by Robin Palmer
how long exactly do you plan on being such a jerk to me?
Okay, that was pushing it. I couldn’t send a text like that and expect a good response.
But then I did.
Because as I was backspacing and deleting it, my finger slipped (that’s what I got for not washing my hands after eating greasy french fries) and pushed the send button. So the text read, how long exactly do you plan on being such a jerk.
“OH MY GOD!” I screamed as the words showed up on the screen. Not only did I sound like a horrible person, but I looked stupid because it didn’t have any punctuation.
“What happened?! What’s the matter?!” Mom asked, panicked. I heard her, but I didn’t see her due to the fact that my eyes were screwed closed tight because I was trying to do that deep-breathing thing she had taught me that she did in yoga that was supposed to relax you. Unfortunately, it wasn’t doing that for me. All it was doing was making it harder to breathe because I was gasping for air.
Eyes still closed, I felt around blindly for the phone and grabbed it and threw it in the direction of her voice.
“Ow,” she said. “Sweetheart, watch where you aim.”
I opened my eyes to see her rubbing her chest as she looked at the phone. Whoops. Her eyes widened as she read the text. “Why would you send this?!”
“I didn’t!” I cried. “What I mean is that I didn’t mean to send it! I was trying to take your advice!”
“When did I give you advice to accuse someone of being a jerk?” she asked. She looked at the phone more closely. “And not even use punctuation with it, to boot?”
I rolled my eyes. That’s what you got for having an English professor for a mother. “No—the advice you gave me to write things out and then get rid of them because just writing them would make me feel better.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, that always works for me,” she said. “But you sent it.”
For someone who had gone to school for so many years, sometimes my mom could be pretty slow. “I sent it by mistake,” I explained. “My finger slipped.”
“Oh. Oh,” she said, finally getting it. “Oh, this is not good,” she said as she shook her head.
“THAT PART I KNOW!” I cried. “What I need to know is how to fix it!”
“Oh. Well, that’s easy,” she said.
“How?”
“Just recall the text before she reads it.”
“You can’t do that,” I sighed. Not only did my mom like to point out the obvious, but she had zero understanding of how technology worked. She still sent letters to people.
“You can’t? I feel like I’ve done that before . . . .” She stared at the phone. “Hold on—she texted back.”
“What does it say?!” I demanded, lunging for the phone.
“It says ‘excuse me’ in all caps with four exclamation points.”
Uh-oh. Caps were not good. And they were especially not good now. I snatched the phone out of her hand. “What should I text back?”
“Nothing,” Mom replied. “You should stop this texting nonsense and call her and talk to her.”
I looked at her like she had just suggested I strip down naked and get on the roof and sing Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” which was my go-to karaoke song.
“I know I’ve said this before, but while all this technology is supposed to help people connect, it also allows them not to have to take responsibility for themselves and show up and have difficult conversations and—”
“Mom. Please. Not the technology lecture now.” I could pretty much recite it by heart. “Even if I did call her, what would I say?”
“The truth. That you’d like to talk things out once and for all so that you can start having a real relationship, seeing that within a week you’re going to be family.”
At that, I literally crawled under the patchwork quilt that was on the couch with me. I popped my head out. “Isn’t there something else I could say?”
“Not if you want to tell the truth.”
I sighed. “Let me guess: I should just be the bigger person and do this.”
“You got it,” she replied.
I pulled the blanket over my head again.
* * *
It wasn’t the lecture about how this kind of stuff was “character-building” and that in the long run I’d end up being grateful for the opportunity to “leave my comfort zone” so that I could “stretch and grow” that made me take Mom’s advice and finally call Cassie. It was the Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream that she let me get before doing it.
“Hi . . . Cassie?” I said when she answered.
“Yeah?” she said icily.
“It’s, uh, Avery.”
“Yeah?” she replied just as icily.
“Cassie,” I heard Lana warn in the distance. It made me feel better to know she was standing over Cassie like Mom was standing over me.
“Obviously, I didn’t mean to send that text,” I said.
“Yeah, well, you did.”
I sighed. So much for Mom’s prediction that this call was going to go much better than I thought it would. “Do you think we can get together so that I can apologize in person?”
“Yes. You can,” I heard Lana whisper. Wow. Either I talked really loud or she was really close to the phone.
“Fine,” Cassie said.
We decided to meet at Javalicious at three o’clock the next afternoon, because Lana had errands to do around there anyway. Cassie was already there when I got there, thumbing through a copy of Us Weekly.
I walked up behind her. “I love the Stars—They’re Just Like Us! section,” I said over her shoulder. “Especially the pictures where they’re, like, taking out the garbage and stuff like that.”
She turned and gave me a look as if I had said, I like to eat garbage.
“It just makes them so . . . normal,” I said nervously.
She closed the magazine. “Yeah. Whatever.”
I sighed. “I’m going to get a Chillsie. Do you want one?”
