“Have you lost your goddamn mind?” Mom screams as she zooms through the campus in search of the nearest exit. It’s 12:01 a.m. and I’m officially a criminal. “I told you it would set off the alarm! That security guard was barely around the corner.”
“I’m sorry.” The last thing I wanted to do was add yet another layer of stress to our night. “But it didn’t go off after I smashed the headlight! I figured it must’ve been broken or something.” I watch out my window as we almost miss a key intersection for our escape. “Left! The on-ramp is like a mile down the road after you turn.”
She doesn’t exhale until we’re back on the turnpike.
“Luke’s gonna know it was us,” she finally says. “Let’s hope he doesn’t press charges.”
“He won’t.” As if I know how Luke would respond to a situation like this. “His parents will fix it for him. He knows we’re broke.”
“Right.” Mom shoots a cautious glance at the rearview mirror.
“There’s no one behind us.” I press Play on her phone. “We’re fine.”
The first song to come on is “Bust Your Windows” by Jazmine Sullivan.
“Oh, my God,” I say. “It’s —”
“Your theme song,” Mom blurts.
We burst into laughter like a pair of cackling witches. I turn the volume up and absorb Jazmine’s lyrics. She’s unapologetic — singing about how what her ex did to her was much worse than a car repair bill, but she had to do something to make him hurt. Preach!
“Holy shit.” I wipe a validated tear from my cheek. “This song is almost too perfect.”
“She’s that bitch.”
As the song fades out, it occurs to me that we haven’t yet sketched out a plan for Richard’s house.
“How are we gonna get inside?” I ask. “You’re positive there won’t be anyone home?”
“He’s in California.” Mom lights a cigarette with the hand she’s not using to steer the car. She’s basically back to being a full-blown nicotine addict at this point. “Who else would be there?”
I don’t say anything. The answer is obvious.
“There’s no way he had two New Jersey side bitches,” she says. “I think I’d have at least picked up on that.” Her voice shakes with insecurity. “Trust me. The house will be empty. I know the code to his garage. We’re fine.”
“He has one of those garage door opener keypads?” I ask. “God. That’s so upper middle class I could puke.”
Mom smirks. “Wait ’til you see the granite kitchen island.”
“Shut up.” Seriously, though. What’s up with rich people and their big-ass kitchen islands? You already have a countertop and a kitchen table! Why do you have to breed them? “I’m gonna have so much fun spray painting it.”
Richard’s exit appears practically out of nowhere. After a few left turns, we approach a random stoplight in the middle of his otherwise residential (and poorly lit) neighborhood. It’s yellow, but Mom isn’t reducing her speed.
I glance out the side of my window and see a jogger — sporting a pair of black stretchy pants, a purple Reebok hoodie, and oversized headphones — round the corner from the street perpendicular to us. She’s clearly oblivious, jamming out to her running playlist and headed directly toward the crosswalk we’re about to plow through.
“Mom, slow down!” I squeal. “There’s someone about to cross. Look!”
“Fuck me.” She slams on the brakes. We jerk into a stop directly under the traffic light. The jogger snaps out of her haze, drops her phone on the pavement, and comes to her own screeching halt right in front of our headlights. She’s blond and middle-aged. “This bitch,” Mom hisses. “Who goes for a run at this hour?”
The bitch in question picks up her phone from the ground, gives a half-wave, and continues on her journey. You’d never guess we almost just mauled her.
“She should at least be wearing some reflective gear.” I turn the music off. “Damn.”
“Right?”
Mom tosses her burnt cigarette out the window as I maneuver my head under the windshield and look up. My cheek is basically glued to the dashboard, but it’s the only way I can get a glimpse of the traffic light dangling above us.
“Okay.” It turns green. “Go.”
Mom switches the headlights off once we’re on Richard’s block. An eerie darkness consumes the interior of the car now that the radio display and speedometer are no longer backlit. It’s accompanied by an equally eerie silence. I feel like we’re tiptoeing down the street.
“Here it is, she whispers.
