“Whatever,” I said, slowly getting up, my hand still braced on the couch. “Maybe if you were a real mother.”
She looked like she was about to cry, but she didn’t. Her breath got caught in her throat for a second, but she swallowed it back down before she spoke.
“I’m sorry, okay?” she said. “I’m sorry I let you down. But you scared the hell out of me, you have to understand that.”
“Yeah,” I said, my shame slowly building, “I know, no more mixing.”
“I’m serious, Vic. You have to be careful.”
“I know,” I said. The tears running down my face were involuntary, prescription drug-induced, I was sure. “I will.”
“You promise me,” she whispered in my ear as she pulled me into a death-grip hug.
“Ow, Mom,” I said, mid-hiccup, “my arm, remember?”
“Oh. Sorry. Just go to bed, okay? I have the day off tomorrow. I’m all yours.”
“Okay,” I said, extricating myself from her. I wandered off to my room as she dumped the rest of Lord Windermere down the drain, shaking her head.
“I’m going to kill you,” she called.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said. “That’s child abuse.”
Seven
I slept in late the next morning, and when I finally woke up it felt like there was a mountain of sand on my chest, weighing me down, and I could barely get myself out of bed.
“The beast stirs,” Mom said, coming in with a mug of coffee and putting it down by my bed. “Thought you could use some caffeine.”
I picked it up and took a small sip. “This stuff tastes like paint thinner.”
“Oh, so you’ve been drinking that, too?” she said. “We really have a lot to talk about.”
“Would you grab my T3s from the bathroom?” I asked, putting on my most pathetic face. “Please?”
“One,” she said, offering up a cautionary finger and wagging it in the air. “I’m getting you one pill.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, taking another sip of coffee and grimacing.
She came back to my room with the pill and a glass of water in her hands, and I swallowed it gratefully before laying back down on my bed. Mom sat next to me and ran her fingers through my hair. “So,” she said.
“So?”
“Do you want to start, hon?”
“I told you I was sorry about last night,” I said, brushing her hand away from my head.
“I’m not so sure you did,” she said.
“Well I meant to.”
“So …?”
“So?”
“Go ahead.” She pushed my nose like it was an apology button.
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I drank your wine.”
“And the pills?” she asked.
“Mom, I need those pills. My arm hurts so bad.”
“I know you think you need them,” she said, “just take it easy, all right? And don’t ever mix like that again. You could have killed yourself.”
“I thought you were the one who was going to kill me.”
“I still might,” she said, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“Hello, 911?”
“Har har. So. Now that we have that settled …”
“That’s settled?” I asked. “Wow. I got off easy.”
“You have no idea.”
“Some. So, are we done here? My head seriously hurts.” I stooped to take another sip of coffee and hoped that the Tylenol would kick in soon.
“Surprise, surprise,” she said. “But before I leave you to wallow in your hangover, I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about the tour.”
“What’s there to talk about?” I asked.
“Well, maybe I’m reaching here, but I’m going to go ahead and use my stunning psychic abilities to guess that maybe there’s something about the tour that’s bugging you.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “It sucks that you’re gonna be gone for so long, but I know it’s important to you, so whatever. It doesn’t matter. Go.”
“It won’t be that long, sweets,” Mom said. “You’ll barely even notice I’m not here. We can video-chat all the time!”
“Yeah, uh-huh,” I said. “I know.”
“Is this about our birthdays?”
“Come on,” I said, “I’m not some dorky six-year-old. I can handle us not being together for our birthdays.”
“So what then?” she asked.
“What do you mean what?”
“Why is this bothering you so much?”
Mercifully, the Tylenol was starting to kick in, and I could feel my whole body start to relax. My tongue loosened, slip-and-sliding around in my mouth, and I heard myself say, “Because you didn’t even ask me to come with you.”
Immediately embarrassed at how childish I sounded, I curled up onto my side, facing the wall. But Mom lay down on her side next to me and hugged me close with one arm around me, like we were spoons in a drawer. “I wish you could,” she said quietly into my ear. “I really do. But it’s almost two thousand dollars to fly to Tokyo and back again, and we just don’t have that kind of money right now.”
“Oh,” I said, mad at myself for not having considered the cost of the trip in all my disappointment.
“I’m working as much as I can for Sal just so I can afford my own ticket. I’m really sorry, sweets. I wish you could come. I’d love it if you could. But I’m pretty sure the only way we could afford it is if we bought two one-way tickets.”
“Look out, Tokyo,” I said to the wall, “here we come.”
“You think they’d let us move into one of those cat cafés?” Mom said, sitting up.
“What are you talking about?” I said, turning to face her.
“Come on, Vic, you’ve heard of them, haven’t you? They’re these places where they charge you by the hour and you get to hang out with a whole bunch of cats!”
“Wow,” I said, “heaven really is a place on earth, huh?”
“It’ll be great. We’ll eat sushi and soba all day, and we can get matching koi-fish tattoos!”
“Mom, seriously, where did you learn about Japan, Sailor Moon?”
