Crush Control (7 page)

“No,” I answered. “No tennis or student government.” I pointed back at the densely diagrammed paper towel, shifting the focus away from myself. “So where's Max in all this?”

Georgia drew a wide circle around the pyramid. “Best I can tell, Max orbits. He's friends with everyone.”

Not surprising, but I was his
best
friend, right? I looked at the wide black circle encompassing everyone and wondered if that was still true.

The bell rang and moments later the bathroom was infiltrated with girls fixing their hair at the mirrors, re-applying make up, and texting. Georgia and I pulled ourselves up off the floor. I grabbed the paper towel and shoved it into my bag for further dissection later. I followed Georgia down the long hallway and out onto a covered walkway, watching the streams of people pass by as the sticky heat enveloped me.

We walked into the next building over and were hit with a welcome blast of air-conditioning. Georgia gestured to the first door and I walked into English class, put my bag down in the first empty seat, and went up to introduce myself to the teacher. When I turned around and walked back to my desk, Georgia had taken the seat behind me.

A petite blonde walked through the door. She glided over to the chair adjacent to mine and sat. Her long straight hair was the perfect shade of blonde—not as light as Playboy Bunny processed platinum, but not dull and dingy like the dishwater blonde I was. Her hair was soft and shimmering—classy and polished, like a long plate of glass. It caught the twinkle of the fluorescent lights from above. Not a strand was out of place. Not a fraction of frizz. I smoothed my hand over my head, a sliver of envy creeping into my insecurity.

Georgia nudged me from behind. I looked back at her. She nodded over toward the beautiful blonde and steepled her hands into a pyramid.
Mia
, she mouthed.
Queen bee.

Just then, in walked the hot guy from the park, Quinton, with his hair all tousled and gorgeous.

He patted Mia's desktop two sharp times as a hello, and then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw me. He stopped his stride and turned in my direction.

Just like in the park, I became flustered. Even though I knew I wasn't, I instinctively looked down to make sure I wasn't wearing my M&M T-shirt. I nervously unbuttoned then re-buttoned the top two buttons of my sweater.

A small smile crept across Quinton's face. He pointed at me. “
Do you be-lieve in life after love
?” he sang. He laughed then walked toward the back of the room.

I felt everyone staring at me, wondering who I was. My hands felt hot and sticky.

“Oh. My. God.” Georgia's hot breath streamed into the back of my hair. “Quinton Dillinger is gorgeous. Gorgeous! THE QUARTERBACK ! If not the god at the top of the ancient Egyptian pyramid scheme, definitely whatever comes next—a pharaoh? A noble? A priest?”

“I highly doubt he's a priest,” I mumbled back as Mrs. Stabile stood up to start the lesson.

“If this is your first day here, how do you know Quinton?” Georgia was hyperventilating.

I waited until the teacher looked down at her book, then turned and talked out of the side of my mouth like a ventriloquist. “My dog humped his leg at the park on Saturday.”

“Ah!” Georgia gasped. “Memorable! Just like on
Rhapsody in Rio
when Eva met Juan for the first time because she caused his toilet to overflow. Awkward at first, sure, but eventually, in season six, it became the focal point of the speech at their wedding!”

We both turned and looked back at Quinton, who was running his fingers through his golden brown hair.

I smiled and nudged Georgia. “Did he just sing Cher to me? I didn't, like, hallucinate that, did I?”

Georgia shook her head. “One microphone away from karaoke.”

I turned back toward the front of the room and tried to calm my racing heart. Quinton just sang to me. And not in a mocking way, but rather in a
we've got a private joke
kind of a way. A warm heat coursed through me. Hot Guy Quinton, Grand Pharaoh of the Pyramid of Greatness at this school, not only remembered me but maybe—just maybe—was a little bit amused by me. Maybe I wasn't a tennis player or a student government officer, and I didn't have perfectly glossy hair, but maybe without even realizing it, I'd already started the reinvention.

“This could be the perfect way to get your mind off Max,” Georgia whispered as class began.