I notice a FOR SALE sign on the (sizable) lawn as we pull into the driveway. I peer out the window and take it all in: two-car garage, tidy white railing framing the front porch, dark window shutters against light vinyl siding. It’s all so HGTV — the kind of house some rich bitch with a million dollar budget on House Hunters would complain is “too cookie cutter” while Mom and I scream at the TV in a shared fit of life envy.
We sit in silence for another few moments.
“I feel so stupid.” She looks straight ahead at her hands, still on the steering wheel even though the car is in park. “This house —”
She stops herself from finishing the sentence. Probably because she knows she doesn’t have to. I’m feeling it all, too. This house was supposed to be the finish line. Moving into it would be proof that Mom’s relationship with Richard was truly different. Proof that she could see all the long distance periods through to their eventual happy ending. Proof that she was indeed wifeable — totally capable of being one of those million-dollar-budget HGTV rich bitches. Even if the budget wasn’t technically hers. It would be close enough.
There’s a fog of sadness in the air. Damn. I really shouldn’t have turned off the music. It totally stalled our momentum.
“You put up with way too much from him.” I rub her shoulder. “Remember that night last year when he didn’t show up?”
I could be talking about any number of nights — Richard was always blowing her off — but I have a feeling she knows which one I mean. It was a hot Friday in August. We shared the bathroom mirror as we both got ready for our respective weekends away from the apartment — her in Short Hills, me in Piscataway. Luke was picking me up at nine. Richard hadn’t texted Mom since they made their plans on Wednesday. She’d spent all day becoming flawless for him anyway — hair, manicure, wax, everything. Even with her makeup only half done, she already looked like she belonged on the cover of Vogue Italia.
“Is this normal for you guys?” I looked at her through the mirror while aggressively massaging store-brand apricot scrub into my T-zone. “Not texting for two days?”
“He’s in his forties.” Mom didn’t break focus from her eyeliner application process. “He’s not attached to his phone like we are.”
Fast-forward to nine o’clock when Luke texted me to let me know he was parked on the street outside.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, gathering the rest of my things for the weekend. “I don’t know how you haven’t been blowing up his phone.”
“If I do that, I’ll look like a crazy person.” She blinked twice and stuck the cap back on her Maybelline liquid liner. “What I need to do is act like it doesn’t matter to me.”
“I think you’re taking this whole ‘chill girl’ thing a little too far.” I couldn’t help but think about how a pre-Richard Mom would have been screaming obscenities into a dude’s voicemail for pulling something like this on her. “You shouldn’t have to play these games! It’s been more than a year with him. Haven’t you at least earned the right to be annoyed by the fact that he’s MIA after you’ve spent all day getting ready?”
She lowered her perfectly shadowed eyelids in shame. “Yes.”
“Text me when you hear something.” I was halfway out the door. “And if he doesn’t show up, please give him shit.” I gave her a hug. “Actually, give him shit either way.”
She took my advice and they ended up fighting for the entire weekend. He turned it around and made her feel like she was wrong for not trusting that he had a valid excuse for his silence. “Flights get delayed and phones die.” She accepted this line as law from that point on, reminding herself of it whenever he showed up late or blew her off, desperately looking forward to the day when they’d live together and this kind of thing would become a nonissue.
And now here we are in front of their would-be domicile, realizing that day will never come.
“All those times I should have said something.” Mom bows her head. “‘Flights get delayed and phones die.’ I’m so —”
“Stop saying that.” I comb my fingers through her hair. It’s soft, shiny, straight. Maybe those bargain keratin treatments are just as good as the real thing. Sometimes I miss her curls, though. When I was little I would wrap them around my tiny fingers and let go — entranced by how they’d always bounce back into shape like little springs. She hasn’t worn it like that in years. Guys like Richard always prefer it straight for some reason. “You’re not stupid. You were just gaslit.”
“Wait here.” She unbuckles her seat belt. “I’ll wave at you once I’m sure we can get in.”
“Shit. I just realized I dropped my bat in the parking lot after smashing Luke’s windshield.”
“Whatever.” Mom shrugs. “I’ll whack. You spray.”