“Wikipedia,” she said proudly.
“No wonder you’re so wise.”
“Of course. So wise that I’m willing to take my chances on your temporary good mood and tell you that I think you should give this Shaun guy another chance.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“I’m serious, hon. It can’t have been that bad. Besides, you’re going to need to work up some juicy gossip for our video-chat dates while I’m away.”
“You’re terrible,” I said. “This is my life!”
“And you owe it to yourself to give it a decent shot. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“You mean other than accidentally taking him to a beach full of naked old men for our first date?”
She sat up and leaned back on her hands. “How full of naked old men are we talking exactly?”
“Full-full,” I said, sitting up, too. “Neon thongs and beef-jerky skin as far as the eye could see.”
“Ha! Oh god, that’s hilarious. You should be writing this stuff down, it’s a great story. Ooh, or a film, a short little movie!”
“Mom!” I smacked her leg. “This is real! Not some stupid punchline for your next burst of inspiration.”
“Have it your way,” she said. “But real life always makes the best stories.” She picked up my coffee mug from the floor. “You want any more of this?”
I shuddered. “Ugh, no. Thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, and was about to leave when she turned back and said, “I really do think you should give that boy another chance. You could use someone to keep you company. Besides Lucy, I mean. And your gran.”
“You could use someone to keep you quiet.”
I went over to Lucy’s house later that day so we could start plotting out our game. Lucy comes over to our place more often than I go over to hers bec
ause she says she likes how quiet our apartment is — when Mom’s not around, anyway — but I love Lucy’s because it’s the exact opposite, always busy, and that day was no exception. Lucy’s dad was fussing around in the kitchen cooking something that smelled delicious, while her aunt kept watch on a giant pot on the stove and two of her little cousins tore through the place, pretending to be Batman and Bane.
“Come on,” Lucy said, shutting the door behind us to her parents’ small home office, “this is the only place my cousins won’t come looking for us.”
She moved some stuff off of the big desk on the far side of the room, turned on the computer and opened up Twine, which she’d downloaded, to start our new game fresh from the beginning.
“Shouldn’t we make some notes or something first?” I asked.
“That just means typing stuff out twice,” Lucy said. “Let’s just do it.”
“Okay,” I said, less than convinced that trying to write a game together without a plan in mind was such a great idea.
Lucy started off by writing the scene for our opening page, and she told me to look away as she started typing frantically. Obviously she’d had an idea in mind already. I distracted myself by looking at the piles of papers and framed family pictures hung on the wall until finally Lucy told me that she was finished.
“What do you think?” she said, leaning over me to reread her words while I looked at them for the first time on the screen.
I’d only read a few lines of what Lucy had written before I started to get a weird feeling in my stomach. It was about a young woman time-traveller who found herself transported to an ancient Mayan village.
“Cool,” I said, trying to be as positive as I could. “This is sort of like an LoA tribute, right?”
“Yeah, I guess, kind of. But it’s just a starting point. I mean, we could go anywhere with this — the story’s wide open.”
“I just meant …” Was I wandering into a friendship bear-trap? It didn’t feel like there was any good way out of this. “Maybe we should do something more original?”
“I don’t only write fanfiction, you know,” Lucy snapped.
Definitely a bear-trap.
“I know, I know. Look, I’m sorry, okay?” I said, trying to back-pedal. “I was just hoping that our game could be, you know, more personal. I mean, I thought the whole point of making our own game was to tell our own story.”
“Fine,” Lucy said, “go tell your own story, then.”
“What?” I said. “We only just got started. Let’s just keep going and see what happens. I like this as a start, I think that there’s lots we can do with it.”
“Sure,” Lucy said, “we can copy Lore of Ages IV, scene by scene. Because that’s all you think I can do, right?”
“That’s not what I said!” I was getting mad now at how indignant Lucy was. She was just pissed that she’d been so obvious. That wasn’t my fault.
“Whatever,” Lucy said, turning back to the screen and deleting what she’d written to start over again.
I could feel anger tightening like a fist inside my head, and I was about to leave without saying another word when I remembered that I had absolutely no other plans for the rest of the summer. That Mom was about to leave. And getting another chance with Shaun definitely wasn’t going to happen. She Shoots sounded absolutely amazing, but there was no way I could go on my own. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but I was just going to have to apologize anyway.
I sighed and sat back down next to her. “I’m sorry, okay? I was a jerk. I’m sorry.”
Lucy wouldn’t even look up from the screen, which was still blank. “You were.”
“I know,” I said. “Forgive me anyway?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “I guess so.”
“Come on,” I said, “let’s grab, like, some paper and a pen and sketch out some ideas.”
“Fine,” Lucy said, grabbing a pen and a small spiral-bound notebook from the drawer of her parents’ desk and sitting down cross-legged on the floor. “You’re so retro”
“Blame my mom,” I said, taking a seat next to her, “she’s got me, like, stuck in the nineties.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon brainstorming until we finally came up with an idea that both of us liked. We decided to make a game about a creepy old house, where you could explore different rooms that led from one to another. We couldn’t decide on what the ending would be, or even a name for the game, but figured that coming up with descriptions for each of the rooms and what was in them would give us lots to work on before we had to figure out what the point of it all was.
