Page 57 of Replay

“I’m good, Mom. How are you?”

“You sure everything is fine, Katie-bug?” Dad’s nickname for me, once I became an adult, was a little much, but I knew it came from a place of love. At least no one was here to hear him.

“Sure I’m sure. Doing the TA thing, stretching my brain in class, and my roommate is really nice.” Maybe they were worried about Madeline.

“We heard you ran into Josh.” Mom’s voice was still a little panicky.

What the— “Where did you hear that?” Nora wouldn’t have told them, would she? Fuck, this would be bad.

“Josh’s mother dropped by work to mention it.” My mother’s voice was tight. She was not a fan of Mrs. Middleton. And as far as I knew, they didn’t run across each other. Probably on purpose.

I still thought of her as Mrs. Middleton. She’d never asked me to call her by her first name, the way my parents did with Josh and all my friends.

“She told you I saw Josh.” Josh said he’d figured out his mother didn’t like me after he’d talked to her, but why would she go out of her way to tell my parents?

“You remember what happened with Josh last time.”

Of course I remember, Mom. And now I could get to the angry part of this conversation. “You mean when you two and Mrs. Middleton convinced Josh to break up with me so that I didn’t give up on school?”

Silence. They hadn’t expected me to know. I didn’t say anything else, waiting for them to figure out how to spin it.

“We wanted what was best for you,” Dad said. Josh’s excuse for the breakup as well.

“And you knew better than me what that was?” I was holding back my anger by a thread. They always praised my intelligence, but they didn’t really believe it, did they?

Mom spoke. “You were so young, and emotions are intense when you’re that age.”

That was the excuse they were going with? “Why did everyone think I was so stupid for Josh that I wouldn’t do what was right for me? Seriously. I understand Mrs. Middleton. She’s always been possessive. But I expected better of my parents.”

Another silence. I wasn’t making this easy on them. I still had issues from that breakup, and that wasn’t all on Josh.

“Your sister—” Dad began.

I cut them off. “I’m not Nora, and the fact that you thought you had to scare off my boyfriend because Nora got pregnant? Is not fair. You assumed I couldn’t use my brain to make the right decision for me. That somehow, because I was female, I would be run by my emotions. So you manipulated Josh to break up with me.”

Dad countered. “Your sister is also smart, but she’s now at home with a kid, after dropping out of med school. And she’s pregnant again so who knows if she’ll ever finish her nursing degree? She had plans, and they’re gone. We didn’t want the same for you.”

But manipulating my life instead of talking to me? Not cool. “We’ll never know what might have happened if everyone had left us to figure things out for ourselves, will we? But I’ve got my degree now, so crisis averted!”

Dad asked, “But you’re still going to get your master’s, right?”

I pulled the phone away for a minute and yelled into a pillow.

“Katie?”

I lifted my face from the pillow. “Yes, I’m still working on my master’s. Do I need to send you my grades to prove it? Maybe the papers from my work as a TA?”

They’d better not say yes because no way in hell was I reporting back to them like that. I was twenty-three years old, not thirteen.

Dad realized he’d pushed me as far as he could. “We don’t mean to upset you, Katie-bug. We’re just worried.”

I drew in a long breath. “What are you worried about?”

“You and Josh were very…involved.”

What the actual fuck? “So you’re afraid if I see him again, I’m going to give up my academic career and ask him to give me babies?”

“No, of course not, just…you wouldn’t do that, would you?” Mom questioned.

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