In reality, Boone wanted to be a park ranger. He wanted to spend his life outdoors, soaking in what he loved. Instead, he was going to school eight hours away, to do a job that he wasn’t all that interested in, to make his mother happy.
And now we were having a baby and I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do.
My parents were not going to be happy about the news.
In fact, between Gail Windsor and my parents, Minnie and Barton Wheeler—the pastor and the pastor’s wife of Sawtooth Pentecostal Temple, this was about to become one of the worst times of my life.
My parents were awful. My dad more so than my mother. But my mother did whatever my father wanted, so if he told her to fuck us up, she would. Because she lived to please her man, and her children were subpar to her husband, and always would be.
“Yes, Mother?” Boone asked, looking ghostly white.
“What’s wrong?” Gail asked. “You look pale.”
He would be.
I’d just told him he was going to be a father at seventeen.
“Nothing,” Boone lied. “I’m just hungry.”
“You should’ve eaten your afternoon snack like I instructed instead of coming straight up here with Antoinette.”
Gag.
I hated my real name.
I much, much preferred being called Nettie, and Gail knew it. She took a sick sort of pleasure in calling me by my given name, and always enjoyed watching my eyelid twitching.
“It was important.” I shrugged.
“Well, what was so important that you would call him straight up to the informal living room instead of allowing him to eat after a tough polo practice?”
I kept my mouth shut.
I wasn’t ready for her to know what news I’d just shared.
I wanted to process it with Boone first.
“Just prom plans,” Boone lied.
He saw and read the tension that I had with his mother easily. I’d shared with him multiple times, and had long drawn-out discussions others, about how his mother was unbearable and controlling.
He saw it, of course.
It was hard not to.
But for some reason since she was his mother, he had a hard time reconciling the fact that she was a bad person.
“Oh, you’re going to that?” she asked. “I thought we’d decided that you were to join me at the ball for the business district that night?”
My eyelid twitched.
I wanted to scream, “Why would Boone want to go to some stuffy, rich people function that barely served any food instead of going to his high school prom?”
Yet, I did none of those things, because Boone didn’t like it when I antagonized his mom.
And honestly, he was right.
When I antagonized her, she got worse.
