Bottled Blue

Three

My science teacher was the kind of person who liked his class to be neat and orderly at all times. His classroom was set up so that he always knew where we were and who we were working with. We also didn't get a "first week back" grace period. We had homework on day one. As if my life couldn't get any worse.

He passed out sheets and stuck two of them on our table. We had a research project. "Get on your computers, go to the library," he said, walking along the rows of desks and handing out the worksheets. "It's due on Monday. You need to work with your partner, so exchange phone numbers, email addresses, IMs. I don't care. Just make sure that you work on it together. And believe me—I will know if you try to get out of it." Okay, so he didn't actually say that last part, but I felt it in my bones.

Jett slid the sheet over to me, and I reached for it. But, of course, he immediately swiped it away again. I groaned and glared at him.

"Seriously?" I asked. He shot me a smile. He was illuminated by the nearby window. The sun had finally come out and thrown gold light into the room. His black curls looked like a golden halo now. And the smirk on his face made me think he knew it. Like the universe just manipulated itself to make him look beautiful at all times.

"I'll put my phone number on it so you can call me." I rolled my eyes.

"I'll fail this class before I ever call you." He scribbled his number at the top of my worksheet anyway. Then slid it back over. This time, when I reached for it, he yanked it back again. Now I scowled, ready to stab him in the middle of science class. "You really don't want to piss me off."

"Forgot to put my name." He wrote his name under the number as if I wouldn't already know it was his. Then he slid it back over, and I reluctantly reached for it. Gratefully, he didn't snatch it again. So I quickly stuffed it into my folder. "So—you gonna give me yours?"

"Over my dead body."

When the bell rang, I jumped off my stool and hurried out of class. I couldn't wait for the day to be over already. The one class I always looked forward to had been tainted by a partnership with Jett Kanellis.

It was raining again when school let out, and I had to get my red coat before heading outside to find my mom. Even through the coat, I could feel the winter chill seep in through my clothes and reach all the way down to my bones. Everyone had this idea that California was always sunny and warm. But it wasn't true. The closer you got to the beach, the chillier it got when it rained, especially in San Diego. But okay—I was kind of just a huge wuss, and I hated being cold.

My mom's car pulled up to the curb and honked while I was waiting outside. The number one thing that set me apart from other people wasn't my nerdy love for science or my blue hair. It was my mother. She came off as a completely ordinary woman at first. She had thick brown hair that she always wore in a bun at the back of her head or in loose curls. After a long day, the bun had gotten loose, and the pieces of her hair fell in her face. She had a beautiful face. Perfectly proportioned with big brown eyes. My mom was always beautiful. But she was definitely one of the people that didn't know, or maybe just didn't care, that she was pretty.

It was her occupation that made me a freak. Not that I wouldn't have done an excellent job of that on my own. But it was something I got constant questions about, if not downright bullied. It was the only reason guys ever wanted to date me. I got comments and harassment daily. And I was also banned from having my mom come in for career day. She was a sex therapist. And her job was actually much more boring than people realized. She had two PHDs and sat in an office 99% of the time. But she wrote a book about sexual health and healing or something, and it took off. People called her for talk shows, and business had been booming ever since. The only issue is that everyone and their parents all knew that I was the daughter of the sex therapist from TV. So my parents decided to move us to a private school to protect our privacy or something.

My parents were never legally married, but that seemed to work out well for them. The truth was that my older brother had a different dad, but he turned out to be a dirtbag. So my mom divorced him and got with my dad, who she thought was super sweet but had no intention of marrying or spending her life with since she'd just gotten divorced. But then she got pregnant with me. And my dad wasn't just super sweet; he was also the best dad in the world. To both her kids. And the rest is history.

And by history, I mean that she'd just given birth to my baby brother a few months ago and regularly told me that she and my dad had great sex. Not because she was gross, but because she said it was healthy for children to know that their parents had sex, so they didn't grow up thinking sex was inherently disgusting. Or that you couldn't have good sex after a certain age. As if I really cared.