Hmm
, I wondered.
Get my mind off him . . . or make him realize exactly what he's missing?

I walked the two miles home from school in the sizzling heat, with each step my hair levitating upward with frizz until I looked like a puffy dandelion. I climbed the front porch steps and entered the house, so quiet, still so empty. It was much bigger than our apartment in Vegas, and my mom thought this was fantastic—
you can get so much more for your money here!
But Mom failed to realize that extra space meant we would need more furniture to fill in the gaps, more rugs to stop the echoes, and since Mom wasn't the best with budgeting, I suspected we'd be hearing echoes for quite a while. Since Mom had now officially taken over the checkbook, we were probably late on the mortgage the minute we crossed the threshold.

No
, I reprimanded myself. If I was capable of transformation, so was she.

I tossed my canvas bag onto the kitchen counter, grabbed a Twinkie from the wicker basket of snacks, and plopped on the couch. Oompa waddled out from my bedroom, shook his head as if to say,
This place is so quiet, with only the rustle and tap of the maple tree branches against the window, and that, my dear, does not compare to Cher.

“I know,” I agreed and patted the cushion next to me. Oompa backed up, giving himself an ample runway, then heaved himself up onto the couch with a thud. I scratched his ear, thinking how for so many years I'd assumed Max's feeling for me were deeper than friendship. He gave me his dog, after all. “When you saw Max yesterday, could you smell that girl on his clothes?” I asked Oompa. “Did you know he had a girlfriend?” Oompa snorted and buried his nose behind a pillow, looking guilty. “You could have warned me.” I sighed and propped my feet up on the old, scratched coffee table.

I flipped on the TV and quickly got frustrated that I couldn't find my favorite stations on the never-ending list of channels on the menu guide. Everything felt so weird. Mom was supposed to be here, eating Twinkies with me, asking me how my day was and watching
Dr. Oz.
She'd make her weekly promise to eat healthier, then get ready for her show. Instead, it was just me and Oompa and TV stations that were all wrong. I decided to pick a movie from the towering stack of romantic comedies that Mom had collected over the years. Feeling full of self-pity, I popped in
My Best Friend's Wedding
and watched Julia Roberts concoct manipulative plans to steal her best friend back from the clutches of the wrong woman. If only I had a gay friend to masquerade as my boyfriend and make Max jealous, I thought.
Would Max be jealous?

The front door opened and Mom walked in. I was startled at the sight of her. She looked completely unchanged. She was wearing a short, eggplant-colored dress with a rhinestone-studded belt wrapped around her waist. Her legs were bare except for the thin diamond anklet sparkling against her tanned skin. Her matching purple leather heels were four inches, and her voluminous hair added another inch to her height. Her eyes were rimmed in charcoal liner.

“What?” she asked, all frazzled and breathless, dumping a pile of books next to mine, kicking off heels, and grabbing a Twinkie. She unwrapped it from the crinkly cellophane and joined me on the couch. Oompa grumbled at the unexpected shift in his cushion. She propped her feet next to mine and exhaled loudly. “Who knew nine to five was so . . . long.” She looked over at the TV. “Ooh, I love this part,” she said, and proceeded to laugh at the antics onscreen. She turned back toward me with a quizzical look on her face. “What?” she asked again, eating the last gobble of Twinkie. “Why are you making that face?”

“Your clothes,” I said. “I thought you were working at a doctor's office?” I asked, although I knew she was. “I just thought—”

“What?” She turned toward me.

“You're dressed like you're going to do a Vegas show.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “I thought you said you wanted to change, to have a more normal life. . . .”
Normal moms don't wear four-inch purple heels,
I wanted to say.
Normal moms don't get catcalls and whistles from the road.
I blinked my eyes so I wouldn't cry. “How are the patients going to take you seriously if you're dressed like that?”

Mom turned her lower lip in and chewed on it for a few seconds. “People will take me seriously because I know what I'm doing. I'm going to help them. And”—she pointed to the stack of books on the table—“I'm really going to work hard to be the best hypnotherapist I can be.” She bit her lip again. “I'm not going to let anyone down, most of all Charlie.”
Her new boss.
“He took a chance on me, and I'm going to prove to everyone that I can do it.”

