Imogen felt a sense of relief when her phone rang and it was the principal of Annabel’s school. No parent ever wanted to get that call, but it meant she had an actual reason for not returning to work.
‘Ms Tate, I need you to come to the school immediately’ came the stern voice of Ms Oglethorpe, a woman with the demeanor of a drill sergeant who has just eaten something unpleasant. Ms Oglethorpe’s voice at the other end of the line made Imogen’s mind swim with terrible thoughts, the worst of which was that one of Marty McAlwyn’s wealthy former clients had finally snapped and come after her children, kidnapping Annabel for a small ransom to replace the money they lost when Alex put their deadbeat benefactor behind bars.
‘Is Annabel all right?’
‘She’s fine. She isn’t hurt, I can promise you that, but you will need to come take her home.’
‘Can you please tell me what is happening with my daughter, Ms Oglethorpe?’ Even as the words left her mouth, Imogen knew she’d learn nothing over the phone. Ms Oglethorpe delighted in the pageantry of informing parents in person that their offspring had disappointed her.
Annabel looked small on the generously proportioned chair outside Ms Oglethorpe’s office. She swung her legs back and forth in a rhythm that looked like it soothed her. Her head was low and she wasn’t crying, but when Imogen put a finger beneath her daughter’s chin to raise her face, she saw that her eyes were rimmed red.
‘I’m sorry, Mommy’ were the first words out of her mouth. ‘I just wanted to know who was doing it. I just needed to know which one of them was saying those terrible things about me.’ Tears spilled down Annabel’s apple-round cheeks. What exactly had her daughter done?
Ms Oglethorpe, a stern groove whittled between her deeply set eyes, exited her office and cleared her throat.
‘Ms Tate, please come into my office. Miss Marretti will be just fine sitting out here for a while longer.’
Imogen felt like a child herself as she eased into a chair opposite Ms Oglethorpe’s imposing mahogany desk.
‘I can assure you Annabel is not the kind of little girl who gets into trouble. This has to be some kind of misunderstanding.’
Ms Oglethorpe folded her hands in front of her, the fingers gnarled and red around the knuckles. She dispensed with any niceties about Annabel. ‘First of all, you do know our policy of not allowing smartphones in the classrooms. We understand that you parents feel the need to buy them iPhones and iPads and all other manner of “i” things at a younger and younger age each and every year, but we cannot have those things in our classrooms when the teachers are trying to teach. It’s an enormous distraction.’ Imogen nodded. Every single one of Annabel’s friends were given a smartphone well before their eighth birthdays. They’d been able to hold out until she was nine. It would come even earlier with Johnny. He already tried to swipe his finger across picture books to turn the page.
‘Did you call me down here because Annabel had her phone in the classroom?’ Absurd, even for a school like this one.
‘No. I just wanted to point out that Annabel had her phone with her when she screamed and threw food at Harper Martin and a table of other young ladies.’
Imogen was familiar with Harper Martin’s mother. Ella Martin was the socialite fourth wife of George Martin, the owner of the Brooklyn Nets. If the younger Miss Martin was anything like her entitled mum, Imogen could understand screaming at her, but she still didn’t fully understand what would make Annabel lash out like that, unless Harper was the one sending the nasty messages to her daughter.
‘Ms Oglethorpe, I am sure there is an explanation. Did you ask Annabel why she did what she did?’
‘I did. She clammed up.’
Imogen sighed. ‘Would you mind giving me some time with my daughter? Would you let me try to figure out what is wrong? There has to be a reasonable explanation.’
‘I prefer you take her home. She’s suspended for today and tomorrow.’
Imogen didn’t know what to say. Her daughter, suspended from school.
Annabel was suitably cowed when Imogen walked out of the office. She stood and placed her small hand in her mother’s, something she had refused to do for a couple of years now. They walked the six blocks back to their house in silence. When they got there, Imogen told Annabel to go upstairs and wash her face and asked her to meet her in the kitchen in fifteen minutes. Her daughter silently obliged. Imogen busied herself putting on the kettle for some tea.