She slinks out of the car and up to the front of the garage — stealthily, like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. A pair of motion-activated floodlights turns on and illuminates the entire front of the driveway. Oh, no. I almost snap my neck turning to scope out every other driveway on the street, terrified they’ll suddenly be filled with nosy neighbors in silk pajamas. (That’s what rich people wear to bed, right?)
But thankfully, the glow is perfectly contained to the ten-foot radius directly in front of the garage doors. We’re fine. The houses in this neighborhood are about a hundred times more spread apart than they are in Bayonne, where you can literally stick your arm out your window and into your neighbor’s kitchen.
Mom got the door open! I gather my bundle of supplies and do a Tomb Raider creep of my own. The first thing I notice upon entering the empty gray box of Richard’s garage is a set of golf clubs resting in the corner. Perfect. I swipe one to use as a replacement for the baseball bat I no longer have. The floodlights — which were also illuminating the inside of the garage for us — tick and turn off. Everything goes back to black.
“Please be open, please be open, please be open,” Mom quietly chants as she twists the door handle leading into the house. “Yes.”
“I have to pee.” I enter the first bathroom I see and place my Walmart bag and golf club on the marble counter. My reflection in the wall-spanning mirror is a damn travesty. I’ll admit that I normally have some degree of dark-circle action happening under my eyes, but it’s on a whole other level right now. You can tell I’ve been intermittently sobbing for the past thirty-six hours. It’s not cute! And, oh, my God — my hair. Random clumps of it are glued together from the sticky residue of the egg. Gross. I turn the faucet on and try to rinse it out over the sink.
All of a sudden I hear a cacophony from the other room. I turn the water off. Mom must have started without me again. Clank. Clank. I’m guided down the hall by the faint glow of dim track lighting. I find her standing in the open-concept kitchen, chucking dishes across the living room like Frisbees. The shiny hardwood floor at the bottom of Richard’s stone fireplace is peppered with chunky ceramic confetti. Rihanna would be proud.
“You know what really kills me about this?” Mom hands me a bowl. “It’s that I knew better than to trust his ass. But I did anyway.”
“Fuck him.” I hurl the bowl at the fireplace and watch the pieces burst and scatter. It’s entrancing to hear the room go from total silence to clank and back again. I grab myself another bowl. “Fuck all of them.”
“I just thought, ‘You know what? I’ve never been with a big-shot successful guy like this.” Mom picks up a plate. “Maybe Richard’s right. Men like him are busy.” She thrusts her entire body weight forward on her throw. “Yeah.” The plate explodes against the stone and shavings rain down onto the floor with the rest of the wreckage. “Real fuckin’ busy.”
Mom steps away from her pitcher’s mound and grabs a can of spray paint from the Walmart bag. I stand back in awe as she unleashes it all over the kitchen — on the counters, stainless-steel appliances, cabinet doors. Her approach is abstract: random lines, squiggles, zigzags with no rhyme or reason. She’s a pissed-off Picasso in skinny jeans and mascara.
“I’m going upstairs.” She tosses the can at me.
I barely catch it. “I’ll meet you up there.”
Just like the rubber grip of the baseball bat earlier, the chemical smell of paint fumes in the air transports me back to that day at Leo’s. Somehow the stakes feel higher at this house. I guess it’s just that much bigger. In large letters all over the kitchen island, I spray:
ASSHOLE
The jet black graffiti against the tan-white granite gives me chills.
My phone.
Shit. It’s Luke.
LUKE: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz. Fuck. He’s calling. I hit ignore and quickly respond to his text.
ME: what are you talking about? I’m sleeping
My pulse quickens as I watch the three dots next to his name bubble ominously.
LUKE: campus security just woke me up and showed me my car
It’s been at least an hour since we set his alarm off. What the hell has that security guard been doing this whole time?
ME: Someone keyed it or something?
This is something someone with absolutely no idea of what happened would say in response to the context clues Luke’s given so far, right? Right? Right?
LUKE: it’s DESTROYED
LUKE: you need serious help
LUKE: you’re fucking crazy
There it is again — the C-word. Because God forbid I have any feelings whatsoever about the fact that he ran my heart through a meat grinder.