“I know you will, Mom,” I said. “I just think that here, especially in a small Southern town, maybe your appearance might be . . . a distraction. You say you want to be taken seriously, but maybe someone might be too blinded by the rhinestones to even give you a chance.”

“My appearance shouldn't dictate my value.” They were words I'd heard before—every time Mom and Grandma fought.

Mom relaxed her shoulders. “If I told you I wore a lab coat, would that make you feel better?”

I smiled. “Maybe.”

She smiled back and got up.

I followed her into the kitchen.

She randomly opened the cabinets and stared at the boxes and cans. She pulled out a box of Kraft mac 'n' cheese and shrugged. I understood the dilemma. Our schedule was so out of whack. We were accustomed to eating a snack after I came home from the library, then eating a bigger meal after the show. Mom didn't like to feel weighed down onstage, so we'd wait until the last person in the audience had departed; then we'd raid the casino buffet and traipse home with white Styrofoam boxes filled with an assortment of fried, greasy foods. It had been ages since we'd actually prepared a meal.

I took out a pot and filled it with water and turned on the stove. I looked over at the purple leather heels resting on the ground. This perplexed me—the shoes. The outfit. I just wasn't expecting it.

There had been a long-standing battle between Mom and Grandma about Mom's lifestyle and choices. After an especially large battle, they had stopped speaking, and our visits to Georgia had ceased. I found letters from Grandma begging for reconciliation crumpled in the trash, and Mom always argued that Grandma wanted to reconcile but on her own terms. Grandma wanted Mom to lead a more conventional life—to have a more acceptable job with a daytime schedule, a more conventional wardrobe, a steady relationship—all the things that she thought would give me a more normal life. But Mom wanted her mother to accept her regardless of her choices. She wanted Grandma to admit that, even though Mom's life was the complete opposite of Grandma's, she was still a good mother, a good person.

It was sad, because even though, essentially, they were arguing about what was best for me, they failed to realize that their stubbornness carved a chasm in my life. I wanted my family to be together. I missed my grandmother, but I hated that she was so judgmental. I felt loyal to Mom because despite the craziness of our lives, she was still an awesome mom, but I resented her for fracturing my relationship with my grandparents.

So I did what I always do—I tried my best to control the situation. When I talked to Grandma and Grandpa on Sundays, I did it in private where Mom wouldn't hear. And when Grandma asked probing questions about Mom's job or boyfriend of the month, I simply deflected the conversation to a less controversial topic. And for years that's how it was. I maintained both relationships with a delicate balance.

Then, quite unexpectedly last spring, Mom began casually mentioning her parents.

“You know, your grandmother does that exact same thing,” she commented, noting how I lined up the Easter egg dyes according to the color spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

Or, “Funny, last night I watched
Driving Miss Daisy
, and that stuffy old woman sort of reminded me of Grandma.”

Then, “Last night that creep in the front row was so obnoxious and I just got to thinking what it would be like to have a different job.”

And that's when the tingle of anticipation crept inside me—the possibility of a new future seemed within reach. A future where I could have a mother who looked like other teenage girls' mothers and had a normal job and I'd be the one bringing new boyfriends to the house. We could have family dinners on Sunday nights instead of phone calls in private.

Then, a few weeks after Mom began talking about her parents and a new job, she met Charlie. It was an accidental fleeting encounter—one of those crazy scenarios where she was racing for the elevator, he held the doors, and they rode up twelve floors together. And in that time she told him she was a hypnotist; he told her he was a doctor; and apparently they had some lightning-bolt connection. Not romantic, she insisted, but some crazy energy passed between them. Mom suggested an idea—a way to help his patients deal with their pain through hypnosis. He came to her show. She impressed him, naturally. Then he told her she was smart. Not beautiful, not sexy. Not intriguing, enticing, entertaining, or any of the zillion other compliments she heard on a routine basis. He said smart.