Covet (2 page)

Tessa fed her mother bites of toast and urged her to take sips of the orange juice, coaxing until she’d eaten most of one piece of bread and nearly all of the juice.

“Another bite? Please, Mom? Just finish this, okay?” pleaded Tessa.

But Gillian couldn’t be persuaded and stubbornly turned her back to her daughter. “No more,” she croaked. “I’m tired, Tess. Let me sleep now.”

Tessa sighed but set the dishes aside. “Mom, you’ve been sleeping almost nonstop for days now. You need to snap out of this soon. Otherwise, I’m going to drag you to the clinic so they can give you something. This episode has been going on for too long and you know it.”

Gillian shook her head. “No clinic. No pills. You know how much I hate that stuff. They make me feel like a zombie, Tess.”

It was on the tip of Tessa’s tongue to remind her mother that she already acted like a zombie, pills or no pills. But it was nearly time to leave for school, and she desperately needed extra time this morning to get in some last minute studying for her math quiz. She’d studied like mad for this one, knowing that she had to get a better grade than the last disastrous test. Otherwise, she feared she’d have to meet with the teacher or, worse, a guidance counselor, and the last thing she needed was for anyone to start prying into her personal life.

“You need to do something, Mom,” she chided gently. “The down time has never lasted this long before and I’m worried about you. I need you to get better, Mom, okay? Please? For me?”

“No pills. No doctors. They’ll make me check into some clinic, and God knows what will happen to you, Tessa. You’ll get forced into foster care and they’ll take you away from me forever.”

Gillian began to weep after that, silent sobs that shook her emaciated frame, and Tessa knew better than to keep pushing when she got into this state. Instead, she merely smoothed her mother’s greasy, tangled hair from her face and pressed a kiss to her cold cheek.

“All right,” she assured her quietly. “We’ll talk about it some other time. I’ve got to leave for school now, okay? I’ll be back around eight thirty tonight after work. Please promise you’ll try to eat something else?”

Gillian gave a slight shrug and turned her face into the pillow as she pulled the covers up almost over her head. Tessa sighed, knowing that this was her mother’s way of shutting her off, and that it would do no good to press her further. She gave her another quick kiss on the top of her head before clearing away the dishes, and grabbing her backpack.

The unsettled feeling she’d woken up with didn’t diminish as she made her way down the three flights of rickety stairs to the parking lot. If anything, the butterflies in her tummy were fluttering even harder as she unlocked the cream Toyota compact. Her mother was getting worse as each day passed, and Tessa was becoming more and more despondent as she tried desperately to figure out a way to get Gillian the help she so badly needed.

But it was hard when you were only sixteen, had no relatives or close friends or neighbors to help, and had only lived in this city for a scant six months. They had arrived in Tucson in early April, with barely two months remaining in the school year. Such an impulsive move was nothing new to Tessa, having grown used to switching cities and apartments and schools sometimes two or three times in a year. Gillian was flighty, high strung, given to fits of artistic temperament and spontaneity, and she had often referred to herself as a gypsy at heart, even though she was of Norwegian descent and had grown up in a small town in Minnesota.

The positive side of starting a new school towards the very end of the term – if one could think of it in such a light – was that Tessa had been able to snag a spot at what was considered the best public high school in Tucson. The district had an open enrollment policy, and when presented with the choice between the rather rundown school in her neighborhood, and this much nicer one several miles away, the decision had been a no-brainer. Not only was the school more modern, with better maintained facilities, but was higher ranked academically.

Not that the latter made much of a difference to Tessa. She’d always struggled to keep her grades up, was lucky to get B’s and C’s, and had long ago given up the idea of taking the sort of classes she’d need to get into college. Ever since she’d realized the extent of her mother’s mental illness, she had accepted the fact that getting a decent job after high school to support the two of them had to be her only goal. She took the most basic classes she could at school, ones that she knew she could pass and wouldn’t demand too much of her time with homework assignments or studying. Geometry, unfortunately, had been a graduation requirement at her new school and she was counting the weeks until the dreaded class could be over and done with.