ME: go to hell Luke — I WISH it was me
ME: I’ve been in Short Hills all night
ME: maybe it was Joshua
ME: or some other guy you’ve been fucking
The back of my throat burns with rage. A part of me feels genuinely offended that he’s so quick to assume I would do something so unhinged as to destroy his car in the middle of the night. (The fact that his assumption is correct is neither here nor there.) But a bigger part of me is more concerned with building a case for my innocence.
I send him a GPS location tag as ironclad proof that it couldn’t have been me. I’m more than thirty miles away from the scene of the crime.
LUKE: so u ignore my last texts for two days and suddenly respond now
LUKE: interesting
Fuck. He has a point. If Mom were here when he texted, I’m sure this is the first thing she would have warned me about. Damn her for going upstairs without me! What is she even doing right now?
LUKE: they’re pulling the security footage
ME: good for them
I put my phone in my pocket and pick up the golf club, channeling my ire into my grip. I almost wish I could just send Luke a link to the music video for “Bust Your Windows.” What he did to me was so much worse than what I did to his car. How could he not understand that?
I look around for something good to demolish, but the space is surprisingly sparse and open. There are only essential furniture pieces — no lamps, no vases (a vase would be so good right now), no cutesy home accents. This really would have been the perfect blank canvas for Mom to decorate if she had ended up moving in as planned.
I turn the corner toward the front entrance of the house and finally spot the perfect target: a crystal chandelier dangling over a random table in the foyer. It’s off, but the crystal is shining in the darkness — reflecting all the fragmented brightness it can muster from the kitchen lights down the hall. I admire the beauty of it all for two seconds before stepping back, putting my hood over my head for protection, and going berserk on the thing.
It’s raining shards of crystal. I’m reminded of the inside of Luke’s car after I obliterated his windshield earlier. It’s like I’m standing in the middle of a (highly disturbed) snow globe.
By the time I’m through with it, the chandelier resembles a bush that got run over by a lawn mower. I drop the club on the ground and shake the debris off my hoodie.
It occurs to me that the upstairs is too quiet. Shouldn’t I have been hearing an equal amount of destruction from above? I drop the golf club to the floor and barrel up the beige-carpeted stairs, casually spraying the walls with black paint as I go. It’s dark in the hallway, but there’s some light peeking out from beneath a door down the hall.
“Mom?”
I push the door open and see her zooming back and forth between two doors on opposite sides of the room. She’s possessed — maniacally transferring loads and loads of clothing from the walk-in closet to the master bathroom.
“This fucking bastard,” she says. “Look at this!” She drops her current load of clothes to the floor and bends over and rummages through the mess, apparently in search of a specific garment that isn’t there. “Ugh!”
She collapses on the floor, buries her face in her hands, and whimpers.
“You okay?” I ask. What a stupid question.
“Yeah.” She exhales and snaps out of it. “Or at least I’m about to be.” She leads me into the bathroom. The extra-deep soaking tub in the corner looks like the menswear bargain bin at JCPenney, if JCPenney bargain bins were filled with designer labels. She digs around until she finds what she’s looking for: a black bra. “Double D! This isn’t mine or his wife’s. I looked her up online and she’s flatter than a goddamn Olsen Twin.”
“I’m glad I just destroyed his chandelier.”
“I thought I heard something down there.” She tosses the bra back in the bathtub. “Nice.”
Something has snapped in her. The version of Mom that gave sage beach advice and warned against smashing Luke’s windshield has been dying a slow death all night long — but this bra was the final nail in the coffin. She has absolutely no more fucks left to give.
“So are we —”
“Yup.” She goes back to the bedroom to grab the clothes she dropped on the floor a few moments ago. She comes back and slaps them into the tub with the rest. “What else should we burn? Anything?”
“Uhh…” I scan the beautiful en suite. Once again not much more than the basics. There’s an almost-full bottle of Listerine by one of the sinks (of course this bathroom has two sinks). I pick it up. “What if we pour this over all the clothes?” I ask. “This is, like, super-flammable, right?”
“Only one way to find out.”
I douse the clothes in the minty green liquid.
