He pulled out his textbook and plopped it in front of me, pointing to a section on quadratic functions.
“Quadratic functions? But they’re four times the fun!” I said.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’d make the perfect Miss Frizzle in a Magic School Bus reboot?” he asked, smirking a tiny bit.
“Has anyone ever told you that Miss Frizzle is my hero and I take that as a compliment?”
“I’ve honestly never met someone so excited about math,” he said. “Are you doing something with it in college?”
“I’m planning on going to Indiana State to study engineering,” I said. “What about you? What are you planning to do after we break out of Springdale forever?”
“Probably something with music. I want go somewhere where there’s a saxophone conservatory. I can’t decide if I want to try to make it professionally or teach,” he said.
“Ooh, anything to avoid having to teach little kids how to play. Ashley used to play flute back in the day, and that was rough to listen to in the house,” I said.
He smiled. “That’s actually my favorite part. I like helping kids realize that music is something they can work on their whole lives. Like it’s a secret language they can speak with musicians around the world, no matter where they’re from.”
“That’s actually really sweet,” I said. We held eye contact for a few seconds before I looked back down at the textbook. “Okay. So, quadratic functions—”
“Can I have something to drink, before we get started?” he asked.
“Oh gosh, I’m officially the worst hostess ever. Yes. We have water, milk, orange juice, some diet pop—”
“Some diet what?” he asked.
“Pop,” I said, emphasizing the final p. “You know, like Diet Coke.”
“You mean soda,” he said.
“I mean, you live in the Midwest now, George, you have to embrace pop over soda everywhere you go,” I said.
“I’ll have a diet, then,” he said.
“A diet what?” I asked. “If you answer correctly I’ll even pour it over ice for you.”
“Pop,” he cringed out, followed by a big smile. “Diet Coke is my weakness, otherwise I wouldn’t have given in so easily.”
“Sure,” I said, putting on a smile that matched his. I brought the glass back to him, and he dramatically took a sip with a loud “Ahh!” at the end that made me giggle. I shuffled the paper in front of me, actually writing Quadratic Functions, Chapter 3 on the top of the sheet before a very excited Fiyero bounded into the kitchen.
“Fiyero wanted to come say hi,” Mom said, following closely behind him.
Fiyero practically pounced on George, trying his hardest to leave slobbery kisses on his face. George scratched Fiyero behind his ears, just like he loved, and they became instant best friends. It was easy to sway into Fiyero’s favor—give him a table scrap or a particularly good scratch behind the ears and he was in the palm of your hand.
“George, you’ve now met poodle monster Fiyero. This is my mom,” I said.
“Kim,” she finished, shaking his hand.
“Nice to meet you, Kim.” He smiled. I silently thanked the gods that he didn’t say Mrs. Alverson. That always put her in a weird funk when she had to explain that she was no longer, in fact, Mrs. Alverson.
“You’re Grace’s cousin, right?” Mom asked. I sent her a look, as if to warn her not to make it seem like we’d been talking too much about him. I wanted to seem like I at least had the smallest semblance of chill.
“I am,” he said. “We moved here from South Carolina to be closer to family. Plus, my dad got a new job.”
“That’s a bummer that you had to switch schools your senior year,” Mom said.
“Oh, I’m a junior, so it’s a little less dramatic. Besides, I wasn’t a huge fan of the school I went to in South Carolina. I think we all were in need of the change,” he said.
A million questions popped into my brain. What happened at his old school? Why wasn’t he sad to leave? Didn’t he have friends he was leaving behind? It took everything in me to not start blurting them out as soon as I thought them.
“Well, I’m glad to hear you’re having a better time here,” Mom said. She looked between the two of us, and I widened my eyes in the universal teenage signal of “Leave us alone.” She had a crooked smile on the corner of her mouth as she observed the signal.
“All right. I’ll leave you two to it,” she said. So we’d formed some small form of peace since we talked this morning. Nothing had completely blown over, but at least we were talking again. I took it as a step in a positive direction.
She tried to convince Fiyero to go back upstairs with her, but he’d made a comfortable spot under the table, wrapped around George’s foot. It didn’t look like he’d be leaving anytime soon. Mom shook her head and went back upstairs, coffee in hand.
“He’s not usually so comfortable with strangers,” I said, pointing down to the sleepy mess of poodle fur at George’s feet.
“I think he’s probably comforted by our similar hairstyles,” he said. “He must think I’m one of him.”
I actually snorted with laughter and quickly covered my face in my hands. I would have never described George’s strawberry blond curls as poodle-esque before, but now that he brought it up, the similarity was uncanny.
“Well, thankfully for you, it’s a good look on both of you,” I said.
He turned the same embarrassed shade of red all over that he’d turned in the hallway last week. I could feel my own face heating up from admitting that George might be a little, somewhat, kind of good-looking. You know, in a gangly seventeen-year-old boy kind of way.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll have to leave a nice review on the Yelp page for Supercuts, since you like it so much.”
“Appreciated,” I said.
“So Grace tells me that you’re a really great writer,” he said, twirling a pencil in his fingers.
