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 job 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.
“This is not about you,” Grace said, tracing circles on my back.
“I said those things, Grace,” I managed. “They edited it, but I said them.”
“Because you meant them!” she said. “Screw them for making you talk about something that you don’t agree with. Screw them for twisting the words that actually came out of your mouth.”
“I just wanted to be supportive,” I said. Because I did. I wanted to be the calm, collected sister Ashley told me I could be. I wanted to be the strong peacemaker while she was out of the house. I wanted to have a normal relationship with my mom again without her obsession with weight getting in the way of everything.
“I think you’ve been pretty damned supportive,” Grace said. “I know your sister will never say this because she would never say anything bad about your mom, but she’s being incredibly unfair to you. Making those backhanded comments to you about everything you eat? That is the definition of uncool parenting behavior.”
“Because we both know so much about parenting,” I said.
“I know that parents shouldn’t be allowed to make their kids feel like shit unless they buy into their culty dogma,” she said.
I shrugged. “I don’t think she does any of it on purpose.”
“Does that matter?” Grace asked. “She’s not looking out for you when she makes those comments. She’s looking out for her own self-interest.”
“She’s the mom. I’m the kid,” I said, repeating Mom’s rant. “I just have to deal for now until I can leave this place.”
“What about living with your dad for a while?” Grace asked.
I snorted. “With Sheri? Two months of living with them was almost enough to drive me over the edge.”
“I’m just saying, you have other options. You don’t have to stay here,” Grace said.
“I appreciate it, but we’re fine. It’s fine here. I can make it until college,” I said.
She held out her arms so that I could fall into a hug. “I’ve always got your back, babe. It’s us against the world.”
Grace offered to stay with me until Mom got back, but it was reaching dangerously close to her curfew, and I convinced her that I would be okay if she left. Every part of me wanted to ask her to stay, to ask her if I could hang out at her house for the foreseeable future, but I couldn’t bring myself to be that kind of burden.
I lay down in my bed, my legs curled into my chest. I’d read online that creating pressure around your torso was supposed to be comforting when you were having a panic attack, but it just made me feel like I was suffocating. I changed my position so that I was starfished across the bed and felt the tremors shake out to the tips of my fingers and toes. My breathing slowly changed from ragged and quick to a more even rhythm as the panic left my body.
Why hadn’t Ashley called me yet? If she’d seen the show, she had to know that I would be freaking out right now. One part of my brain tried to remind me that she was probably studying or hanging out with friends and hadn’t had the chance to watch the show yet. The other part of my brain tried to convince me that she was mad at me, too. That she’s warned me about keeping the peace while she was gone, and she was angry that I’d so publicly disrupted it.
My fingers started dialing a number that I’d known by heart since I was a little girl without me even realizing it.
“Savannah?” my dad asked as he answered the other end of the line. I held my breath for a few moments, realizing just what a mistake I might have made in calling him. Maybe if he couldn’t hear my breathing, he’d hang up.
“Savannah, I know you’re there,” he said.
“Hi,” I squeaked out.
“It’s late. What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Did you watch the show?” I asked.
“We have a strict no–Shake the Weight–viewing policy now,” he said.
I twisted my blanket in my fingers idly and tried to remember the last time we talked on the phone. It had to be months ago.
“It was really bad, Dad. They came and interviewed me for a follow-up, and I looked like such a brat. Mom is so mad at me,” I said.
He sighed. “She knew how you felt about that show. She knew how we all felt about it. She should have known going into this interview that it wouldn’t be full of glowing praise.”
“I tried so hard to make her happy, Dad. I—I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive me for this,” I said.
“She’ll forgive you. Just give it time,” he said.
“Could I wait it out with you for a while?” I asked. He was silent for a few beats.
“You’re in the middle of school. You can’t just drive an hour to school and back each day,” he said.
“Could I come for a week then? Just to give her some time to cool off?” I asked. The last sentence came out with a crack of tears. I’d never asked him something like this. I’d always been so firmly on Team Mom through their entire divorce that I’d never even considered moving to Walcott with him of my own free will. This was his chance to do something nice for me.
“Now’s not the best time, Savannah,” he said. “Sheri is remodeling our house, and I just don’t think this is a good time to have guests.”
“I’m not a guest. I’m your kid,” I said. My sadness was turning quickly to anger. The little piece of hope that I’d built around this idea of getting a relationship back with my dad was slowly crumbling inside a little place in my heart I’d ignored for a while now.
“I’m sorry, you just can’t come—” he said.
I hung up the phone before he could finish his sentence.
* * *
The next day at school I got a few weird looks in the hallway from the handful of kids who would tune in to Shake the Weight on Wednesday nights. Where the kids who recognized me or my mom used to smile at me as they passed, they quickly dropped eye contact and walked away today. They realized that they didn’t want to mess with the new “Reality TV Brat,” as I was dubbed by a particularly snarky blog. Trust me, I’d seen it all in the recaps this morning. It was a good thing that I’d already set all my accounts to private the moment that Mom went on the show, otherwise I was sure there would be a flood of hate mail for me all over social media.
The warning bell rang, letting me know that first-period calc was ten minutes away. I started to head toward Mr. Kavach’s room, looking everywhere for Grace. If there was one day I needed her as my wingwoman, it was today. So, of course, she was nowhere in sight.
“Savannah?” I heard from behind me.
I turned around to take in George, having to completely tip my head back to make eye contact with him. For some reason, I hadn’t noticed how ridiculous our height difference was until that moment. We had to have a good foot in between our heights. The ends of his strawberry blond curls were still a little damp, like he’d just woken up late and had to take a supersonic shower before driving to school.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said, turning away from him and continuing my walk toward Kavach’s room. “Did you watch the show? It’s okay if you don’t want to associate yourself with me anymore. The rest of the Internet has already written me off.”
“What?” he asked. “Wait, what show? Are you holding out on your fame on me over here?”
I turned back to him. “Grace didn’t tell you? You really don’t know?”
“I truly don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“My mom, she was on that show Shake the Weight last season. They came back a few weeks ago for a follow-up interview with the families, and it aired last night. My interview did not put me in the best light, to say the least,” I said.
“Then my question still stands,” he said. “How are you?”
The sincerity of it sent a shiver up my spine. His sincerity floored me. There was nothing sarcastic in that moment, no more banter left in him.
“I’m doing okay, thank you,” I said, deepening our eye contact.
“Good,” he said, before turning that full-body shade of red and turning his eyes from my gaze. “Uh, I do have a question for you.”
“Ask away,” I said, starting up my walk to class again.
“So we have a precalc test on Friday that I need some help with. I can pay you in a milkshake and endless fries if you’re game?” he asked.
“Call it pizza and you have a deal,” I said. “Want to meet at the Pizza Kitchen tonight? Five o’clock?”
“That’s the other thing,” he said. “My mom needs the car tonight. Do you mind picking me up?”
“I can’t promise that we’ll get there in one piece, but I can give you a ride,” I said. “Driving is one of my least favorite pastimes.”
The one-minute warning bell struck and he froze, probably not realizing just how little time he had to make it to his first class.
“I have to get going,” he said.
“Wait!” I called after him, “I don’t have your address!”
“I’ll slip a note in your locker!” he yelled back, as he ran down the hallway.
“How do you know which one is mine?” I asked.
“I just do!” he yelled back over his shoulder, sending me a lopsided smile before he rounded the corner.