My keep-Afton-away strategy doesn’t work, however, because not even a half hour later she approaches me outside the restrooms at Volcanoes National Park. “What’s going on with you?” she asks immediately.
Shit.
“Nothing is going on with me,” I spit out. Another lie.
“Still thinking about Leo?”
“No, I am not thinking about Leo at all, except now I am, thank you very much.” It’s a good cover, I realize, acting like I’m upset over the stupid breakup. It explains things that I need to explain. Like the way my teeth are grinding together right now.
“You should talk to Mom about it.”
I snort. “Mom. Mom doesn’t even know I broke up with my boyfriend. Does she know you broke up with your boyfriend?”
“Not yet,” Afton says lightly. “She’s busy.”
“She seems to make time for the things she cares about, though,” I say bitterly.
“Yeah,” Afton says, because she thinks I’m actually saying something good about Mom. “She’s had some interesting breakups. She could give you some perspective on the subject.”
“I don’t want Mom’s perspective,” I mutter.
“That time I . . . after my first time, in the garage, I talked to her,” Afton says.
I sit up straighter. “You told Mom about having sex?”
Afton nods.
I scoff. “What did she do?”
“Oh, she wasn’t exactly happy about it,” Afton remembers. “But she hugged me. She talked me through it, even. She’s not as good as Pop about these kinds of things, maybe, but she’s capable of the parenting thing. When forced. You should talk to her.”
I wonder how long it will be before I can even comfortably be present in the same room with my mother again. This morning, before she left the hotel, I thought about calling her out. And then, while Abby and Afton and I were having breakfast, Mom texted me asking about what we were planning on doing today (she didn’t read the folder, either, apparently), and I was so tempted to text her back, Oh, nothing, just hanging out in the room. Or do you and whoever-it-was need it again? It seemed like you were pretty busy in there yesterday.
And then I imagined Mom staring down at her phone, horrified, almost as shocked as I was yesterday, sick with knowing that she’s caught. Terrified that I know who she really is now. Dreading that she’s going to have to look me in the face at some point and finally tell me the truth.
That might make me feel somewhat better. If she could feel just a little bit of what I am feeling. If she would fess up to it. If she’d say she’s sorry. If she promised not to do it again.
But if we all put our cards on the table, I can still only see one probable outcome: divorce—a word I associate with a few hazy memories of voices screaming at each other from behind closed doors and the silhouette of a man holding a suitcase. And this time the man with the suitcase will be Pop. My jaw clenches at the thought. I’ll be damned—yes, damned, I decide, which feels like an older person’s word, but I embrace it—I’ll be damned if I lose Pop because my mother is a selfish slut.
There it is. The word. I mean it this time. We aren’t supposed to use the word slut because that’s what men used to call women who dared to have sex outside of their control. There are a lot of words for it: strumpet, hussy, tramp, skank, ho. Any woman who might possibly enjoy sex and actually want to participate in the act, who hooked up with more than one partner—there must be something wrong with a woman like that. She should be punished. Slut.
But I can’t think of another word. My mother has betrayed us with sex.
And why? Why would she do it? It isn’t like she’s sex starved. She and Pop have sex. She isn’t one of those repressed and lonely housewives from the fifties who never really had a choice but to get married to the first available beefcake and have babies and do her marital duty. Mom is a modern woman. A freaking surgeon. She cuts people open and takes them apart and then puts them back together. My mother is a titan. She’s a badass.
So why can’t she also be a decent person? Is that so much to ask? Mom always talks about how Afton and I (and Abby, eventually) need to be strong and good, as people but also as women. She likes to say we need to be the change the world needs—something ripped off from Gandhi, I think. She expects us to do our best, and we do. We get straight As. We participate in the requisite extracurricular activities, and we excel in those, too. We have been model children.
And all this time, Mom has been screwing around.
I really, really want to hate her.
“Ada?” Afton prompts quietly.
“Why is sex such a big deal?” I ask, more to myself than to my sister.
“Oh. Right. I used to think it wasn’t a big deal,” Afton says. “I used to see sex as a purely physical thing, something programed into our animal brain, or whatever. I didn’t think it had to mean anything. I was pretty eager to cash in my V-Card. But now—”
“I guess I couldn’t possibly understand,” I snap, “because I’m a naive little virgin.”
She cocks her head, confused at my sudden attitude. “What couldn’t you possibly understand?”
“Why everyone around me feels like sex is the thing to do.”
Her cheeks get pink. “Everyone?”
“Well, you told me I need to find some cute boy to sleep with so I could get over Leo.”
And just like that, we’re back to fighting. And it’s my fault.
“You know I didn’t mean it like that,” Afton says, her eyes dropping like I’ve embarrassed her somehow. “I was just—”
“I think you did mean it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said it. Because that’s exactly what you would do.”
Afton’s mouth snaps closed so hard her teeth click. “Hey. Don’t be a bitch.”
Oh, so now she’s calling me a bitch. “Who, me?” I pretend to look around. “I guess it’s better than me being a fucking square, though, right?”
Afton’s eyes narrow. She stares at me silently for a minute. Then she says, “Where is your new boyfriend, anyway?”
I bristle. “Nick is not my boyfriend. We’re just hanging out.”
“You’ve been hanging out all day.”
“It’s nothing. He was nice to me last night when I was sick.”