Tessa knew that her scholastic struggles weren’t entirely her fault. She wasn’t dumb or lazy or without ambition. Things just came a little harder for her at times, and it wasn’t like she’d ever been able to get help from Gillian with homework. Her mother, in fact, had more often than not scoffed at the notion of homework and tests and regimented classes, and there had been numerous times when Tessa had been a child when Gillian had called her in sick so that they could go out and have a day of fun together instead. Tessa had set her foot down on such actions once she’d reached the age of ten or so, not wanting to fall even further behind everyone else in class. To Tessa, it felt like she was always playing catch-up, always struggling to understand the lesson. Of course, much of the blame for that could be placed squarely on Gillian’s shoulders for moving them around so frequently. Tessa would have just settled in at a new school, become comfortable with the teacher, and even begun to make a friend or two when Gillian impulsively decided that Albuquerque was too crowed, or Palm Springs too commercial, or that the vibes she felt in Durango weren’t helping her creativity to flow and causing her latest bout of writer’s block.

So they would move again, packing up the few clothes and household goods they owned, and start over again in another city in the Southwest – Santa Fe, Yuma, Sedona, El Paso. Gillian loved the desert, loved the dry, hot climate, and insisted she never wanted to live anywhere else. She had never stopped to think how difficult each move was on her child, how hard the already shy and introverted Tessa had to struggle to fit in at each new school.

And as Tessa grew older and more observant, she began to realize that it wasn’t just creative reasons that prompted her mother to move them around so frequently – especially over the past few years when Gillian barely wrote at all. More often than not the reasons they would just pick up and get out of town were because Gillian owed money to someone and didn’t have the cash to pay them back. Or because she was suddenly anxious to get away from a boyfriend who’d become a little too demanding. And there had even been a few times when a social worker had started nosing around, usually after Gillian and Tessa had spent some time living in a homeless shelter.

Tessa hated to think about those times – the days and weeks when they had had no recourse but to stay in a shelter. Those stays had more often than not occurred when Gillian had been in a downward spiral, stuck in one of her depressive phases, and hadn’t been able to work. Tessa had been wary and intimidated by some of the other shelter occupants, and had stuck to her mother’s side like glue, even though Gillian hadn’t been in any condition to offer her much protection or reassurance.

Social workers and outreach volunteers had always seemed to be present at the shelters, interviewing occupants and doing what they could to get them into permanent housing and finding other services for them. It had been rather obvious that Gillian was in dire need of a mental health professional, and wasn’t in any shape to take proper care of Tessa. There had been talk of placing her in foster care while Gillian sought treatment, and Tessa had been terrified that she would be separated from her beloved mother and never see her again. She’d also overheard nightmarish stories from other shelter occupants about what had happened to their own children during their time in foster care – everything from molestation to physical abuse to neglect – and Tessa had begged her mother to get better so that she wouldn’t be subjected to such horrors.

Somehow or other, she’d managed to avoid being placed into foster care over the years, and now that she was old enough to hold down a part-time job and had learned by trial and error how to manage their little household, Tessa vowed silently that she would find a way to continue taking care of herself and Gillian.

When your mother would slip into a depressive state without warning for days and weeks at a time, you learned quickly – even as a six year old – how to feed and dress yourself and get to and from school each day. By the age of eight Tessa had learned how to do the laundry, was taking out the trash, and washing the dishes. At twelve, she’d figured out how to write a check so that the rent on whatever apartment or room they were living in wasn’t late again and they weren’t threatened with eviction. By fourteen she’d more or less taken over all of the day to day chores, paid the bills, did the grocery shopping, and tried – mostly in vain – to get Gillian to take her meds. Now at the age of sixteen she was more parent than child, fully responsible for a mother who’d suffered from severe bipolar disorder ever since Tessa could remember, all while going to school and working two part-time jobs.