Annabel was wearing pajamas with little penguins dotted all over them when she padded back down the stairs. They made her look much younger than ten.
Imogen gestured to the kitchen table and the English Breakfast tea, her favorite. Her daughter wrapped her small hands around the warm mug and sat down.
‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ Annabel nodded. ‘Go on, then.’
‘I’ve been getting these messages.’ Annabel squirmed uncomfortably. ‘First they got posted to my Facebook wall and then they came as Facebook messages. Sometimes they are mean comments on my Instagram and my YouTube.’
‘Can I see them, darling?’
‘I erased a lot of them. I didn’t want anyone else to see them. But there are still a couple.’ Annabel pushed her chair back from the table to grab her laptop out of her bright pink backpack. She logged onto the Wi-Fi and then opened up her Facebook page. Sure enough, the messages came from the same girl, ‘Candy Cool.’
There were still four messages in Annabel’s in-box. Imogen gasped when she saw what they said.
No boys r ever gonna like u because u have a face like a monkey.
U should ask your fancy mom if she thinks u r fat. I bet she does.
Do u ever look in the mirror and cry?
Hey chubs. U Suck!
‘Why do you think these came from Harper?’
Annabel shrugged.
‘Harper and her friends are jerks. They don’t like me. They laugh at me. I saw Harper on her phone in the cafeteria. She snuck it. She had my Facebook up on it. They were laughing at it.’
Annabel was in tears again. How could Imogen blame her? Imogen understood better than anyone right now what it was like for a bully to push you to your breaking point. She crossed to the other side of the table, picked her daughter up out of her chair and sat down in it herself, pulling Annabel down onto her lap, letting her cry into her breast. Breathing in the scent of her hair, Imogen could feel her heart just breaking for the girl.
‘I think we need to let Ms Oglethorpe know that you think it was Harper who bullied you.’
Annabel violently shook her head from side to side.
‘You do. You have to tell her.’
‘I don’t know if it was her anymore. When I yelled in the lunchroom she denied it. That’s why I threw my smoothie at her.’
‘Did it hit her?’
Annabel nodded. ‘In the face.’ Imogen tried not to smile. There was a certain satisfaction in being of an age where you could settle something by throwing a giant green smoothie in another girl’s face.
Her daughter continued. ‘But she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. At first I just thought she was a good liar, but I don’t think that she’s that good of a liar at all. Now I don’t know if she did it.’
‘Okay, Annabel. But you know how serious it is to be suspended from school, right? You know how disappointed your dad is going to be?’
Annabel buried her head back in her mother’s chest. ‘I know,’ came the muffled reply. ‘Please don’t tell him.’
‘Ana, I have to.’ Given the talking-to Imogen knew Alex would deliver that night and the stress Annabel had been under, she opted to play the good cop.
‘Well, it looks like we are both playing a little bit of hooky today. How about we make the most of it and have a girls’ afternoon? I can ask Tilly to keep Johnny for the next few hours.’
‘What should we do?’
‘Why don’t we go to the salon and get our hair done like proper ladies?’ Annabel had never been much of a girly girl, but she loved having her hair done in elaborate styles. She nodded.
‘You’ll need to put actual clothes on.’ Annabel raced up the stairs. Imogen kept staring at the nasty comments on her daughter’s Facebook page.
Imogen briefly checked her own email as she clicked off Annabel’s Facebook. Six emails from Eve, all asking with escalating urgency where she was. She considered not writing back, but what was the point? Eve would only send more emails.
‘I’m taking a personal day, Eve. I’ll see you in the office tomorrow.’ The rest of the emails could wait until the morning. She put the phone away just as Annabel was coming back down the stairs, pajamas replaced by a pair of skinny jeans and a bright purple sweater, her long dark hair pulled into a knot on top of her head.
‘You know, Ana, sometimes people are terrible. I wish they weren’t, but some people are just jerks.’ What was the point in lying to her daughter? Annabel nodded and hugged her around her middle, surprising Imogen at how tall she was getting.
