he was not to put his hands on you anymore. Now, after it is obvious that he has, I have no choice but to retaliate. And what’s more beautiful than killing his future and having him suspended from the team?”

  Every hair on my body stands on end.

  Via betrayed Penn. She destroyed his acceptance letter, so to speak. She never wanted to come back to start over. She came back to get even.

  “Tell me you understand, that you will comply, and that this matter is sorted, Miss Followhill.” He stands up, parking his hands on his waist. His crotch is in my face, and I feel the need to throw up again.

  I have an epiphany at that moment. I know what I need to do to save everyone.

  Penn.

  Adriana.

  Harper.

  Bailey.

  Most of all—myself.

  I nod, my heart hardening as I come to terms with what I have to do.

  “Crystal clear, Principal Prichard.”

  I crawl to my room with what little energy I have left. Every bone in my body is sore. My muscles are stiff, and my butt burns with each step I take.

  The house is quiet. Bailey and Melody are at ballet. Dad’s at work. Penn—probably still at practice, or with Adriana and Harper. I don’t even have it in me to feel relieved that Via isn’t here. I haven’t seen the hideous pink Jeep she ended up accepting (“Mel, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me! So, so beautiful, thank you!”), and there’s no sign of anyone else in the house.

  Pushing my door open, the sour scent of alcohol and wine fills my nostrils, and I stumble back, my spine hitting the opposite wall.

  As the door creaks ajar, I get a better view of my room and see the reason for the odor. My bare toes are soaked and sticky on the floor.

  My champagne aquarium wall is shattered. The hammer Via used is still hanging in the middle of the glass, from which the pink champagne filters down, making a hissing sound of a freshly opened beer bottle.

  I stagger inside, supporting myself on random furniture. I’m trying to open my eyes all the way, but the skin around them is too swollen and tender. As I enter deeper into my room, I notice a piece of cream-colored paper stuck to a wet piece of glass that’s still standing in the aquarium. I recognize the note instantly. It was torn from my journal. I pluck it out.

  Tell them it was an accident

  Or your mom will find out you killed her dream, too.

  My eyes roll inside their sockets, and my knees give out. Everything turns black, just like the book where I keep all my secrets, and there is no light at the end of my tunnel.

  Love is so much like death

  Certain

  Absolute

  And out of our control

  The future is always blissfully photoshopped.

  We’re always a few pounds lighter, a few brain cells smarter, and soaked with life experience and healthy logic.

  The sad reality is, you never grow up to be who you’d imagined yourself as.

  Through adolescence and my twenties, I thought I’d be the best mother in the world. Motherhood was the end game, the goal, the quest. I was so acutely aware of the mistakes my own parents had made with me, and I vowed to be perfect.

  From the outside, parenting looked almost easy. Whoever said it doesn’t come with a guidebook was wrong. There were dozens of thick, helpful books—all of which I read while pregnant with Daria—and a few principles I thought were vital for success:

  Don’t raise your voice to your kid.

  Don’t lose your shit (see: number one).

  Give them space.

  Trust them.

  Encourage their independence.

  Shower them with love and gratitude, and they will grow up to be good humans.

  I was bullied into becoming a ballerina by parents who wanted their daughter to be everything my mother couldn’t afford to be. So when Daria came along, and I saw from a very young age that she was spirited, rebellious, and full of the same anger her father harbored—raw fierceness that couldn’t be contained—I didn’t push her to follow my footsteps. Ballet, after all, is harsh and demanding. I always made sure she knew she wasn’t expected to be like me. But it seemed like the more choice I gave her—the harder she tried to prove me wrong.

  I wonder where it all went wrong while folding the kids’ clothes in the laundry room. Doing the laundry is not a task I need to do with the amount of help I get around the house, but it’s a telling job when you raise teenagers.

  I can see, smell, and find all their secrets.

  I found Daria’s pompom string in Penn’s back pocket. Penn’s mouthguard in the pocket of Daria’s cardigan. There is still a resistant bubblegum-pink lipstick stain that refuses to leave one of Penn’s shirts. A lipstick I know belongs to my daughter. Bailey’s clothes are always full of mud—she rolls with Lev, our neighbor, on the hills of El Dorado. Via is the only one who is careful not to show where she’s been. She is, therefore, the kid I know who hides the most.

  She thinks she is fooling us. But the fact of the matter is, I let her get away with her behavior because she’s been through so much.

  I stop when I get to Daria’s pajama dress. It is sticky and heavier than the rest of the clothes as though it’s not completely dried. I turn it around and sniff—a mother always sniffs her kids’ clothes—and it smells like aloe.

  Why would she put aloe all over her behind?

  Clutching the fabric in my fist, I leave the laundry room to ask her just that.

  Over the past few months, I’ve been begging for crumbs of her attention, knowing somewhere deep inside me that I don’t deserve them. I’ve failed her one too many times. She always seemed so strong and opinionated, and I made the gravest mistake a parent could. I treated her like an equal.