“Have you been talking about me with Grace?” I asked, the smile that I was already wearing, spreading even farther across my face, if that was even possible.
“Only some basic recon. I had to make sure that you’d be a reputable tutor,” he said.
“And my writing skills relate to that how?” I asked.
“I didn’t ask Grace to give me that information. I also didn’t ask for the information that you know all the words to every Eminem rap ever,” he said.
“You’re telling me you didn’t also have a phase where you loved the 2002 classic movie 8 Mile?” I asked.
“I don’t think anyone our age did.” He laughed.
“I am older than you, to be fair,” I said.
“Barely!” he said.
“I’m old for my grade; I was born in September,” I said.
“Well then, we’re only eight months apart,” he said.
“That’s four and a half dog years.”
“Just because I have poodle hair doesn’t mean you can measure our ages in dog years,” he said. “What’s the one song … ‘If you had one shot—’”
“Don’t make me start, this could go all day,” I said, giggling.
“‘Or one opportunity—’”
“‘To seize everything you ever wanted, in one moment, would you capture it, or just let it slip—’ I’m going to stop, it’s too much,” I said, full-on belly laughing.
“I’m impressed,” he said.
“Very few people get to witness Savannah Shady. You should feel honored,” I said.
“Oh, I do,” he said.
I shoved the paper that I’d written on so many minutes ago in front of him. “For real now. Quadratic functions…”
chapter SEVEN
In an effort to start making things up to my mom, I started my morning out by baking flaxseed pancakes from scratch. If I couldn’t win at least a little bit of forgiveness from her favorite breakfast, this was going to be a long road back.
To pass the time, I tried to call Ashley
, working off the chance that she happened to wake up before noon. Because I know if I were free to sleep as long as I wanted, there is a 1,000,000 percent chance I would wake up at dinnertime every day.
“Sissy?” she asked.
“Sissy! You’re awake!” I said.
“I am now,” she grumbled.
“Sorry,” I said, genuinely sorry that my suspicion was correct. “Mom and I finally had a big fight about the show.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I think I will be,” I said. “She did that whole ‘I don’t know how you can make it up to me,’ and ‘I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed’ thing. Which is worse than her flat-out yelling.”
“Aw, babe,” she said.
“I wish you could come home,” I said, taking a bite out of the fresh pancakes. “I’m not sure that I can handle our episode of Shake the Weight airing without you.”
“Maybe you’ll make up before then,” Ashley said.
“Highly unlikely. Mom has a strict one-week return on firm grudges. At least. Trust me, I should know, being the one who inspires most Mom grudges,” I said.
“Maybe she’ll make an exception, since you’re living alone together. I’m going to be optimistic about this one,” she said.
“Thank goodness for your optimism. I almost believe that she’ll come down in a chipper mood this morning like nothing has happened,” I said.
“Can I call you back later?” she asked abruptly. “I stayed up way too late last night.”
“Sure! Yeah, sorry I woke you,” I said.
“S’fine,” she mumbled. “Talk later.”
“Love you!” I said, as she hung up the phone.
A few minutes later, I heard Mom’s door creak open slowly. She made her way down the stairs, then shuffled into the kitchen as I put on my biggest possible smile.
“Mom, I made some flaxseed pancakes for you. What do you want on them?” I asked.
“I’m not hungry,” she mumbled.
“Are you sure? I made these all healthy for you,” I said.
She ran her hands through her bed-head hair and sighed. “I actually might just go back to bed,” she said.
“At least take this up with you,” I said, handing her the plate of pancakes. “It would be silly to let them go to waste.”
“Fine,” she said.
So apparently the peace she feigned when George was over was fake. Noted.
* * *
When I thought I was more alone than ever after the first day Ashley was at school, I had no idea how lonely it would be with Mom checked out, too. She sulked in her room for as long as she possibly could before going to work every day. Every time I tried to engage her, she would come up with an excuse to leave the room.
I invited Grace over the night that our episode of Shake the Weight was going to be airing as moral support, since Mom had been MIA the entire week. She brought over some calc homework for us to work on before it started, along with her favorite tropical pack of jelly beans. I never understood her obsession with jelly beans, but she swore that they got her in the mind-set to study.
“How are you feeling about making your television debut?” she asked, popping a jelly bean into her mouth.
“Appropriately nervous,” I said. “I have pre-embarrassment.”
“Come on, it won’t be that bad,” she said.
“I hope you’re right,” I said. I started to work on another page of homework, scribbling my way through the worksheet.
“So how did studying with my cuz go?” she asked.
“Oh, last week? With George? That was good. Great? We’re no longer in a world-war situation if that’s what you’re asking. I wouldn’t say that we’re friends, but, you know. Civil,” I said.
She stared at me for a few beats before a sneaky smile crept onto her face. “You totally have a crush on my cousin.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I said.
“First Mateo, now George … I don’t think you should be allowed around any more of my family members,” she teased.