But she didn’t mind – not really – even though so much responsibility meant that she wasn’t free to enjoy all of the normal things teenagers experienced. Like dating, or going to high school football games and dances, or simply spending time chatting on the phone or texting her girlfriends – girlfriends that didn’t actually exist. Tessa was too busy to find time to cultivate relationships – not to mention still incredibly shy – and she was always cautious about letting people find out too much about her personal life.

She was always one of the first to arrive at school, and the little Toyota compact was one of only a dozen or so cars parked in the student lot. The ten year old car had been a gift of sorts to Gillian a few years back from a boyfriend she and Tessa had lived with for several months. Gillian had once been quite successful at wheedling things from men – clothes, jewelry, money, apartments. She had been not just extraordinarily beautiful but charming, flirtatious, and fun-loving, a combination that most men had found irresistible. But when a manic phase had really taken hold, she’d often been out of control, and the men she’d met had been unable to deal with her wildness, deeming her crazy and suddenly keeping their distance. And that had usually been when she would pack up her things, grab Tessa, and hightail it out of town.

The hallways were largely empty when Tessa entered the school building, as was the cafeteria. Very few of the students ate breakfast here, the vast majority of them coming from well-to-do families who didn’t have to rely on their children receiving reduced cost meals from the school district. For Tessa, however, the supplemental meals were a godsend, even if some of the menu items didn’t always look particularly appetizing.

She hurried through her breakfast – French toast with yogurt and fruit – before pulling out her geometry book to cram a final few minutes of studying. Fortunately, the unsettled feeling she’d woken up with seemed to have settled down, and she hoped that her superstition about Wednesdays would prove to be unfounded this time around.

Tessa kept her head down and didn’t make eye contact with any of the other students as she made her way to geometry, her first class of the day. She had become adept at making herself as invisible as possible over the years, figuring that if she didn’t draw attention to herself no one would delve deeper into her private life and thus determine that Gillian wasn’t in any condition to raise a teenager. Tessa made sure she was at school every day, always on time, and that she never cut class. She was diligent about turning in her homework, keeping quiet in class, and generally flying under the radar. Kids like her who stayed out of trouble weren’t the ones who normally got called to the principal’s office, or gave teachers or counselors cause to start poking around into their personal business. And it was more important than ever, given Gillian’s rapid descent into total darkness, that no one – students, teachers, social workers – ever suspected how bad things were for Tessa at home these days.

She was startled, therefore, when Logan Dunbar – the really cute guy she’d admittedly had a secret little crush on since the first day of school this year – sat down at the desk to her right and grinned at her broadly.

“Hi, Tessa,” he greeted. “Ready for the test?”

Tessa could only gape at him for long seconds, startled that he even knew her name, and even more so that he seemed to be going out of his way to speak to her. Not only was Logan a hunk – tall and rangy with longish dirty blond hair and mischievous green eyes – but he was definitely one of the most popular guys in their junior class. He played on one of the sports teams – football or maybe soccer, she wasn’t exactly sure – and always seemed to be surrounded by a group of both guys and girls, of which he was the undisputed leader.

Aware that he was gazing at her expectantly, Tessa felt her cheeks grow hot and she mumbled almost incoherently, “Um, I, uh, think so. I hope it isn’t going to be too hard.”

Logan winked at her. “I doubt it. At least, not like the last one. Man, I sweated bullets taking that test, thought for sure I was going to flunk it.”

Tessa struggled mightily to dream up a witty reply, but her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth at the moment so she only smiled in return. Logan’s twinkling green eyes roved over her curly blonde hair and flushed cheeks, before dropping to the swell of her breasts beneath her thin cotton T-shirt. When he lifted his gaze back up to her face, his eyes had darkened noticeably.

“Hey, tell you what,” he offered. “If we both survive today’s test, we should celebrate a little. You want to go out with me this Friday night to the movies?”