  But Daria is not my equal. She is my daughter. My very sensitive daughter. She’s been hurting beyond belief recently. I’ve done nothing to rectify this situation, only escalating it by bringing in more factors that drove us apart.

  I make my way toward her room and stop when I hear my husband’s voice behind her door. “Of course, you can tell me, Dar. You know there’s no judgment inside these walls.”

  Frozen, my jaw slacks. A part of me, the logical part, tells me to turn around and walk away. She is confiding in Jaime, not me. But another part—the mother in me—refuses to let go. I resent my own husband for having a superior connection with her. I resent the entire world, including Bailey, and Via, and Penn, and our friends for coming between Daria and me.

  “Principal Prichard hit me.”

  The air leaves my lungs, and I stumble backward. Silence. My husband recovers after what seems to be like a full minute.

  “Tell me everything, please.” His voice is barely restrained.

  She does. My daughter spends the next ten minutes chronicling her last, scarring, infuriating four years. She doesn’t leave anything out. Not the fact she destroyed Via’s letter—something I knew but never confronted her about—to how she started writing in the journal, and how Prichard used it against her. She breaks down when sh
e confesses to deleting Grace’s messages in New York. Not that I needed to hear it from her to know it to be true. I figured it out when I finally found Grace’s number and called her. By that point, I could hardly blame Daria. I was a no-show for the past six months of her life. Too busy saving Via and Penn and giving Bailey everything she needs. The way I saw it, until the New York incident—my own wake-up call, if you will—I was staying out of her way, just as she had asked me to do repeatedly.

  Daria always seemed so distant and independent as if she had it all figured out. How could I have been so stupid?

  Daria acts like eighteen-year-old Mel. Dazed, confused, and hurt.

  In New York, when Bailey and Via fawned over me, and Daria awarded me with long yawns, I did what I always do when I get frustrated with her; I built up an ice wall from the same variety she raised every time I came knocking on the doors of her heart.

  I shouldn’t have built more walls.

  I should’ve broken them down.

  Smashed them and stormed in and given her everything she needed so she wouldn’t have to search for them in an abusive educator who took advantage of her.

  I hear my daughter crying in her room and muster the courage to tiptoe and peek through the slit in the door. They are so quiet and content and wrecked together. My beautiful, perfect husband sits on the edge of my daughter’s bed, hugging her close to his chest and kissing the crown of her blond head. She is falling apart in his arms, and my heart hurts so much I can’t even breathe.

  I should be hugging you.

  I should be comforting you.

  Collapsing against the wall, I suck in air. Sourness rises in my throat, and I swallow it down, but it keeps coming up, wanting to spill over. I want to purge whatever’s inside me on the floor. All the frustration and hate and animosity toward the person I gave birth to. This has been going on for far too long. I need my baby back.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, the love of my life?”

  The love of his life. I know he means it. Jaime would die just to put a smile on his mini-me’s face.

  “I can’t stay here, you know. I’m not going to let Penn throw the game, and I won’t be able to show my face at school after the journal goes public.”

  “It’ll never come to that. I will hit Gus up tonight.”

  “No.” I hear Daria sniff and know she is shaking her head. She’s made up her mind. “It’s too late. My reputation is shit. If the truth comes out, people will know I killed All Saints High’s chance at taking the championship, and Gus and Via will spin it against me. Besides…” She takes another deep breath. I know why. I know because I fold their clothes and tuck their secrets into their closets every day.

  “I need to put some distance between the Scullys and me.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m so sorry, Daddy. I know you didn’t want this to happen. And I know I let you down a gazillion times. By letting the Hulk win. By being jealous. By being mean. By not being the best version of myself I could have been. By falling in love with a person I had no right to fall in love with.”

  “Shh,” he murmurs into her hair, cradling her. They are moving back and forth to a soundless lullaby, cocooned inside a world I’m no longer a part of.

  “You are the perfect version of yourself, kiddo. The real deal. We’re the same, you and me.” He kisses her nose, then the tears from her eyes. “When I was your age, I was frustrated and confused. I always had the best intentions, but my actions came out all wrong. As for falling in love with the wrong person…” He chuckles, shaking his head.

  A ghost of a smile finds my lips.

  Don’t say it, Jaime.

  “I’m a lot of things, but a hypocrite is not one of them. I fell in love with my high school teacher. And guess what? We still made it work. Don’t let people tell you who to fall in love with, and don’t think just because the past few years have been shit, the rest of your life will follow suit. Look at your old man. I got my happy ending. You will, too.”

  She mulls his words over, munching on her lip.

  “I need to get away.”

  “From your problems? Not a good idea.”

  “No, from the people I’ve hurt. There’s a lot of healing to be done. I need to start fresh where I’ll have a chance to reinvent myself. To be who I know I can be, Daddy.”