“We had a nice time. That’s it. He didn’t even text me to tell me how he ended up doing on the test, so I don’t think it’s going to happen again or anything,” I said. Besides, there was no way he was interested in me.
“Well, did you ask him to text you with his results?” she asked.
“No,” I said, grabbing a handful of her jelly beans.
“He’s not a mind reader, Savvy. If you want people to text you again, tell them that you want them to text you,” she said.
We heard the stairs creak behind us as Mom emerged from her bedroom for the first time since she got home from work. She plastered a smile on her face when she saw Grace.
“What a nice surprise to see you here, Grace,” she said.
“I couldn’t miss Savvy’s TV debut,” Grace said, sending a matching smile back to her.
“It’s on in two minutes,” Mom said, sinking into the couch. She pulled out her phone, no doubt getting ready to live tweet the episode. I turned up the volume on the TV and waited for the heavy beating of the drums from the Shake the Weight theme song to take over the living room.
Lauren McVey, the hostess of Shake the Weight, graced our TV screen once again, and I sucked in a scared breath. We had no idea where our package would fit in with the rest of the contestants from Mom’s season, and we had no idea how much I would be featured. Maybe it was a good thing that Grace was here. Mom would at least try to keep it together a little bit better for Grace’s sake.
“Do you want any jelly beans, Kim?” Grace asked.
“Oh, gosh no, honey. Savannah, if you want a snack, there are banana chips in the kitchen,” she said. And there it was, even minutes before she was going to possibly have a breakdown from seeing her daughter make a mockery of her on national television, she could still get a jab in about what I should be eating. It made the jelly beans that I’d already swallowed turn in my stomach.
After two of the other contestants from Mom’s season flashed across the screen, next was Mom’s face. She was out in the backyard running around with Fiyero, laughing as he raced around her. I turned around to look at Mom’s face, which was sunken in, like she was holding her breath during the entire segment.
Mom talked about how much the show had changed her, and how it gave her the confidence to truly be herself, all with photos from her childhood montaged on top of her voiceover. Just when I thought my heart couldn’t take any more, Lauren McVey’s voice played over a shot of me looking unamused in between interview takes.
“But not everyone on your journey is always going to be a positive supporter,” Lauren McVey said. My blood ran completely cold and I could not move for the next minute of television that unfolded in front of us.
“My mom came back a completely different person after the show,” I said, as they played footage of me looking bored or mad during the interview. It then switched to B-roll of me sitting at the kitchen table, twirling a fork while Mom laughed at Fiyero from across the room. A moment when I thought they hadn’t been rolling.
Lauren McVey’s voice came over like she was the interviewer that day and not Arden the producer. “For the better, though, right? Hasn’t she inspired you?”
“Inspired? Forced might be the better word. It’s a lifestyle change that we’ve had to adjust to. People recognize us at the grocery store now. There’s only so much you can do in a small town in Indiana where everyone knows all your business.”
Lauren took over the screen and was shaking her head. “This is a small reminder that not everyone is going to be completely supportive of your journey. But it’s up to you to keep pushing through and do what’s right for you. After the break, we’ll catch up with Anna Marie and her family in Austin, Texas.”
The sound of the commercial for stain-resistant pants took up the entire space of our living room. I didn’t dare look at any of them, knowing that if I did, I would absolutely burst into tears. The editors had made a hack j
ob of my interview, picking and choosing parts of my quotes to include to make me look as evil as possible. Like the heartless, fat daughter who is taking out her jealousy of her mom’s new life in her interview. Every part of it made me sick.
Grace’s hand clasped over mine and she squeezed. I couldn’t squeeze back, completely frozen in my place. Arden had promised that she would make everything positive. She even had me reshoot answers to have a more positive spin! Maybe that was what they were doing all along—trying to get me to say the most ridiculous things possible while reassuring my mom that they were trying their best to make me look good. I knew better the entire time leading up to the filming. I knew how toxic and manipulative reality TV could be, let alone a show that ridicules people about their weight on a national scale. Even so, I was dumbfounded.
Finally, after a few moments, I had the courage to look back at Mom. She was still staring at the screen, unable to fully process the train wreck that was her segment. Her eyebrows furrowed together as she stood up, becoming a towering giant over me.
“I warned you about the interview,” she said coolly. Too coolly. With ice dripping in every word. “But, of course, you did whatever you wanted to do instead. I can’t even speak to you right now. I can’t—” she said.
“Mom,” I started, the giant lump of holding back tears forming in my throat.
“You knew how much this meant to me,” she said. “You promised.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Grace, I’m sorry that you had to see this,” she declared, looking around. She snatched her keys from the hook by the front door.
“Don’t drive when you’re upset,” I said, my voice reaching new octaves while trying to hold back tears.
“Newsflash. I’m the mom. You’re the kid. I will do exactly what I want, when I want,” she said. She slammed the front door behind her without looking back. I heard Norma the Nissan starting up since Grace had boxed Mom’s car in the driveway. Grace and I sat in silence as the headlights from Norma continued down the road.
Once they were out of sight, I completely burst into full-on, ugly sobs.
To Be Honest Page 6