“Yes, I was wondering about that. Were you sick last night?” she asks, blue eyes sharp on me. “Really? Because I think you were faking it to get out of having dinner with everyone. And that’s normally my move.” She sighs. “I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t know what bug crawled up your butt today, but it’s not okay for you to just puke your rage all over me. Why are you even so mad? I mean, I get that you’re still steamed about Leo, or at least I would be. But you don’t have to take it out on me.”
She’s right. It’s Mom I’m really pissed at. I should apologize. I know that. I should be an adult about it. But I also still see the common sense in getting Afton to stay away from me. It’s a painful push and pull with us, like turning magnets toward and away from each other. I want to draw her in, confide in her, work it through with her, get her advice, get her sympathy, get her support. And I also want to push her away so she doesn’t get hurt.
Sisterhood is complicated.
And in some irrational way I do blame Afton. If Afton hadn’t taken Abby to hula class—if they hadn’t both insisted on freaking hula, instead of paddleboarding like I wanted, none of this would have happened. I’d still be blissfully unaware of what is going on with Mom.
But I can’t say any of this, so I have to think up another reason.
I start with the obvious. “You didn’t tell me about you and Logan breaking up.”
She frowns. “Well, like I said before, you had your own thing—”
“A good sister would have told me. We always tell each other everything. I told you about Leo. And if you’d told me about Logan, then we could have—I don’t know—commiserated. But instead you just let me babble on and on about all the things I was feeling.”
“I was trying to be supportive,” she says tightly.
“Well, don’t. Also you didn’t save me a seat.”
“A seat?”
“Today, when we got to the bus. I thought we were going to sit together, but no, you sat with Kate.”
She gives a little confused shake of her head, like what the hell am I talking about? “I thought you were going to stay up front with Abby.”
“But I didn’t. And you don’t even like Kate. And you were sitting on the inside, by the window.”
“So? I always sit by the window.”
“So you must have sat down first. And then Kate came to sit down next to you, and you didn’t say, ‘Sorry, I’m saving this for my sister.’ Which would have been the sisterly thing to do.”
She looks tired. “Maybe I’m not that good at being sisterly.”
“I know, right?” I say wryly. “Anyway. That’s why I’m hanging out with Nick.”
“Well, awesome,” she says sarcastically. “He obviously likes you.”
“He’s being nice. That’s all.”
“Maybe he could be more than nice.”
I scoff. “So you’re single now. How about you look for some cute boy to hook up with? It should be easy for you. You’re so fricking beautiful. There’s got to be someone around here who—”
That’s when I spot him.
Michael Wong.
As in, Billy and Jenny’s oldest kid. The one who just graduated from college. The one with the supposedly amazing ass. He’s walking around with Abby and Peter and Josie, chatting with Jenny.
“Oh look, there’s Michael,” I say slowly, surprised and confused because Billy said at dinner that first night that Michael wasn’t coming to Hawaii. “What’s he doing here?”
“The same thing as the rest of us,” Afton says. “Getting dragged along by his parents.”
We’re both staring at Michael, and it’s like he feels it. He turns, smiles in our direction, and mouths the word hi.
Afton lifts her hand in the lamest wave ever. And then she actually blushes.
I give a disbelieving laugh. “Well. Okay. You should get on that. You said yourself that Michael would be the perfect rebound.” I look around. All that’s out there at the moment is a tangle of rain forest, so thick I can’t see anything beyond the crush of trees and bushes around us. Which feels like my current mood. “I mean, it could be awkward, if anyone found out you were getting busy with Mom’s . . . colleague’s much older son. But who cares? It’s what animals do, right? I say go for it.”
“He’s sweet, actually,” Afton says coolly. She smooths her hair over her shoulder. “He doesn’t seem to get how hot he is, and I like that in a guy. And he’s very smart.”
“Plus he has the stellar ass,” I fill in.
“True. We have a lot in common.”
Of course perfect people have a lot in common. Because they’re perfect.
“So I assume you’re going to have sex with him,” I say. “Like, it’s no joke anymore, right?”
We lock eyes in some kind of impasse where we’re both thinking better of mean things we want to say. “Who says I haven’t already?” she says finally.
“That’d be impressively fast, even for you,” I snap.
“Yeah, well, I’m nothing if not efficient.”
Right then Nick comes out of the bathroom, shaking his hands to dry them. He looks around and sees me. His eyes actually light up, and he starts walking over.
In that moment, I know Afton’s right. Shit. Nick likes me. As in, he’s interested in me, romantically speaking. I can tell by the way his walk changes, shoulders straightening, more self-conscious, like he’s deliberately trying to be smooth. He brushes his hair to one side and tucks it behind his ear. He smiles. Shit shit. He thinks I’m interested in him, too. I’d assumed he was simply being friendly. I wasn’t paying attention. But now I see, in that flash of insight you have sometimes, that all this time he’s been flirting with me, in his nerd way. Because he likes me.
“Aw, he’s cute,” says Afton archly. “Like a little puppy.”
I turn to her. “If you could refrain from speaking to me for the rest of the day, that’d be swell, thanks.”
Her eyes narrow. “Fine.”
“Fine,” I agree. Another F-word.
She stalks off. Probably to go find poor unsuspecting Michael.
Nick is almost upon me. Ten more steps, and he’ll be here, wagging his tail.
But instead of greeting him, instead of being nice the way he is nice, I decide I have enough to deal with. I don’t even really know Nick, and I’ve had enough drama with boys this week, thanks.
I don’t need a puppy.
So I turn my back on him. And I walk the other way.