“Oh my God, Mom.”
“Also, please remember you were very recently glad that I wasn’t dead.”
“This isn’t getting better.”
I reach into the cooler behind me and come up with a juice box, a cheese stick, and a lunch-size packet of chocolate chip cookies. “Let’s have a snack. Low blood sugar will only make this worse.”
Congratulations to me.
I have now earned the ultimateteenage disdainlook.
Gonna have to add that one to my mom badges when I get home.
“I stood on the sidelines for an hour,” she says. “My blood sugar isfine.”
“Can you just humor me and have a snack just in case? The cheese stick might not help, but it definitely won’t hurt.”
She rolls her eyes.
I take a deep breath, shove the food into her lap, and open my mouth, not at all sure what’s about to come out, because that’s what Flint Jackson does.
He addles my brain.
“Coach Jackson is an objectively attractive man—”
Junie’s face telegraphs an intense desire to fling open her car door and throw up.
“—but I have no interest in datinganyone, least of all an adult inyourlife, andespeciallyyour coach.”
The dubiousness hangs thick between us.
I don’t know which of us believes me less.
“He was really mean when he hosed me off the other day. And not nice about it at all when I took your muffins and cookies into school on Monday.”
She rips open the string cheese and takes a bite right off the end.
There was a time in my life I would’ve acted horrified and called her a savage for eating string cheese wrong, but she hasn’t wanted to joke around with me much lately. I give half a thought to trying, but she snorts softly while she chews, like she’s preemptively rejecting the joke, and I go back to the matter at hand.
“I don’t want to trash-talk your father, but I wouldn’t be doing my job as your mother if I didn’t tell you that the relationship left me unfulfilled, and all of us—all of us—should walk away from relationships that suck our souls dry. Whatever that relationship is and whoever it’s with. I don’t know how it got to that point, but I know that I can’t be a good partner to anyone if I don’t know what I want and what I’m willing to offer. So you can rest assured that no matter how objectively attractiveanyman might be, I won’t be dating until I’m satisfied with myself and where I am in my own journey of loving myself.”
Her chewing has slowed, and she stares at me like I’m an alien.
Not just an alien, but an alien sitting in the middle of the couch, shoving popcorn up my nose, and using my feet to flip through all the channels like an anxious man on crack.
I sigh and turn back to the road.
Still have half an hour to go, and it’s getting dark.
Last thing I need is to addmaking roadkill of an antelope on a dark Wyoming roadto my list of accomplishments today.
“That was really deep, Mom,” Junie says quietly. “I didn’t know you had that much self-awareness.”
Leave it to a teenager to think they have the market covered on self-awareness.
I stifle my smile and let only a small one curve my lips. “Thank you.”
“But do you mean it, or are you just saying that?”