“Nope,” she said, and went back to her magazine. This was going well so far. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”
As I stood in line, I kept stealing looks at her out of the corner of my eye, hoping to see her in a different light. Meaning one where I had sympathy for her for what Kayley had told me, instead of seeing her for what she looked like at that moment: a stuck-up princess who judged everyone and everything and found them to come up short.
“So . . . that text,” I began, staring down at my drink once I had joined her back at the table. “It was a mistake.”
“Yeah. I’ll say,” she replied. I sighed. If this was how the conversation was starting, I could only imagine how it was going to end. Be the bigger person . . . be the bigger person, I said to myself as I took a deep breath. “What I mean is that what I was trying to say was that I was sick of us fighting and wanted to know if we could talk this out once and for all.”
“Talk what out?” she asked innocently. “We don’t fight.”
My eyes narrowed. She wasn’t going to make this easy. And I was sick of it. No more beating around the bush. “You’re right. We don’t,” I agreed.
A small smirk started to bloom on her face.
“Instead you just say all these things to me that maybe technically aren’t insults, but actually are.”
The smirk deflated. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah. Like that,” I went on, “talking to me like you’re the queen and I’m . . . I don’t know . . . your chambermaid!” Chambermaid? I wasn’t sure what had come over me, but whatever it was had obviously downed a Red Bull, judging by how revved up I was. “From the very beginning I’ve gone out of my way to be nice to you. I’ve sucked it up, I’ve been the bigger person, I’ve—”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, obviously someone needs a time-out right now—”
“I do not!” I cried, sounding just like a kid who did need a time-out.
From the way a bunch of people turned to l
ook at me, it was obvious that had also come out a lot louder than I meant it to. I shrank down in my chair, hoping the floor would open and swallow me up. “See? Even when you’re not technically embarrassing me, you still figure out a way to embarrass me!” I hissed. I knew I sounded like a crazy person, but I couldn’t help it. This was what I did. Because I was so afraid of there being weirdness between me and other people if I told them how I really felt, I instead let things build up and build up until I exploded. It wasn’t pretty, and as Mom liked to remind me, it wasn’t fair to them.
From the look on Cassie’s face, I was a crazy person. “Are you done now?”
I stared at her. She just didn’t get it. Why was I even wasting my time? Yes. I was done. Big-time. So what if I hated my stepsister? Lots of people did. That was the entire basis of fairy tales! “No. I’m not,” was what came out of my mouth instead. Oh no. “I just need to say one last thing.” Did I really?
“What’s that?”
“I need to say . . . that I know you weren’t sick yesterday.”
Her I just sucked on a lemon face was replaced by surprise.
“And that . . . I’m sorry about your dad, and how he said you couldn’t come live with him.”
The surprise turned to something in the neighborhood of fear. “How do you know about that?” she whispered.
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. The last thing I needed was to get Kayley mad at me. “But I want to say that I’m sure it really, really sucks to be told something like that. And while I can’t imagine it exactly, until recently I didn’t get along all that well with my dad.”
“You didn’t?” She seemed genuinely surprised by this.
“Well, it wasn’t like we had fights or anything like that,” I said. “We would have had to actually talk in order to do that.”
She looked confused.
“My dad’s said more to me in the last few weeks than he has in probably my entire life,” I went on. “Before now we barely ever saw each other, let alone talked.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said softly. “You guys seem so close.”
I laughed. “Hardly.” I sighed. “Do you know what it feels like to send your own father an e-mail telling him about your life and he doesn’t even bother replying?”
“Yeah. I do,” she said, angry. But I could tell this time the anger wasn’t directed toward me. It was toward him.
Now it was my turn to be surprised. “It seems like we finally have something in common, I guess.”
She looked at me. This time there was no lemon sucking. This time I saw a girl who looked just as sad as I had felt all those years when it came to my dad. Someone who wondered what she had done wrong to make one of the two people who were supposed to love her no matter what not even want to bother talking to her.
“I’m really sorry, Cassie,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said softly. “I am too.”
“Look, I know being older, and coming from California, you must think I’m a total dork, but—”
“No, I don’t. I actually think you’re really cool,” she admitted. “Which is probably why I’ve been such a jerk to you.”
Wait a minute—what?
“When I saw how great my mom thought you were, I started to get worried that soon enough I’d have two parents who didn’t care about me anymore.”
Whoa. That made total sense. Not that that would happen, but that she’d worry that would happen. Because that’s exactly what I would think if I was her. Maybe we had more in common than I thought.
“I get it,” I said.
“You do?”
I nodded. “Yeah. And I’m sorry you had to walk around feeling like that.”
She gave a shy smile. “And I’m sorry that you had to walk around with me being such a jerk to you.”
“Yeah. It kind of sucked. Like, a lot,” I replied.
She flinched, which made me feel bad, but if I was sitting here going on about honesty, I kind of had to do it myself, too.
“I bet it did,” she said softly. “I really am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. I really did mean it.
“Do you think we can start over?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. We can.”