After that, I started going over to Lucy’s house almost every day so we could build our creepy mansion together, room by room, and it was amazing how quickly the next few weeks passed. Lucy and I were in our own little world, texting each other with new ideas for the game when we weren’t together working on it, and I was so glad we’d found a way to work together without killing each other. She was the only friend I had who hadn’t left town for the summer.
I didn’t mention the game at all to Mom. Not because she wouldn’t have wanted to hear about it, but because I liked it being Lucy’s and my secret project. Mom had a bad habit of trying to horn in on my extracurricular activities, and she was still hurting from the time I refused to start a family band with her. Never mind that my lack of musical talent or ability to carry a tune made the idea a total impossibility.
I told her about the new Dennis video, though. And by the time I actually got around to showing it to her, the video was up to almost eighteen thousand views.
“Wow,” she said, as the text of the video started scrolling, “people really believe in this stuff, don’t they?”
“Eighteen thousand of them,” I said.
“Huh,” Mom said, “I always thought that if he was going to go anywhere, Mexico would be the place.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Oh yeah. Open up a gringo bar on the beach and go surfing every day. He would have loved that.”
“I thought you said he didn’t surf.”
“Oh, no,” Mom said, “he didn’t. He was actually kind of afraid of the water. Still, it’s a nice thought. He would’ve adopted about a dozen street dogs by now.”
“Do you miss him?” I asked.
“It’s hard to say. But I feel him with me. I do. Every day.”
And then it was time for Mom to leave. She and her band had been rehearsing overtime to make sure they were in their best possible shape for the road, and most nights she didn’t get home until long after I’d fallen asleep.
“You know what I hear Beyoncé does before she goes on tour?” Mom asked as she packed up the last of her suitcase. Of course she’d left it until the last minute — she was leaving the next day.
“What?” I said. “Luxuriates in the aura of being powerful and perfect?”
“Of course,” Mom said. “But seriously, I hear she runs on a treadmill while singing her entire album front to back. In heels.”
“So that’s why you’ve been spending so much time at the gym,” I said, an obvious joke. Mom had never set foot in a gym in her life. She was one of those people who are annoyingly skinny no matter what they eat.
She’d definitely been gone more than usual lately, though, which was kind of weird. She’d chalked it up to working extra shifts for Sal and practices running late, but there were nights she’d come home looking more like she’d been fooling around in some asshat’s shoebox of a condo than wiping up strangers’ spilled beer, and I was starting to get suspicious. This was nothing new, of course. Mom went through boyfriends at a surprising rate considering she had such a mouthy dependant, but she’s never made me meet them unless it was serious, and for that I was glad, glad, glad.
“You know me,” Mom said, “I’ve got them buns of steel.” She stuck her butt out at me, shook it and laughed.
“A regular Jillian Michaels over here,” I said. “When’s your TV show air?”
&
nbsp; “Any day now. We’ll blow those Biggest Losers out of the water with my new program: Fork Yourself Fit.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, sitting down on Mom’s suitcase to help her zip it shut. It was overloaded with more clothes than she’d possibly need in Japan along with half a dozen books because apparently she was too punk rock for an e-reader.
“Thanks, sweets,” she said, inching the zipper around the suitcase. “Now stay with me here. Raise your fork to your mouth and chew. Good, that’s one! And down to your plate — excellent! Now back up. That’s two! Keep going!”
“Great plan,” I said, “I’ll start working on a Fit Fork app.”
“Ooh, that’s even better. Almost … aha! Done!” She did a little victory dance at having finally forced her bag closed.
“So, what time are we meeting Gran at the restaurant?” I asked as I helped Mom lift her suitcase up onto its wheels.
“Oh geez, seven at Queen Pasta,” she said, checking her wrist for a watch that wasn’t there. “What time is it now?”
“Uh, six forty-five?” I said, pulling out my phone. “But it’s close by, it’s right on Queen, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said, “it’s one of those stupid suburban tricks. It’s all the way out in Bloor West Village.” Mom was exaggerating. Gran’s neighbourhood wasn’t actually the suburbs, but it was far enough west of where we lived that it brought out the downtown snob in her. Which was weird considering that we hadn’t even lived in Toronto that long.
“So what now?” I asked. “That’ll take us at least half an hour. And Gran’ll be pissed if we’re late.”
“I don’t know,” Mom said, sounding like a nervous little kid. Gran definitely brought that out in her.
“Jam jar?” I asked, nudging the small Mason jar sitting on our bookshelf where Mom kept her emergency money. She’d even made up a dorky label for it that said THE OUT-OF-A-JAM JAR.
“I guess we don’t have a choice, huh?” she said. Mom was seriously stingy about dipping into the jar, especially since we’d already taken one cab ride that week, but the thought of facing Gran’s wrath was enough to foil her cheapskate ways. This time, anyway.
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