Page 43 of Filthy Little Secret

She glares at me. It’s the first time she’s looked at me since we sat down for dinner. It’s her quiet disapproval she banks on to win my compliance. I concede.

“I signed up to help out with the Habitat for Humanity group at school,” I say, “and I’m doing well in all my classes this semester.”

I say it the way I would if she were a reporter asking me about the year.

Her lip curls upward with satisfaction.

She cuts the salmon on her plate and then takes a bite.

I wonder what she would think if she knew about the sort of vile things I let Tim do to me. Or if somehow one of our recordings leaked online. It would be devastating, but something about how much it would piss Mom off excites me. It’s one of the reasons I think I enjoy them so much.

My phone vibrates in my pocket.

Tim?

I don’t check it, though. Mom has a weird thing about checking phones while we’re eating at the table, and if she has a weird thing about something, Dad and I sure as fuck better comply or face the consequences, which range from her silence to all-out screaming matches.

As I take the last bite of my salmon, I’m thinking of how hungry I am. A meal of salmon, steamed vegetables, and rice isn’t the most filling thing in the world. But I assume there’ll be food at the fundraiser.

When we finish dinner, I head upstairs to my room and check my phone.

It’s Tim again.

HIM:Sucks that my dick is lonely tonight.

ME:The problem is that it doesn’t suck. ;)

HIM:Skip this thing. Get back to the apartment, so I can come.

ME:Can’t.

HIM:Wish I could pull you aside into a room and fuck the shit out of you in front of everyone.

ME:Then why don’t you?

I’m not joking, either. But I doubt he’ll take me seriously.

HIM:Where’s it at?

My interest is piqued, and I guess so is his.

* * *

Dad adjusts my tie as we stand in the back room of the Marriott auditorium where Mom will be delivering her speech.

I can’t believe I asked Tim to meet me here.

There’s no way we can mess around. Too many people. And Mom isn’t going to let me escape for a second, but I doubt he’s really going to come.

It was a bluff. He wouldn’t even be able to get in.

Mom stands in the corner of the room, reading from a sheet of paper as she moves her mouth to the words, rehearsing her speech.

I’ve already read it—seen how she’s milking Becky’s death. I think about the little girl with blue eyes and blonde hair as bright as the fake color Mom now has. I get sad as I remember her sitting in a cushioned chair with an IV tube stuck in her. Even then, Mom put on a tough performance. She took Becky to every appointment. Every treatment. She yelled at the doctors and nurses when they fucked up something on my sister’s chart or nearly gave her the wrong meds. But despite how cold she can appear, she’s also the mom I would hear crying in her room when Becky was at her worst. The mom who I watched shake to the floor in a fit of tears in a room at the hospital, gripping me like she needed support from me, even though I desperately needed the same from her.

I never doubted Mom’s sincerity back then. But now that Becky’s gone, she just cares about how it can further her career. It kills me knowing she can take something that created such a deep wound within me—something that hurt our family so much—and put it on display for the whole fucking state because she sees how good it is for her career.

Can’t she tell she’s not just desecrating our memory of Becky, but destroying me every time she turns it into a performance?

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