28
beth
“Aunt Hannah called,” I told my mom as soon as she walked through the door.
The wooden door shut and barely made a sound. It wasn’t like our thick mahogany door in Texas that Jo used to throw sharp-pointed ninja stars into. That thing slammed shut every time the wind blew and shook the house with it. The door in this house looked like it was made from birch and could blow away with the wind anytime.
Mom set her purse down on the floor and walked over to the fridge. I saw the lines of tension sprout across her forehead, but she kept a straight face. “What did she say?”
My aunt had called three times before I finally answered, and she sounded like she was covering the receiver. I would have told my mom this if her under-eyes weren’t the color of my jeans.
“That she needs you to call her back. She sounded stressed-out.” I paused long enough for my mom to dip her head into the fridge to avoid me. “Is everything okay?”
Mom stood up and closed the fridge, a carton of eggs in her hands. “Yeah, yeah. Everything is fine. Did you get all your class work done? Are you still behind a week?”
Classic Meredith Spring, changing the subject even better than Amy. I knew my mom twice as well as my sisters did, so that meant I knew her every move. She didn’t have many, but lately she had been cashing them all in. She was trying to distract me by asking for my homework and getting me to talk about myself.
“I caught up after Christmas break, remember?” I specifically recalled talking to her about it in the living room.
“Oh yeah.”
My mom opened the cupboard and grabbed a mixing bowl. She hadn’t been in the mood to cook lately, but I wasn’t going to bring that up. I didn’t mind cooking most of the meals around here, but I was happy taking the morning off. It was almost noon. Jo was upstairs writing in her room, and Meg was with John downtown. Amy was at the house of some girl down the street, so we were alone for the most part. I owed it to my dad to take any time I could to check in on my mom. He hadn’t called in days, and her eyes were bloodshot this morning.
My mom’s blond hair was pulled back in a claw clip. Her hair was thinning in the front, where she curled the pieces into one big curl around her hairline. Meg always begged her to let her give her a new style, but so far our mom had refused.
“How much longer do you have? I should know this.” She pulled a smile out of the pocket of her favorite T-shirt. She slept in the T-shirt, printed with my dad’s old company name over the image of a tank. It was so worn that the black fabric had turned gray and the tank had started to peel off. The decal now looked like a house or something, not a tank.
“Until May, technically, but I might be able to finish early.”
My mom popped open the carton of eggs and inspected them. “Your dad has always wondered about next year. And the school sent an email . . .” Her voice fell a little.
My dad wanted me to go to “regular” school, I knew he did, but he would never just flat out say it. “What kind of email?”
She took a few eggs in her hands and walked over to the bowl on the counter. “Just an enrollment email for you, Amy, and Jo. Are you ready to go back to school?”
She stopped talking, and I figured that she was trying to collect her thoughts before she handed them out. She chose the weirdest stuff to treat me like a kitten about.
“Does Dad think I should go back to school?”
“That’s not what I said. I said he’s asked over the past few months if you were ready to go back.”
“Why, though? Is something wrong with what I’m doing now? I’m ahead of schedule now, and I only fell behind one time and that was over holiday. Jo bombed that math test last week.”
“It’s not about the grades.”
Mom began to crack the eggs against the side of the bowl. The eggs broke hard enough that I’m sure a few tiny shells went inside the bowl, but didn’t want to point them out. I usually did it at the end, pulling out little shards of eggshell. My mom wasn’t great at not getting shells inside, but at least she wasn’t like Jo, who refused to look at the eggs. She ate scrambled meat that wasn’t real meat and tortilla shells almost every day for breakfast. Or the occasional bagel stuffed to the brim with cream cheese.
I waited for my mom to explain why I was failing as a teenager.
“It’s that you’ll be in tenth grade. Freshman year is always tough, for sure, but you’ve had a break. Do you think it’s time to try it again? Now that Jo could get you into Yearbook with her? You’re so smart, Beth.”
This wasn’t the first time Mom had brought it up, but this time was much more direct than ever before.
“You don’t get it. It’s not about being smart, Meredith,” I said accidentally. It threw her off, I could tell. My sisters had picked up Jo’s habit of calling her by her name, but I liked to call her Mom. Sometimes I would call her Meredith out of my sister’s habit, but I tried not to. “It’s not about me being smart, it’s about the majority of the school day having nothing to do with actual school.”
“What does that mean?”
I sighed. I felt like I had explained this enough times in the last year.
“Is this about bullying? Because—”
“It’s not about bullying, Mom. It’s about no one getting that I don’t want to be around people the way that Meg and Jo and Amy and you and Dad do. I can’t learn with a room full of people. I’m sorry if it’s not normal—”
“Beth . . .” Mom paused. Her tone was unreadable and her eyes were full of guilt. I didn’t ever want her to feel guilty, I just wanted her to see that this wasn’t about her. “I wasn’t saying you have to go back to school. I was only bringing it up because of the email. You know what’s best for you, okay? I trust you to know what’s best for you, and if you want to be homeschooled until college, that’s okay.”
I knew I was lucky to have the option of staying home. Most parents would have been the opposite of mine and forced me to “work through my anxiety,” which my parents did try until I couldn’t handle it anymore and started skipping.
“Thank you.” I sighed, leaning against the counter.
I would have brought up that my college would be in home, too, but I just wanted the conversation to end.
My mom continued to make breakfast until Jo came down with her arms full of newspapers and said Laurie was going to come over later. He had been spending a lot of time with Jo, but I thought it was a good thing. She wasn’t good at making friends like Meg and Amy. She wasn’t as bad at it as I was, but still.
“What in the world?” Mom asked, gaping at Jo and her baggage.
“I’m looking for something,” Jo said, as if that explained what in the world she was doing. The smell of bacon smothered the kitchen until I added onions to my mom’s famous farmer’s breakfast. It was a mash-up of potatoes, oil, butter, salt and pepper, bacon, sausage, eggs, and cheese. Jo got her own skillet with no meat, and I ate from both.
When we had devoured our plates, Jo said, “That was so good—thanks, guys,” and went back to her stack of papers while I started washing the pans.
The phone started ringing again and I hit silence. Seconds later someone knocked on the door. Jo set down the newspaper she had in front of her face, and my mom stalled a moment before asking me to get it.
I hoped it wasn’t Aunt Hannah, but when I saw the two officers standing in the doorway, I immediately took back my wish.