I was in sixth grade when she opened up to me about sex for the first time. Kind of. She'd always been pretty open about things like consent and body shaming and stuff like that. Because she'd wanted me to grow up knowing how to put my foot down but also knowing how to love myself. And she never wanted the talk to be jarring or unsettling to me. So I wasn't entirely shocked to learn the truth about how bodies worked.

But it was still mortifying. There had been diagrams and words I'd never heard before, like "orgasms" and "condoms." She walked me through how bodies worked and then how they worked together. Then she went over same-sex sex just to cover every base. It wasn't porn, mind you. But to my poor eleven-year-old brain, it might as well have been.

I wasn't a virgin, though. And ultimately, I was grateful for my mom's vast knowledge and openness with sex. I learned to take care of myself and my body and not to take shit from some dickwad just because he thought it would be cool to have sex with the sex therapist's daughter or something. But my mom had been really cool about it and made sure I did everything safely. She kept buying me condoms even when I was no longer using them. And one time over the holiday break, when she got really drunk off sangria, she gave me a book called "A Woman's Guide to the Kama Sutra." It had pictures. Not illustrations. Actual photographs. It was mortifying, and a few days later, she admitted that she hadn't meant to give it to me, but I should keep it anyway. Because if I was going to have sex, I better make sure it was at least good. And since most boys my age didn't know a damn thing about how to do it, I should at least be prepared to teach them.

I'm still mortified when I think about it. But, like I said, I knew how to get what I wanted. And while my mom didn't need to know the details, I was grateful she'd given me the knowledge in the first place. One of my friends had a regular boyfriend who could never get her off, and I sympathized.

And look, I read the book. So what? The point is that my mom made me a weirdo. I loved her to death, but sometimes I wished she wasn't so open about it because then my life might be a little more normal. I was proud of her, but I hated that I couldn't go a week at school without someone quoting her book to me. Or that the only guys who were ever interested in me were only interested because they thought I'd be good at getting them off. Or like I was a conquest. If they could get ME off, then they'd accomplished something great.

I climbed into the car, and we got on the road home. My mom was very smartly dressed. She always was, even though she spent half her workday at home. But her shirt was a little undone. And she did that because she said it made her feel sexy, and women can feel sexy if they damn well please.

Legally speaking, my mom couldn't tell me about her day much. She obviously couldn't tell me about clients or what they talked about. But she would always immediately engage me in conversation about my day or subjects that had come up at work. "Do you think impotence is a genetic trait, or do you think it's strictly stress or age-related? Or maybe both? I'm asking because I know you like science, and I'm curious about your input." I'd reply with, "I don't know, Mom. That's your job." And she'd go off into detail about her research while I listened.

We lived in a really nice house not far away from my school. It was a Victorian that was built when the entire area was orange groves and berry farms. My parents had spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to fix it up. It was technically only a two-bedroom, but it had a decent attic. And since I was the only girl, I got my own room. I chose the attic. The stairs were narrow and creaky, and it was always cold in the winter, even in sunny San Diego. But I had a space heater and a heater blanket that made it nice and cozy.

The attic was technically two rooms. There was a little cupboard where we put spare blankets and towels and things at the top of the stairs. But there were two small rooms on either side. Both the exact same size and build, only opposite. Both were mine because they were too tiny to count as a full bedroom and didn't have doors. So I hung up all my clothes on the left side. Where I also kept my bookshelves and made a bed of pillows and cushions on the floor beneath the window where I could hang out and read or do my homework or whatever.

Both sides had a slanted ceiling that took up most of the space and a single window. My bed was on the right. It was shoved up right under the sloping ceiling, so a small area was designated entirely to stuffed animals and pillows because nothing else could fit. Except maybe some spiders. I had a single dresser in there that was only about two feet away from my bed at any given time. So that sometimes, I had to crawl onto my bed to open it and dig around for clothes.

The right side, where my bed was, looked out over the front yard and the street. The left looked out over the backyard. So the only real issue I had with my room, other than the cold, was that it was directly over my parents' bedroom. And, as my mom said, they still had great sex. Not to mention, the house was still ancient, so sometimes the ceiling leaked, and pigeons took up residence in the cooling vents.

When I got home, I dumped my bag on the floor and turned on the space heater. Then I changed into more comfortable clothes and braided my blue hair out of my face. When I was done, I headed downstairs to make myself a mug of hot chocolate. My mom was saying goodbye to the babysitter as my baby brother fussed about being fed.