‘You know you’re beautiful, right, honey? Really totally stunning,’ Imogen said.
Annabel scrunched up her face. ‘You have to say that, you’re my mom.’
Imogen kept going. ‘More important, your character is beautiful. You’re a gorgeous person inside and out. I may be your mother, but I don’t lie. I’ve hung around with some of the most famous supermodels in all the world and I can objectively tell you that the most beautiful humans I have ever met are the ones just like you … the ones who were genuinely nice, good people.’
Annabel laughed. ‘You sound like Oprah.’
Imogen raised her arms into the air and tried to affect her best Oprah voice. ‘And now everyone’s getting a car!’ At least she could still make her daughter laugh.
The time to lecture was over. They both needed a little distraction. ‘Now let’s go to the salon and then take loads of selfies and see who calls us ugly after that.’
Bundled up against the cold, Annabel shuffled her feet as she walked along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks and the tree roots that sometimes burst through the old New York City concrete. It had been a nice day with her mom. A great day actually. Mom really did mean well, but no one’s parents actually understood what it was like to be a kid these days. When her mom was her age, the Internet hadn’t even been invented yet. Things were different.
Candy Cool might not even be a girl at school. It could be anyone. It could be Green Grrl, who was really, really good at making GIFs and memes and weird graphics and stuff. She’d never met Green Grrl, who was also ten and also lived with her parents. She was in Florida though, not New York. They followed each other and once when Green Grrl first started making YouTube videos about smoothies last year she IM’d Annabel to ask if they could share recipes. But since then she had gotten really competitive and weird with her.
Whatever.
Annabel didn’t want to care. But it totally sucked when people posted things about you that everyone could see. The really worst thing about Candy Cool was that every single person at school could see it and they were all laughing at her. She thought about unfriending her or blocking her, but it would be worse if she didn’t know what people were saying, right?
Plus it hurt when people said things you already sorta felt yourself. She felt a little chubby. Her whole family, her mom, her dad and Johnny, were thin as wilted arugula. When Annabel was little and had even more baby fat than now she thought she had sprung straight from the belly of her grandma, Mama Marretti, a woman who never met a lasagna she wasn’t totally in love with.
Annabel never felt pretty and it was lame to hear her mom say, in her British accent that just wouldn’t go away, that Annabel was gorgeous. It came out like ‘gore-juice’ and it just wasn’t true. Her eyes were too far apart and her nose was too thin. Her hair did whatever it wanted to with no regard for how it made Annabel feel and most recently she had a colony of pimples break out on her chin.
Her mom was always so put together and pretty. Annabel felt sloppy in comparison, like that character in Charlie Brown who always had a cloud of dirt around him. She loved her mom. She didn’t really mind that she wasn’t always at home like some of her friends’ moms. She always made sure to spend a lot of time with her and Johnny. Plus, her job was cool. Last summer she had bought Annabel a brand-new dress and shoes and surprised her with a visit to the set of Martha Stewart’s television show and she made a big deal introducing Annabel to Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart!!! Mom talked all about her YouTube show and garden smoothies like they were some big important thing. Then Annabel got to talk to Martha and was so excited to learn that they both felt the same way about kale – it was great with everything!
Until about a month ago Imogen could watch Annabel’s videos only when Annabel pulled them up for her on the computer screen.
Afterward she would absentmindedly wave her hand at the screen and say something like, ‘Oh, you’ll have to show me how to do this one of these days.’ Then she would say it again the next time they’d watched a video. She’d gotten a lot better lately though. She was picking things up quickly. Annabel heard only bits and pieces about what was happening with her mom’s job, but it sounded like it sucked pretty bad. She had a new boss who was a jerk or something. She looked up at Imogen, her perfect blond hair bouncing over the top of her crisp white collar. Too bad her mom couldn’t just chuck a big old green smoothie in her boss’s face. Annabel decided to say that to her mom. It made her smile.