Untouchable

Parent-Teacher Conference

Chester Bennington stood in front of the vanity in his bathroom, going through his typical morning routine of conformity and self-hatred. With distaste he buttoned the long sleeved cuffs of his white dress shirt, one of five he owned with the insurance company logo embroidered in red on the left breast pocket. He tucked it into his navy blue dress pants and scowled as he buckled his brown leather belt that matched his brown dress shoes.

The job at the insurance agency was supposed to have been a temporary one, all those years ago when Talinda was finishing law school and the girls had finally started public school. They needed the money badly after he'd stayed home for years to take care of the twins, born just months before his twenty-second birthday, and they'd somehow managed to live off financial aid and her parents until he went back to work.

Going to that bar was the worst twenty-first birthday decision ever. Chester quickly shook away the thought as he reached for his toothbrush. He loved his girls, and even though the surprise pregnancy with a woman he woke up next to the morning after he was legally allowed to drink wasn't how he'd envisioned his life, it was his now. He still couldn't understand how he'd had so much to drink that night that he'd ended up sleeping with a woman.

He looked at his teeth in the mirror, inspecting them for pearly-whiteness and trying to ignore the little gap on the side that he'd wanted fixed since he was a teenager. Oh well. Maybe when the girls move out, I'll scrape enough together for Invisalign or something. He tried not to think about how he'd be old enough that it wouldn't matter if his teeth were perfect or not once he got back into the dating scene. Back into. How about, into at all. That's more the way it is.

His dark brown curls were close cropped and messy, but short of shaving his head, there wasn't much he could do with them. He slid his glasses on, thinking about how he looked like an accountant or librarian, or something as equally boring as an insurance salesman with the big black frames prominent on his face, hiding his caramel brown eyes. With one last scowl at the plain black plugs in his ears he had to wear for work in place of the gauges he adored, he flipped off the light switch and descended the stairs into the chaos that was his eleven-year old twin daughters getting ready for school.

"Dad!" Lila exclaimed the second she saw him, a hand on her hip. "We're out of waffles again. Again! Didn't you go to the store this weekend while we were at mom's?"

Before Chester could get a word out, Lily started in on him too. "You promised you'd get Nutella, too, and there's not any!" She looked seconds away from a meltdown as the twins stood in the kitchen, empty handed, complaining about the absence of their favorite breakfast items.

Chester took a deep breath. Dealing with them was like dealing with Talinda - multiplied by four. "How about I make pancakes this morning, sweethearts? There's syrup, and you love my pancakes." He took a few steps over to pull Lily into a hug, then kissed Lila on the forehead. "Go get your backpacks ready for school, and I'll get started on them."

"Well... I guess pancakes are okay," Lila offered, a small smile on her lips that were covered in sticky pink lip gloss. "Thanks for making them on a school day," she added, turning away in her black leggings and oversized purple sweatshirt with a unicorn head on the front of it. Lily was dressed identically, and both girls had their long black hair pulled back into ponytails. Chester wondered briefly when they would stop dressing alike to torture their teachers.

"Don't forget your flutes," Chester added as he pulled out two skillets for the pancakes. "I'm meeting your band teacher today to talk about your progress."

Lily stopped dead in her tracks. "What?! He called you? Mr. Shinoda sucks, dad! He's so mean! We didn't do anything!"

"Yeah!" Lila exclaimed as she stuffed a pink glittery notebook into her bag. "He's always telling us we're wrong! Like, he wants us to do our face a certain way, and hold the flute a certain way, and my arms get tired, Dad!" She zipped up her pink and green paisley Vera Bradley backpack and turned to face Chester.