The babysitter was an old lady who lived across the street. My mom didn't pay her in cash. She paid her in free therapy. So every week, instead of going home, they would go into my mom's office and talk about sex. That was the one thing I couldn't understand about my job. I know it was more complicated than just telling old people how to get it, but that's still how I thought of it. But my mom always said I was weirdly modest and kind of a prude. And really, all she did was help the babysitter and her husband connect through intimacy or something. And then she'd go off into a tangent about how intimacy didn't inherently mean sex, and I was just being a brat about it.

Since they were busy, I went to the kitchen to get started on that hot chocolate. I really loved hot beverages, but I didn't like coffee. So I was constantly drinking hot chocolate, tea, warm milk. Even in the middle of summer, I'd always have a hot drink in my hand. My mom said people craved hot beverages because they mimicked human affection. I took that to mean she was implying I was lonely and looking for comfort from tea.

I don't know what it was, just that I'd always been like that. Even as a baby, when she'd tried to give me cold milk for the first time, I'd spit it back out immediately like it was tainted. For a long time, she thought I didn't like milk. But maybe I was just spoiled because I just never wanted it cold. I didn't even like cereal like most kids. I liked oatmeal. She said I was weird for that too, but she always got me the kind with little dinosaurs in it.

I heard the phone ring as the babysitter left, and I got the microwave going.

"Aasha?" she asked from the hall.

"Yeah?"

"There's a boy on the phone for you."

Oh great. I had one idea about who that might be. If it was my brother, she would have just said it was. And I didn't really know any other boys who might call. At least none that actually liked me. I left the microwave and stepped out to where she was now nursing my baby brother right there in the entryway, one hand on the phone, the other tucked under his little plump body: Tit out and everything.

And okay, I didn't think I was THAT much of a prude. I was okay with body parts and was fully pro-breastfeeding in public. But up until a few months ago, I was the youngest child and hadn't seen my mom's boobs probably since I was weaned.

I took the phone from her and brought it into the kitchen to wait for my hot chocolate.

"Hello?" I asked in the dullest, most 'what the hell do you want?' kind of tone.

"Aren't you a ray of sunshine as usual," he replied. I thumped my head against the counter and groaned.

"How'd you get my number, Jett?"

"Mr. Louis gave it to me after class. I told him you said you'd rather die than give it to me, and he handed it right over." I sighed.

"Is there any particular reason you think I'd actually want to talk to you?"

"We have an assignment due on Monday, genius."

"We have a whole week to work on it."

"We have a different assignment for each day. It's a journal that leads into an essay. Didn't you look at the worksheet?"

"He didn't go into details. I haven't gotten around to it yet."

"Monday. Research the origins of the word 'Monday.' Give me a detailed paragraph discussing the relation to its planetary body and why it's still used today. Then with your partner, search for the planet's location in the sky and write down your findings. Tuesday. Research the origins of the word 'Tuesday.' Give me a detailed paragraph...."

"Okay. Okay. I get it. We don't have to spend every single day together, though. We can probably knock all of these out in one go. And how the hell is he going to know if we did it together or not?"

"We're supposed to sign and date it. And I don't know how planets work, but I'm assuming they're in a different place in the sky at different times."

"You think we can't calculate when that's going to be? Like it's a complete mystery every single night? They just pop up wherever they feel like?"

"How am I supposed to know, Inglewood? You're the smart one."

"I'm just saying—we don't actually have to talk every single day."

"Of course not. But we still have to collaborate at some point. And I'm not failing this class because you decided you hate me."

"Why do you even want to do your homework with me?" I snapped.

"I don't have a single fucking clue about what planet Monday is associated with and why."

"The Moon, stupid. Now go away."

"You live in that old gray Victorian house, right? The one down the street from the Quick-Stop?"

"How did you know that?"

"Because Finn gave you a ride home after that party in sophomore year, remember? I was in the front seat." Oh yeah. "Also, I live like two blocks away. I drive that way to school every day. See you in half an hour." The phone clicked off, and I hit my head a few more times.