I watch her for a moment. It could be worse, but I still don’t want my twelve-year-old hanging out with fifteen-year-old boys. I was one of those, once, and Ivy isn’t ready for that. “So your mom took your phone away for talking to a fifteen-year-old boy, who you had also met at the mall.”
Ivy gives me a sulky look. “She didn’t know I met him. But he’s really nice! And he talks to me every day.”
“Until you got your phone taken away.”
Ivy looks away.
Great. “You’re still talking to him?”
“On my computer,” she says. “We video chat.”
Oh. My. God. I try not to freak out visibly. It’s good that she’s telling me this, and I don’t want her to stop feeling like she can talk to me.
But I also can’t let my twelve-year-old video chat with strange teenage boys over the internet.
“He’s really cool!” she says, clearly anticipating my objections. “He’s never asked me for naked pictures or anything!”
I try not to let my eyes bug out of my head at the lowness ofthatbar. “Has someone else been asking you for naked pictures?”
“No,” she says. “But it’s happened to some of my friends.”
Thank god for that. Not the part about her friends, of course. It’s times like these that I think maybe we shouldn’t have agreed to give Ivy a cell phone, but Kim and I both want her to be able to communicate with us when she’s with the other parent, and us being who we are, we also want her to have a way to contact us instantly if she ever gets in a bad situation with fans or paparazzi.
At least Kim found out about it first and took away her phone. “You know I’m going to have to take your computer, right?”
Her face contorts in horror. “Why?I swear, he’s super nice. And I didn’t do anything wrong.That’s notfair.”
I care very little about what’s fair, and yet my children both continue to find this argument airtight. I shake my head. “It’s not a punishment, but I’m your dad, and it’s my job to protect you.”
“You don’t need to protect me,” Ivy says. “I can handle it. I’m mature.”
She is, especially for her age.This is precisely what I’m worried about.
“He’s never sent me any dick pics either,” she adds.
I close my eyes. “Have other people been sending you those?”
“A couple times,” she says. “I told Mom, and she installed a filter, but it doesn’t work.”
Oh, god. Of course it doesn’t.There is no filter in the world smarter than the dirty mind of a teenage boy. “I’m glad you told your mother. And I’m glad you told me about this. But I still have to take your computer, because you can’t be video chatting with older boys.”
Ivy flops her hands down at her sides. “He’s not even that much older!”
“It’s a big gap when you’re so young. Fifteen-year-old boys have different expectations than twelve-year-olds.”
She scowls. “I thought you’d be more reasonable than Mom.”
Because I don’t have as many rules and expectations as Kim does, she thought I would just let her do whatever she wants. Kim’s accused me of the same more than once, both before the divorce and after.
Coming from my daughter, this stings.
“I love you, Ivy,” I say. “And that’s why I’m taking your computer. I’ll talk to your mom about the phone, and we’ll decide what to do from there.”
Ivy’s eyes widen, and her body flattens. “I might have told Mom that Chris is thirteen and a half.”
I raise an eyebrow. “So you lied to your mother.” She’d already admitted to as much by sneaking around to see this kid at the mall and chatting with him on her computer, but those weren’t—as far as I know—things she’d been expressly told not to do.Telling Kim an outright lie seems worse. More concrete.
“If I didn’t, I knew she’d freak out. You know how she is.”