Eleven
After Cassie and I smoothed things over, the Girls’ Night In went from something I was dreading to something I couldn’t wait for. I probably went a bit overboard with the planning (me and Mom stayed up until midnight the night before making seven different kinds of salt scrubs!), but it was hard not to when so many great things came up when you searched for “home spa recipes” on Pinterest.
“Well, if you ever decide to stop being a jewelry designer,” Mom said as she helped me carry everything up the front walk of my dad’s house the next evening, “you definitely have a career making beauty products.” She took the top off a strawberry honey facial mask and dipped her finger in it.
“Mom, you need to stop eating all of it!” I cried.
“I know, I know. It’s just so good,” she said as she took another fingerful. “Not to mention good for you.”
I was surprised she hadn’t eaten the coffee grounds body scrub yet.
Lana had already opened the door and was waiting for us with a smile. “Well, hello there.” She looked at all our bags. “Wow. This looks more like a Girls’ Month In.”
“I went a little overboard,” I confessed.
She turned to Mom. “Monica, I meant to do this earlier, but I’ve been so crazed. Would you like to join us?”
Mom shook her head. “Thanks, but I can’t. I actually have . . . a date.” You could tell by the way she moved her mouth up and down that she wasn’t used to saying those words. Mom hated dating. She said that it was worse than getting her eyebrows waxed, and she hated getting her eyebrows waxed.
“Really? How great!” Lana exclaimed. She shook her head. “Boy, was I happy once I got engaged, just to know that I wouldn’t have to date again. I was a horrible dater.”
“So is Mom!” I said excitedly. “Once, there was this guy named Ted and—”
Mom put her hand on my arm. “Avery, I’m sure Lana is way too busy to hear that story,” she said, cutting me off.
The only reason I was bringing it up was because I thought it was great that they had something in common. That and the fact that it was a really good story because it was about how this guy Ted referred to himself as “Ted” the whole night instead of using “I.” And that wasn’t even the good part. The good part was that he brought his cat with him to dinner, in a carrier that looked like a house, and got all huffy when the hostess wouldn’t let him bring it into the restaurant.
“Okay,” I said, and shrugged.
“Well, I hope you guys have a terrific time,” Mom said as she leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. She turned to Lana. “I’ll be back in the morning to get her.”
“Oh, I can drop her off,” Lana said.
“Don’t be silly,” Mom replied. “You have enough to do the day of your wedding without driving an hour out of your way.”
“Okay,” Lana said, sounding a little disappointed.
Mom patted her on the shoulder. “Stop being Superwoman and just be the bride.”
Lana looked hurt.
“I’m joking,” Mom said.
Lana looked confused for a second and then smiled. “Oh. Got it.”
Mom and I had talked about how Lana was always going a million miles a minute and trying to make sure everyone was taken care of and happy. She also wasn’t a big joker, which, for people like me and Mom, made things a little awkward because we liked to joke a lot.
I had to say it made me feel good how impressed everyone seemed to be not just with everything I’d brought, but with how I had made spa goodies that incorporated things they liked.
“Mmm . . . bananas are my FAVORITE!” Sammi yelled as she took a whiff of the body lotion I had made for her. In addition to whipped bananas, it also had almond a
nd coconut oils, which made it extra yummy. She stuck a finger in it and brought it to her mouth. “Wait—can I eat it too?”
I nodded. “If you want.”
She tasted it. “It’s DELICIOUS!” she exclaimed, and we all laughed. I loved how Sammi got excited about everything. I couldn’t wait to hang out with her even more with Lexi.
I held out a container to Kayley. “And this one is for you.”
She opened it and sniffed it. “Lemon and peppermint?” she guessed.
I nodded. “Yeah. It’s a foot scrub. I remembered you mentioning that your feet were all rough from walking around outside without shoes. And I know peppermint is your favorite flavor of gum, because you bought the multipack of Orbit when we were at the mall last week.”
She smiled. “You have a good memory.” She reached over and hugged me. “Thanks.”
She had never hugged me before. In fact, I knew from eavesdropping once when Lana was on the phone with her best friend, Beth, that Kayley had this thing where she didn’t like to be touched. Just like she had to check that the lights were off in her room every time they left the house. So the hug felt extra special. I hugged back. “You’re welcome.” I turned to Cassie. “I saw on Facebook how you posted that article about the nail art, so I thought this would be neat,” I said as I took out a hand scrub made of avocado and honey, as well as a bunch of different pastel nail polishes.
Cassie smiled. The first real smile I had seen on her face, I realized. “Those are great colors. Thanks.”
Sammi peered at the scrub. “Can we eat this one too?”
“Sure,” I laughed.
Lana picked it up. “How about we save this for dessert?” she asked as she winked at me. “This was so thoughtful of you, Avery,” she said.
I shrugged. “It wasn’t that big of a deal. Plus, I like doing this stuff. It’s like the crafting version of cooking.” That was a bit of a lie; doing all the research and then gathering all the ingredients had actually been super time-consuming, but their reactions had made it worth it. I took out a tube. “And this one is for you,” I said as I handed it to Lana. “I heard you say that this weather was making your hair really dry, so I went to the spa and got this.”