THE RATTLING OF MY PHONE vibrating on my nightstand jolted me awake. I reached for it, and for a second I forgot everything that had happened, and almost answered. Then the memories came crashing over me as my bedroom came more sharply into focus.
I turned my phone off altogether and lay back down. But I was already wide awake. The sun wasn’t up yet, but there was that early-morning glow coming through the windows. I thought about going for a run—clear my head before I had to deal with my parents and their inevitable list of questions.
My brain told my body to get up, dust itself off, carry on, keep going, now. But the only movement my body would agree to was rolling over and falling back to sleep.
When I woke the next time, the light was coming in, bright and strong.
I heard Mom’s voice, muffled from behind her bedroom door down the hall.
“I know—” she said sharply, then, “Don’t you dare tell me what’s good for Chris!”
I was sure it was my parents arguing. I untangled myself from the sheets and jumped out of bed, swung my door open, and marched down the hall. I was prepared to barge in and tell them to just stop it once and for all, but there was quiet, a pause, followed by, “No, you’re wrong. Yes, I knew this would hap—” followed by another silence.
It wasn’t my dad she was yelling at. She was on the phone.
“All I know is, I sent my kid to you for two months and he comes back to me heartbroken and—”
I didn’t even hear the rest of her sentence because she’d said “he.”
“Yeah, fine, Isobel. Bye.”
I heard her footsteps approaching the door, so I turned around to try to make it back to my room before she saw me, but it was too late.
“Chris, wait,” she called after me.
I turned around slowly. “Yeah?”
“How are you feeling today?” she asked, as if it was just some kind of stomach bug that had me down.
“Fine,” I lied, shrugging for effect. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, which made her look younger than she had in a long time. “You’re not working today?” I asked.
“No, I took the day off. Well, I’m showing a house at six—third time, so fingers crossed—but I thought maybe we could spend some time together today?”
I opened my mouth. I was going to tell her I didn’t feel like it. Tell her that referring to me as “he” once didn’t make up for this whole summer of her treating me like a pariah. Remind her that she never did apologize about our fight. But she kept talking.
“I thought we’d head over to the waterfront, go to that place you like with the really good fish and chips?” She stood there in front of me, smiling.
I crossed my arms. I could see what she was doing. She wanted to act like it was old times between us. Every once in a while, when I’d be going through a particularly rough patch, she’d let me stay home from school and we’d spend the day together, at the waterfront, or she’d take me to the latest superhero movie even though she hated them. Or this one time when we went to Niagara Falls and pretended we were tourists—bought the T-shirts and the sunglasses and hats and a souvenir snow globe for Dad, and even took the Maid of the Mist boat tour—despite the fact that we’d both been to Niagara Falls a million times before, all to get me out of my head for a day.
Well, I couldn’t pretend. Not this time. Not anymore.
“Mom,” I said, looking her in the eye for what felt like the first time ever. “You do know that you and I, we’re not okay. Right?”
She looked down and let her shoulder lean against the wall. “I know, Chris. And I know it’s my fault too. I’m just trying to—”
“What, make me feel better?” I interrupted. “You’re a little late.”
I turned away from her and walked back down the hall to my bedroom. Closed the door. Put on my headphones and fell into bed.