Summer of Us

Chapter 2

"Are you sure you don't want to eat anything before you go?"

This comes from my mom, who's standing in the doorway of the bathroom, watching me flat iron my hair. I reach over to turn the volume on my phone down, in turn turning down the music playing on my portable speaker. "What?"

"Eating, Ava."

"Oh," I say, setting down the flat iron on the countertop, which is littered with other girlie contraband—hair ties, combs and brushes, and a mountain of make-up. "Hitchker's is a diner, mom. I'll eat there."

"You've been eating at school, right? You ate the gumbo we sent back with you when we visited during Spring Break?"

"Yes, I ate it," I say evenly, trying to keep my attitude in check. Lashing out wouldn't be good for my social privileges. Or would it? Could she still ground me even though I'm nineteen? I hate all this, this in-between-ness, the unknown. There's no rule book about how you're supposed to act around your parents, or standards that have to be upheld when your home from school.

"You just look so thin."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"It is when you were already small to begin with. We sent you off to college for god's sake, you're supposed to gain weight not lose it." She pauses. "You haven't been taking your medication on an empty stomach, have you?"

"I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. If you're going to stand there and question my ability to be responsible, kindly go back downstairs and watch movies with your wife."

"Is it really so bad, Ava? Being home for the summer? So bad you have to lash out at me, and your sister?"

I slam the hot iron down, about ready to scream. "Stace is not my sister. And I'm not lashing out, not even close. You're standing there suffocating me—"

"I'm just worried about you."

Her alleged worried-ness is met with silence, because if I speak again I'll likely say something I regret. She sighs, mutters something about not staying out too late, then disappears down the hall. My phone vibrates with a text from CJ, an odd sight to see after so many years of lost friendship, telling me to meet him outside in five.

"You're a lifesaver," I tell him when loading myself into his car ten minutes later. "My mom has been up my butt since I got home."

"Oh yeah?" he says, lowering the volume on the radio, his phone screen lighting up his face in the dark. "About what?"

"Eating." I reach over my shoulder to grab the seatbelt. "Medication."

"You're on meds?"

I glare at him, because everyone knew it. You don't survive a car accident that killed your dad and go through life without some sort of prescribed assistance. In fact, I'm pretty sure CJ is the one that started the rumor freshman year, before I even had a chance to reinvent myself, about me being a "pill popping, depressed psycho." I don't know who else could have started something like that, and one that gained such velocity so rapidly. He was the only person that knew outside of my mom and likely his parents, and by first period the second day of high school, it was graffitied in the second floor bathroom.

"Oh," he says, as if his brain had glitched, and he shakes his head while putting the car in drive. "Seriously, I forgot."

"Thought you were just being an asshole."

"What?" he says putting the car in drive once we're in the street. "I've never been an asshole. I'm a good guy."

Too sunburnt and sober to tell him otherwise, I turn the radio back up when a song I love starts playing. It's old and fun and alternative, and I tap my foot in time with the beat.