Page 43 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“So, there was a tie in the election,” Maddie says without preamble. “And rather than doing a recount, the principal has asked Fern and Simon to co-govern as student body presidents.”
Shit.
I can’t imagine what Fern is feeling right now. It’s hard enough to hammer things out with Sara sometimes and we’re repeatedly told that we have the healthiest ex-relationship ever to have existed.
But Simon is a brain-rotted, cowardly piece of shit who deserves nothing but unskippable ads and diarrhea for the rest of his life for what he did to my daughter—and I can’t do anything about the ads, but maybe I can work on the diarrhea if I use up a favor or two from Zoology—
Maddie catches my arm, and I realize that I’ve already started going up the stairs.
“I need to talk to Fern,” I explain patiently. “Make sure she’s okay. Let her know that I’m happy to go have a talk with Simon and give him a chance to do the right thing before I fill his car with potting soil. Or kill him.”
Maddie isn’t letting go. In fact, she’s leading me to a kitchen chair and sitting me down, like I’m one of the stubborn students we practiced managing. “Bram,” she says. Resolutely but with a sort of kindness too, like she understands the next part is going to be hard for me to hear but she doesn’t have the patience to argue with me about it. “Fern is with her friends right now.Theyare making sure she’s okay.Theyare hatching all sorts of plans that may or may not include ruining Simon’s life. You can check in with her later, but right now, she’s with exactly who she needs to be with.”
A chorus of groans and shrieks comes from upstairs. It sounds... well, maybe not all the way happy, but energized. Comradely.
Maddie pats my cheek. Even with my sitting down, she’s barely taller than me. “Fern needs to do this—at least partly—on her own. With her peers. She needs to figure it out without Dad rushing in to save the day. She needs to try to get through this, and maybe even to fail at getting through it, because otherwise she’ll never learn how to pick herself back up again. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to talk to her tonight or give her lots of love in the coming weeks. It just means that Dad isn’t the first person she needs to talk to, or even Mom. Not anymore.”
I look down at my lap. At the hands that held a baby Fern, that held on to the handlebars of her bike while she learned to pedal fast enough to keep herself upright. “I hate that.”
“She’s seventeen. This is what seventeen is for. Learning how to get through hard stuff while the safety net is still underneath her. Practicing leaving the nest so that she can make her own one day.”
“That’s very wise,” I admit. Grudgingly.
“Well, I remember being seventeen very well,” Maddie says with a laugh. “It’s a traumatizing age.”
A knotty sort of guilt snags in my chest and throat as I thinkOf course you remember it well... because it was only nine years ago. Because the difference in age between us is the same difference in age between you and my daughter.
I make myself stand up. “I should get some grading done before dinner,” I say. “Thank you for this.”
She steps back, her expression turning briefly uncertain and then resigned. “I’m a good advice machine. That one was on the house.”
Chapter Fifteen
Bram
After dinner, bath, and twin bedtime, I check in on Fern, who’s moved the anti-Simon conclave to some sort of group call on her phone, and get an impatientI’ll be fine, Dadand a reluctant hug. I close her door, and more shrieking and giggling come through the wood as the conclave makes some biting observations about Simon’s poor performance in Forensics this year.
I pause with a small smile to savor the giggles. I can’t deny that I miss being able to scoop my baby up and hug away all her problems, but Maddie was right in the kitchen. I’m not the first person Fern needs to talk to anymore, and I don’t think she would be cackling and scheming and ready to take on the Ex of It All without her friends.
It just doesn’t feel fair that it’sso hardto learn to be a parent in the first place, to give all of yourself, to be everything for this tiny, gassy, emotionally unregulated person, and then once you think you’ve got a handle on how to do it, you are abruptly required tounlearn it all. To become the backstory so they can start their first act without you. To step back and let them make mistakes and hope they don’t fuck up too badly.
The hallway is mostly dark, save for the light coming from underneath Fern’s door and the light from around Maddie’s partly closed door. I see her sitting on her bed with her laptop balanced on her knees, her face adorably scrunched at her screen.
Another round of shrieks from down the hall makes her face scrunch harder.
“Why don’t you come grade with me in my office?” I suggest.
She twists, startled by my voice, and then squints at me. “Are you sure? I won’t bother you?”
I know what she means, but for a moment, I want to tell her the truth. That she absolutely will bother me. In those sleep shorts that barely cover her ass, in the soft Copperheads T-shirt I lent her that she still hasn’t given back. Her cute little feet in socks, her blond waves in a messy bun, wide mouth naked of lipstick.
She looks like a girlfriend right now, and I haven’t had one of those since I was eighteen, and I suddenly want her so badly that my stomach cramps. Cramps with hunger pains for Maddie wearing my T-shirts, for messy buns, for the dark pressing outside the windows and us together inside.
“I’m used to grading with the twins narrating a Let’s Play video for a game they’re pretending to play and Fern counting her stitches out loud when she’s knitting. Having a grown-up doing the same kind of work in my office will feel like noise-canceling headphones in comparison.”
A jolt of Olivia Rodrigo comes from Fern’s room, along with a polyphony of FaceTimed karaoke from her friends, and Maddie gives a decisive nod as she closes her laptop. “Office it is.”
As Maddie goes downstairs, I check on the twins—both fast asleep on the floor with Hester Prynne between them. (They have beds, of course, but one of the joys of havingonedog come stay withtwogirls is that the dog can’t be in both beds at once. So Letty presented a solution to me: the twins would sleep in their sleeping bags on the floor so they could share Hester cuddles every night. I congratulated them on their problem-solving and helped them find old quilts and comforters to make an approximation of mattresses. I didn’t tell them that Hester is a faithless creature who leaves the twins in the middle of the night to come snuffle my face and then curl up in a dog-croissant by my feet.)
