Boys of West Denton ✓

chapter eleven

Harris

My lips are raw and red when Seb drops me off back at home. I keep touching them without thinking about it. I'll snap out of thinking about how it felt to him beneath me like that, our rib cages and flesh barely separating our thudding heartbeats.

It's only four, which means my mom is definitely awake. For her, four is breakfast time. Her twelve-hour-long night shifts has her living nearly inverted days, but her sleep schedule got royally fucked over by the graduation ceremony and my grad party at Grandma's. Is being old being unable to easily recover from lost sleep? Or is it just that she's overworked?

Even though I know she's awake, I still try to be quiet coming into the house. But there's not really much of a point, because Mom is there, sitting on one of the too-high chairs at our too-high table. She's got a full face of makeup on, and her hair is slicked back into the coiled ponytail she prefers for work. Her scrubs were an M.D. grad gift from me and Grandma, a deep, dusty pink. She looks put together, but I know how tired she must be.

"Hey, Mom," I tell her, leaving my empty shake cup from Paco's on our stained coffee table. "When'd you get up?"

"Oh, an hour ago or so," she says. "Needed time for coffee and contemplation." She gives me a tired smile, flashing the gap between her teeth, and offers up the periwinkle ceramic mug in her hands as if I wouldn't have believed she was drinking coffee otherwise.

I reach out to hug her, and she sets the mug down before returning my embrace. Even now, sitting down, she's still taller than me, but I don't mind it. I think sometimes, I like the fact that I didn't get those tall genes from my mom. In a small way, it makes me feel like I'm not growing up as fast as I don't want to be.

She presses a quick peck to my forehead before pulling away and immediately picking up the mug once more. There's a strong scent of coffee around her; coffee, and her favorite perfume, the one she's been using since I was a kid. Its familiarity is cozy. I know that it's probably to be expected of my own mother, but it's often that I feel so young around her. It's comforting.

My mom and I are actually very close. We're similar in a lot of ways—probably because I never had another parent to influence me—but we're fundamentally different in some others. For one, my mom wanted nothing more than to go to med school when she was my age, far away in Virginia. I just want to get a Business degree, because someone said it's useful and it's not like I had any other ideas, and I can't bear to go any farther than MNSU in Mankato.

She must find my lack of work ethic terribly mind-boggling at times, but she's normally pretty chill about it, so that's good. A cool but strict mom was probably the best thing I could have asked for. And she's gone at nights now, when I'm most involved in the behavior she'd murder me over.

"Have you had any breakfast yet?" I ask her.

"Uh, I was probably going to just do a bowl of cereal," she says. "We still have Lucky Charms, right?"

"Nope. Just Rice Krispies."

She sighs. "But those are for making bars for Grandma."

"Yup." If there's one Minnesotan custom, it's putting things in bars. I myself am a lemon bar man, but I can get jiggy with a good cereal bar every now and again. And homemade Rice Krispie treats kinda hit different. They're subpar only to Fruity Pebbles bars.

She leans back in her chair and draws her mouth into a tight line. "I need to go grocery shopping."

"It's fine, I should have grabbed more cereal the other day. Besides, you know you can't help yourself on a Hy-Vee trip."