  He says nothing and everything at the same time. His eyes tell her it is hers. The fresh start. He would never deny her anything. Not even if it means leaving us.

  I want to hit him. Scream at him. Hug him for keeping our daughter’s mental state above water all this time when I couldn’t. Another bone-crushing hug passes between them. Daria is having the most defining moment of her adolescence without me.

  That’s my punishment for my mistakes. That’s the price I have to pay.

  “Do you think Mel would let me leave next semester?” She tears away from their hug, blinking up at him.

  Mel. Oh, how I hate my name on her lips. It’s Mom, I want to scream most days.

  Jaime grabs her cheeks and draws her in to kiss her forehead. “I think she loves you too much to deny you anything, including breaking her heart.”

  My fingers tremble around the steering wheel as I zip toward Gabe Prichard’s house.

  Fifteen years ago, after things calmed down and Jaime and I came back to Todos Santos, I decided to volunteer at All Saints High. Form a connection with the other teachers and clean up my reputation for my kids’ sake. I figured if I wanted to stay in this town, I needed to prove that I’m not some deranged cradle snatcher.

  Connections. It only took one phone call for me to find out where the bastard lives.

  I’m not in the right headspace for confrontation, but I have no doubt I’ll be pulling it off because it’s not about me. It’s about my daughter. Neither Jaime nor the kids know where I went. I ordered a pizza and stormed out the door without explanation, leaving a trail of freshly done laundry in my wake. Daria was upstairs, oblivious to her mother’s meltdown a few feet away. I’m glad she didn’t witness me at my worst when I found out what he did to her. The last thing I want is for her to feel ashamed or humiliated about what he did to her.

  I cut the engine in front of a Tudor-styled house on the outskirts of Todos Santos and pop my knuckles, inhaling a ragged breath.

  Do not kill the bastard. Your kids still need you, and you’ll be of very little help to them if you’re in jail.

  Easier said than done. When I slam the driver’s door and dart toward his front entrance, not one bone in my body can resist going apeshit on his garden, and house, and face.

  You touched my fucking daughter.

  I forgot to add—even though I tell the kids to keep it clean, I curse in my head—a lot.

  For the sake of appropriateness, and for my plan to succeed, I fix my ballet-teacher smile on my face before I knock on his red door. My relationship with my daughter may be beyond repair, but no one can hurt her like this and get away with it, regardless of the fact she may not fully accept me ever again.

  He opens the door dressed in pale gray cigar pants, a crisp white shirt, and a frown that collapses into a wince the minute he sees my face. Was he expecting my daughter? I can’t ask even though I want to.

  “Mrs. Followhill. This is quite unexpected.”

  “Is it, though, Gabe?” I tilt my head, wearing a smile I’m pretty sure is downright nuts. “Let’s think about it for a second. Is my visit really a surprise?”

  He does the whole charade. The scowl. The blinks. The grave shake of his head.

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re referring to.” His voice is calm, but his left eye is twitching. I’m already under his skin, and I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet.

  “I’m referring to the fact that today, I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what the sticky, persistent stain on my daughter’s pajamas was before realizing that it was aloe. Aloe she put on her butt to ease the pain of you ruthlessly beating her w
ith a ruler.”

  I deliver the news flatly, knowing if I let my emotions slip, I’ll mess it up. I can’t mess it up. Not when Daria is involved. I’m done letting her down.

  “That’s quite the accusation, Mrs. Followhill, and I must say, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, but the blood has drained from his face, and he is clutching the edge of his door as though his life depends on it. I take a step toward him, tilting my chin up so we look each other in the eye.

  “Should I refresh your memory? Because I have full access to my daughter’s phone, contacts, and text messages, and I believe one of us has been very reckless while messaging my Daria.”

  This is both a blunt lie and an educated guess. While I would never entertain the idea of breaching Daria’s privacy this way, I still remember my own affair with her father. The lust. The wildness of the situation. The feral need to keep in touch after school hours. He is probably saved under an alias, and maybe he calls her from a separate phone, but there is no way they don’t have a connection outside of school.

  He shifts from foot to foot, moving his hand over his face when he realizes I might have hard evidence against him.

  “Mrs. Followhill, please do not patronize me in that department. You were in my position. These kids,” he says, referring to my husband as a kid, “are of legal age, with raging hormones and wicked plans. You, of all people, know lines get blurred.”

  “One,” I say, “Daria was not of legal age when she was fourteen and first came to you. Jaime was legal long before I touched him, so don’t compare. And two”—I point at him accusingly—“I never hurt any of my students. Do you realize how much trouble you’re in, Mr. Prichard? I don’t think you do.”

  Another manipulative twist of my knife. I’m talking to him as though he’s already admitted to it.

  “Regretfully, I feel like this matter should be settled through my lawy—”