Page 20 of The Getaway List
Turns out my efforts to lighten up the conversation are entirely in vain, because her next few words feel like they’re aimed to wound. “It’s not funny, Riley. You should be home trying to figure out your next steps and focusing on the future. The last thing I want is for you to end up like me.”
The light changes. I have the walk signal but I can’t move. “Like you how, Mom?” I ask, a challenge in my voice.
“You think I don’t know Vanessa isn’t home? That you and Tom just spent an entire weekend together completely unsupervised?” she demands. “I’ve been through all the motions of this before. How else do you think I ended up pregnant at eighteen?”
There it is. The implication I could hear between her words but didn’t think she’d put as plainly as that. Especially not when the details of how it happened are vague to me even now. Most of what I know comes from my aunts, who told me my mom became friends with my dad just before she moved to New York. She’s offered up bits and pieces about him whenever I’ve cared enough to ask—apparently he was in a band, and has my same loud sneeze, and moved out of the city for the West Coast when I was a kid—but the loudest fact of them was the one she never quite said, which is that whatever friendship she had with him must have ended with me.
So admittedly I don’t know their full story, but I don’t need to know much to know it’s entirely different from mine. It’s Tom we’re talking about, a person I trust more than I trust my own self, and now that we’re eighteen and “unsupervised” isn’t a word she can throw around anymore. None of that matters compared to the hurt brewing in me like a storm.
“You and Tom are only going to get yourself into trouble, worse now that you’re older and on your own,” says my mom, digging in. “If you want freedom so badly then don’t compromise it. You have so many options right now, more than you even realize, and it can all go away in the blink of an eye. I don’t want you wrecking your life over this.”
If the first part was a blow, then that was the knockout. Forget crossing the street—it feels like I can’t even take one step. I know it’s petty and I know it’s only part of a much deeper issue I can’t even see the bottom of right now, but I say, “Well, I’m sorry I wrecked your life, but this one’s mine.”
“Riley.” My mom can’t seem to settle on exasperation or horror. “That’s not at all what I meant and you know it.”
Even so, she’s made a larger point beyond that. I don’t want to end up like her. Which is to say, someone so scared of the past that she’s not only ashamed of it but terrified of her kid repeating it.
But if I keep letting her fear hold me back, I’m never going to have a life of my own. Just one where the only joy I get is from reading other people’s stories and making them up in my head. I want to make some of my own, and if I go back now, she’s never going to let me. I don’t want to live a life of what if.
“I’m staying for the summer,” I tell her.
The decision isn’t even fully made until it’s out of my mouth. The relief is so instant that I know it was the right one to make, even if I can feel a sneaky wave of terror crawling just under it.
“You can’t be serious.”
My spine straightens, holding myself up like I’m bracing for a gust of wind to blow me over. “I am.”
I’m expecting her to dismiss me again the way she did when I first brought up the trip, but she knows I mean it. I can tell from the way her voice flattens like she’s talking through her teeth.
“I think that’s a mistake.”
I hold myself a little stiffer. “Well, if it is, it’s mine to make.”
She’s quiet for another beat, then takes a breath and says, “All right, then. All right.”
I’m momentarily relieved at the way it sounds like she’s trying to come to terms with the situation. Then I quickly realize it’s more like she’s trying to set terms.
“You can stay a few more days. But only if you call or FaceTime every night. I mean it.”
I scowl, pressing the phone harder against my cheek and turning inward, away from people walking by. “You froze me out this whole weekend,” I accuse.
“And we sync ourselves up one of those location apps, so I know where you are at all times.”
I ground my heels into the sidewalk. “Absolutely not.”
My mom’s answer is immediate, thrown like a whip. “That’s the only way I’m going to be okay with this.”
The anger has been threatening to tip over for so long that I’m not ready for the impact of it finally flooding through me, or the words that immediately chase it. “I don’t need you to be okay with this,” I bite out, loud enough that people’s eyes flit toward me. “I need—I need to be away from you. You’ve decided my whole life for me for the past few years and I hated every damn minute of it. I can’t wreck my life any more than you already did.”
Even as the words come out of my mouth I know they’re unfair. There is a whole lot more to it than that, and we’ve never actually talked about it. But I’m so hurt by what she said earlier—about “ending up like her”—that all I can think to do is hurt her back, as fast and effectively as I can.
“All right, then,” my mom says again.
Her voice is hollow. It worked. I stand there almost numb with surprise at myself, with how awful I feel for doing it but how unwilling I am to take it back. It feels like I’m seeing sides of us I’ve never seen before, and it’s scary to feel this unknowable to myself and to the person who knows me best.
The nerve starts to leak out of me then, so I hold on to what I can to stay firm. “I’ll check in every week or so,” I say quietly. “And I’ll come back for the start of the semester. But I need some time to figure out what I want, and I think—I think I can find it here.”
The compromise is the closest thing I can do to an apology, but she doesn’t speak. It hurts the same way her silence did all weekend—like I only matter to her if I’m the Riley she needs me to be, and the mom I know doesn’t exist beyond that.
