Page 33 of She Used to Be Nice
Avery checked the time. It was only noon. She could’ve slept for another twelve years. “I had a late night.”
“Why?” Suspicion crept into Mom’s voice. “What were you doing?”
Avery put her mom on speaker and rested her aching head on her pillow with her phone face up beside her. She closed her eyes. “I was at Morgan’s engagement party. It ran late.”
Mom acknowledged this with ahmphsound. After a few beats of silence, she said, “Can I ask, were you drinking?”
Something was up. Avery could feel it, the way her mother’s questions were more like interrogations than attempts at making conversation. It was classic Jackie Russo.
“Yes?” Avery wasn’t sure what was happening. “It’s a wedding event. There was obviously alcohol.”
Mom cleared her throat. “Your blasétone worries me, Avery Marie. This morning we got a five-hundred dollar medical bill for a hospital visit. Daddy nearly had a stroke. Care to explain yourself, or do you want me to tell you everything I already know?”
Avery sat up abruptly and covered her face with her hands. Fucking fuck. Had she seriously forgotten that she was still under her parents’ health insurance when Pete took her to the hospital?
“I’msosorry,” Avery said stupidly, anxiously. “I forgot you’d be getting a bill. I should’ve warned you.”
“You’re damn right you should’ve. What the hell happened?”
Avery chewed on her lip. She lay back down and pulled the covers snug over her body. “Nothing. I fell and needed to get stitches.”
“Really? Stitches?” The sarcasm bit hard. Mom did not believe Avery for one second. “So the stomach pump and IV drip we were billed for was because of afall?”
Avery massaged her temples as she gathered her thoughts, trying to come up with a way to talk about what happened without sending her mother to an early grave. Once, after Avery shattered her iPhone screen, her mom freaked out because she thought a glass shard was going to come loose and slice Avery’s finger off.The fact that Avery drank so much during a night out that she wound up in the hospital would launch Jackie into another dimension of panic.
Avery drew in a lungful of air and prepared for the worst. “Okay, yeah, that’s not what happened. I … drank too much.”
Mom gasped. “Tell me what that means, Avery. Now. What were youdoing?”
Avery buried her face in her pillow, wishing she could suffocate herself with it. Her parents had no idea she’d started drinking this much. They weren’t naive enough to think she wouldn’t drink in college, but they certainly had never thought she’d be the type to pass out from drinking. To be fair, Avery hadn’t thought she would be either.
Their ignorance wasn’t exactly their fault, though. After graduation, Avery didn’t tell them anything about her breakup beyond the cursory update that she was single now but it was fine. They hadn’t asked any more questions, and she had not provided any more answers.
“I was out with Morgan and I just drank too much!” Avery shouted. “That’s it! It was no big deal.”
But it was a big deal and she knew it. Avery had always imagined herself responsibly enjoying a drink with her future husband the way her parents did their happy hours on Fridays after work, as a relaxing end-of-the-week ritual complete with a charcuterie board. Not in the desperate way she drank now. To forget.
“No big deal?” Mom was shrieking now. “Avery, you went to the hospital! For alcohol poisoning! Is everything okay with you? Do we need to come to Manhattan?”
“No!” Avery sputtered and shook her head, as though erasing the word from the air. “I—I mean, yes, everything’s okay! That was my first and only hospital visit.”
“Something awful could’ve happened to you! How did you even get to the hospital? Was Morgan with you?”
Avery hesitated. Her mom would not like this answer. “No. A guy took me.”
“A guy? Who?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Doyou?”
“Kind of …”
Mom groaned. “That’s great. That’sreallygreat.” Her scorn was palpable, vibrating like a tuning fork through the phone speaker. “How do you know he didn’t take advantage of you when you were drunk? You need to be careful out there.”
Avery stared at her wrist, watching her blood pump thick and spider-like through her veins. Pete would never do that to her. She didn’t know how she knew that, exactly, after everything she’d been through. But she was certain. He made her feel safe. Cared for.
Mom’s reply was also the exact kind of well-intentioned yet misguided thinking that made Avery never want to speak about what happened to anyone, and especially not her conservative parents. Her mom thought she was being protective. She had no idea she was part of the problem.
