“Hey, Brendan,” Mom says.
“Hey.” I sound like I’m crying, which is a sound Mom is all too used to hearing, and it shows.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“No. I fucked everything up.”
“Honey,” Mom says. “What happened?”
I appreciate that she doesn’t tell me she knows I didn’t fuck up. She had a front-row seat to my entire relationship with Candace. She knows exactly what a screw-up I am. “I messed things up with Su-Lin. Like, irrevocably.”
“Okay. How?”
“Well,” I say, not really sure where to start. “I slept with her.”
Mom is quiet for a moment. “And . . . that was a bad thing?”
“Not for me,” I say. “It was fucking revelation. It was so good I can’t even tell you.”
“And please don’t,” Mom says. “But she’s not happy about it.”
“I panicked this morning. And I got up and pretended nothing happened.”
Mom’s tone drops. “Oh, Brendan.”
“I know,” I say. “But that’s not even the half of it.Turns out, she was a virgin.”
“What?” Mom says, sounding surprised. She’s seen theReal Sockwives, and knows well Su-Lin’s brand of innuendo-based humor. “She was?”
“Is, technically. Because we didn’t actually have, like, intercourse. We went down on each other. Which was amazing.”
“No details!” Mom says. “Damn it, I am your mother. You really need to find some friends.”
“Anyway, we talked about that, and I apologized, and I asked if she wanted to keep dating other people and she said yes—”
“Really,” Mom says.
“Yeah, but then we went to this dance tonight, and I figured I’d show her that I’m really trying, you know? So I asked this friend of ours to dance, and then Su-Lin was dancing with this guy who she’d been hanging out with a lot, and I thought she liked him, so I let this girl kiss me—”
“Oh god, Brendan,” Mom says.
“Iknow. And then I found Su-Lin crying and I thought it was because that other guy rejected her, but it turns out that she saw me kissing Jane, and then she screamed at me about how she has no right to be mad at me for that because it wasn’t against the rules but that she is and she hates me for it anyway.”The words just rush out and I’m getting all choked up. I take a deep breath, then realize I forgot the most important part. “She also screamed that she’s in love with me.”
“Please tell me you told her you’re in love with her, too.”
“I tried,” I say. “But she kept yelling at me and ran away.”
Mom is quiet for a minute, and I know she can hear me crying into the phone.
I fucked this up. Of all the things I never wanted to fuck up, my relationship with Su-Lin was it.
“Okay, Brendan, listen,” Mom says.
I lean back, feeling tears trickle down under the collar of my stripper shirt. “Listening.”
“You’re in love with Su-Lin, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Hopelessly.”