Mom grabs a book of matches from under the sink. “I used to love taking baths with him in here.”
“Oh, my God, TMI.” Even we have our limits with the personal details. “I do not need to picture you in here with Richard’s old ass.”
“His crusty old ass,” she adds.
“I will vomit. Let’s just light this shit on fire already.”
“There’s a smoke detector right outside the bathroom door,” Mom says. “We can’t let it get too crazy.”
“Should I take the battery out?” I ask.
“Oh, right.” Her face relaxes. “Yeah, do that.”
Normally I’d be gentle when performing this kind of task, but in this case I just rip the alarm right off the ceiling without caring if I break something in the process. I pluck the 8-volt battery from its compartment and toss it on the floor.
Mom is tearing a match out of the matchbook when I get back.
“Wait!” I dig into my pocket and grab my wallet. It’s dark-brown leather, from Banana Republic. Luke gave it to me as a birthday present just last month. I empty its contents into my pocket — twelve dollars, school ID, license, debit card — and throw the wallet on top of the heap. “This ugly-ass waste of leather can go to hell.”
Mom looks at me with sad eyes like she totally gets it. I do the same for her.
“Here we go.”
She strikes the match and throws it into the tub. The tiny flame lands on the sleeve of a sweater and immediately fades out.
“Well,” I say. “That was anticlimactic.”
She tries again, personally holding the flame directly to a piece of Listerine-y dress shirt until the fabric finally catches fire.
This time it works.
The white-yellow-orange starts slowly — creeping its way through sleeves and pockets and collars. We stand still, entranced by the wandering flames. I can’t pinpoint the exact stitch that causes the fire to accelerate, but soon enough our faces are totally illuminated by this blazing bundle of Calvin Klein before us.
I grab Mom’s hand.
This feels like the perfect form of closure for our respective situations. All the lies, pain, drama. Our invalidated pasts. Our canceled futures. Burn it all down.
“Shit.” Mom lets go of my hand. “Do you smell that? It’s like… burning pl —”
“Plastic.” I’m jolted back into the moment with the realization that something is very different about this fire than the one we made at Leo’s. It’s bigger, brighter, bolder. “You don’t think the actual tub is melting. Do you?”
Mom frantically zips to the faucet to turn the shower on.
Except — oh, my God — how did we not notice that this bathtub is a standalone bathtub? There is no showerhead hanging above to save us.
The shower is totally separate and on the opposite end of the bathroom!
“Shit!” Mom screams as she turns the regular bath faucet on. Cold water drips out, barely impacting a single flame. I cup some of the water with my hands and splash it toward the fire, but somehow it only seems to make things worse.
“Fuck, Mom!” A five-ton slab of dread plummets from my head to my chest to my knees. This can’t possibly end well. “How many times have you been here? You’ve seriously never noticed that there’s no shower over the tub? Seriously?”
“Jesus, Joey, I don’t know! Of course I noticed. I’ve used that shower a million times. I didn’t put two and two together.” Her arms flail in panic. “Romantic baths and revenge fires are kinda on opposite sides of my brain.”
For all the high-end finishes in this godforsaken place, the developers failed at installing a melt-proof tub. This thing is very much turning into sludge before our watery, smoke-filled eyes. That five-ton slab of dread in my body is increasing in weight by the second, by the flame.
“Does he have a fire extinguisher?” I ask. Mom just looks at me in a way that indicates she has absolutely no clue. “Shit! Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
“Maybe downstairs?” she adds. “Fuck. I don’t know, Joey!”
It feels like we’re on a speeding train that has gone off its tracks. There are no brakes. There is no safe way to exit. All that’s left to do is violently crash into something.
“We gotta get the hell out of here,” I say. “This fire is gonna hit the bones of the house and the whole place is gonna burn down.”
“It’s just a bathtub fire!” Mom cries. “There’s gotta be a way we can contain this.”
Right as she says that, an attack of angry flames flares out at us. Sparks fly everywhere. There’s a mess of melted plastic and pipes where the bathtub used to be. A single wood plank is exposed, burning like a campfire log.
Suddenly the smashing of Luke’s windshield seems tame.
Even a little cute.