Page 72 of Well, That Was Unexpected

“There’s no ‘should’ here,” Kiki says fiercely. “Screw George. The only person I care about right now is you. Also, there’s nothing to explain. He literally did the same thing to you that you did to him.”

My mouth opens and closes. I start to speak. Stop. Start again. “But—I—but he—”

“You both messed up.”

And there it is. She’s right. We both messed up. I’d been so consumed with guilt and the WTF-ness of last night that I haven’t had a chance to really process George’s revelation. And now, in the harsh daylight, I realize that I feel…upset. I know how hypocritical that sounds and I am the last person who has the right to feel anything about this, but I do. The thought ofsomeone else being behind those messages is violating. Even though I was doing the exact same thing back to him. How’s that for irony? The familiar feeling of annoyance, of the easy, lazy anger toward him nudges at my senses, but I bat them away. I don’t feel angry at him in the same way that I used to. It’s a hell of a thing, to feel betrayed when I too was betraying him. I don’t really know how I feel, I just know I’m not ready to face it yet. But I can also do better than what I did to Bradley.

“Could you send him a message from my phone?” I say to Kiki. “I don’t want to look at anything on my phone yet, so you’ll have to do this for me.”

She nods. “Of course.” Wow, no caustic remark. My phone must be blowing up with hate mail.

“Tell him I’m really sorry, but I need some time to think, and that I’ll message him when I’m ready.”

One corner of Kiki’s mouth quirks up in a small smile. “That’s very mature of you, Sharlot.”

I roll my eyes and scowl at her, but I can’t help throwing my arm around her shoulders and tapping my head against hers. “Thanks.” I can’t believe that despite everything, I have at least made a true friend in Indonesia.

The flight back to Jakarta is markedly different from our flight to Bali. No private jets, for one. I keep my sunglasses and hat on the entire flight and in the Soekarno-Hatta airport, only taking them off for the customs check before shoving them back on.Lucky that I did, because at the arrivals, there’s a knot of reporters looking around with cameras and mics at the ready. Holy shit. My heart rate doubles, triples, in the space of one second. Kiki and Mama flank me on either side, Mama talking rapidly into her cell with instructions to Li Jiujiu on where exactly to pick us up. We keep our heads down and walk quickly past the reporters—I guess we must look innocuous enough, because they barely glance up at us. Then it hits me that they’re probably not here for me, but for George. Of course. My chest squeezes, as if my rib cage were turning into a vise around my heart. The poorguy.

“They’ll have a better plan in place to avoid them,” Kiki says, reading my mind.

Just then, one of the reporters spots us, and I guess I was wrong after all. They’re also here for me, because the reporter shouts, “Sharlot? Sharlot Citra!” and a couple of them break off from the group to approach us, and when we walk faster, more and more peel off from the group toward us. Now the entire group is approaching, and Kiki, Mama, and I abandon all hope for subtlety and start running. Outside, Li Jiujiu is waiting next to his Alphard and we rush toward him and throw ourselves in. He doesn’t even wait for us to sit down and buckle up before he tells the chauffeur to start driving. I fall into my seat and catch a glimpse of cameras flashing as we speed away from the airport. I close my eyes and take a deep inhale. God, please let this be over now.

I feel a bit better after we reach Kiki’s house and I’m able to take a long, cold, ultra-refreshing shower. Just as there’s nothing better than a hot shower in the winter, there’s nothing betterthan a cold one after the sticky, humid heat of a tropical country. When I step outside, wrapped in one of Kiki’s bathrobes and toweling my hair dry, Mama is waiting in my room. Something about the way she’s sitting, straight-backed with her hands in her lap, makes me wary.

“We can leave here tomorrow,” she says, and it’s so far from what I had been expecting that I stop dead in my tracks, frozen while my hands are buried in a towel on top of my head.

It takes a few seconds before I am able to find my voice. “What?”

“Tomorrow. We go back to LA.”

“Wait, Ma! No.”

She stares at me, her eyebrows knotting in obvious confusion. “I thought you would be glad that we are leaving this place. You tell me plenty of times you hate it here, you want nothing to do with Indonesia.”

“Well—I mean—but—” I flap my hands uselessly, trying to sort my thoughts out into some semblance of order. And it hits me then, the thing that feels truly wrong about all this. And it has nothing to do with me. “You’re running away again.”

Her mouth thins into a pinched line. “No, I do this because I don’t want you to be facing all that—all those reporters.”

“Well, okay. That’s a good point.” I soften my voice and sit next to her, trying to remember the last time we sat like this, just the two of us and no battles raging between us, no barbs or walls or moats filled with resentful silence. “But, Mama, I think…you’ve also got some unresolved stuff going on here.” I’ve clawed and prodded her my whole life for the truth about Indonesiaand all it did was turn her scars into a web of hard, healed skin around her that I couldn’t penetrate. Maybe it’s time that I stop attacking her and start with offering her some of my truth instead. “I haven’t been honest with you, Ma. Back in LA, I…” I gird my insides. This is it. “I was going to sleep with Bradley.”

Mama takes in a sharp breath, her eyes narrowing with displeasure.

“I had thought very logically about it and I was being careful about it too. I’d prepared condoms, and Bradley and I had talked about it beforehand. I did everything right—”

“You are too young!” Mama snaps before she manages to stop herself. She turns away from me and takes a shuddering breath, her hands squeezed together on her lap. “You can’t understand the—the—what it means to have sex.”

“Of course I don’t fully understand, Ma, I haven’t done it yet. Just like I didn’t fully understand what it’s like here in Indonesia because you never tell me anything about it and I’ve never been here before.”

Mama flinches like I’ve struck a blow, and I guess in a way I have. She looks down on her lap and clears her throat. “It changes you. After you do it. It changed me. And I regret it so much, after I do it. I wish—I keep thinking—”

“Because you got pregnant with me?” I can’t quite keep the bitterness out of my voice. It’s hard not to feel defensive when your mom is telling you that you’re the biggest regret of her life.

“No,” she barks, and looks straight into my eyes. “I don’t regret having you. I don’t regret choosing to have you instead of…not.”

Whoa. I was not prepared for the revelation that there was an option of not having me.

“But I regret how it happened.”

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