The car sat in front of the house for a long time. Maybe fifteen minutes. From my bedroom on the upper floor, I watched the darkened windows for some sign. And then he just drove away.
Some sign.
Shayla wasn’t around, so I phoned my mother, just to hear a friendly voice.
“Oh, good. A sane person,” she said. “How are you, sweetie?”
That’s when I started bawling.
With patience, she eventually talked me down, and I explained to her a bit about what had happened that day. I left out the cowgirl-style sex from that morning, and the trespassing, as well as the car sex, and the p**n -past revelations. So, basically, I told her almost nothing.
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” she said. “He came over and you ate scrambled eggs. Then Shayla got weird and jealous, and said he was fake. You and the hunk went for a drive to Dolphin Falls, and then shit got real when you had sex in his fancy car.”
“Mother!”
“Petra. I may be twice your age, but I know what goes on at Dolphin Falls. And don’t forget, my generation invented the concept of shit getting real.”
“I feel like I’m being really stupid. He can’t possibly like me as much as he says he does, can he?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Because I’m a regular person, and he’s Dalton Deangelo.”
“He’s still human.” There was a paused as she talked to Kyle for a minute.
“I should let you go,” I said. “Maybe I’m over-thinking this.”
“Is the problem that you still have feelings for Adrian Storm?”
“Hah! Not in a million years.”
“Mm-hmm. That’s not what I heard from his mother. From what I understand, you were flirting with him, inviting him upstairs to see your old bedroom.”
“Gross! Mother!”
“Then go for the TV fellow. At least he’s not bankrupt. Apparently Adrian had his fancy sports car taken away, so now he’s got nothing.”
“Don’t sound so disgusted. I’ve got the same amount of nothing as Adrian. I work at a bookstore for what amounts to minimum wage based on the number of hours, and I’m still paying off my credit card for a cuckoo clock I bought three months ago in an online auction.”
“We all live in houses of our own construction.”
“You live in a house bought by… some movie star who rogered you.”
“Exactly,” she said.
I howled in exasperation. I hated it when she got philosophical, but more than that, I hated it when she was right.
My phone beeped with a dying battery. “Running out of juice, Mom. I should let you go.”
“Date this movie star for a while,” she said. “And then when Adrian is on the upswing, maybe give him a shot. There’s no rush. You’re only twenty-two. Have some fun, will you?”
We said goodbye and I ended the call, feeling a tiny bit more normal after a typical conversation with my mother.
For the rest of the night, I vegged on the couch, alternating between TV and books. I forgot to plug my phone in, so it sat mutely on my bed while all my friends sent me text messages and left voicemails I didn’t know about.
I ate dinner in blissful ignorance as my mailbox filled up.
I went to bed, feeling confused and ambivalent about seeing Dalton again, but I slept soundly, still ignorant of what awaited me the next day.
~
On Sunday morning, Shayla tapped timidly at my bedroom door.
With my face still in my pillow, I waved in the general direction of my closet. “Help yourself. Wear whatever you want.”
Sounding really concerned, she said, “How are you feeling, really?”
I sat up, on high alert. “What did you hear?”
She gave me a patronizing look. “Everything.”
“You talked to my mother?”
“Not yet. Should I?”
My skin felt clammy. Something really bad had happened, and Shayla knew, but I didn’t. I reached for my cell phone, but it was cold and dead.
She said, “How are you? Really?”
“Shayla, my phone’s kaput. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be upset about right now. Would you please break it to me gently?”
“There are half-naked photos of you all over the internet.”
Every sweat gland in my body pumped its guts out. The world went dark, pulling into a pinhole of light. My mouth watered. The sweet relief of passing out, however, did not come. I was still sitting in my bed, in drenched pajamas, my roommate giving me her best concerned look, mixed with a touch of her I-told-you-so look.
“Show me,” I said.
She pulled up something on her phone and handed it to me. I fully expected to see hidden-camera images of me trespassing in the hot spring, or even images of me transferring na**d to the back seat of Dalton’s car.
Instead, there was a video clip of big-haired Brooke Summer interviewing me on my front steps. I had to watch it three times to figure out what the hell I was seeing.
Brooke: “I understand you’re sleeping with Dalton Deangelo. How would you describe sex with him?”
Cut to me, with my blond hair mussed up from recent sex: “Yes. It’s very nice, if you like that sort of thing.”
My reaction to this video clip was complicated. I was angry at that c-word for tricking me, but I was also pleased to be getting a few minutes of fame for something other than running a successful pledge drive for the local library.
Again, the universe was hinting that I might actually be a wild and crazy girl.
“Whatever,” I said to Shayla. “That’s not too bad.”
She shook her head. “There’s more.”
My stomach dove into my other organs. Now here would come the nude photos in the hot spring.
Shayla fiddled with her phone for a second, then handed it back, sucking in air between her gritted teeth.
“Um, this could be worse,” she said. “You look cute.”
On her phone, I found photos of a girl in brown trousers and a lacy bra, no shirt, standing on a stepladder and installing a light fixture. It took several views of the same images for me to reconcile that it was me, inside the bookstore.
“Cute, right?” she said.
“This is it?” The text that accompanied the photos said I was linked to Dalton Deangelo, but didn’t even say I was dating him. “This is nothing,” I said.
“That’s the spirit!” Shayla said. “Sticks and stones may break our bones, but nasty words will never hurt us.”