So instead I stay alone and silent, wishing she would just go.
Once she says goodnight and I finally hear the gentle click of her bedroom door down the hall, I sit up on the bed and cradle my legs in my arms, gently rocking back and forth. Her interaction with the Elites in the hospital parking garage is all I can think about now. Which quite honestly is a relief in the midst of my unrelenting sexual attraction to Emmett.
Even after luring me to his car with a backseat full of evidence that he was up to no good. The yank of my hair jerking me back into the seat, unable to escape. Leaving me feeling safer slamming the car into a telephone pole than to be carted off alone with him. All of that and I still buckled under his kiss.
Shaking it all away once again, I return to my unanswered questions about my mom. I know she keeps a box of her old yearbooks and high school photos in the attic. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to dig into it all sooner. Really I should have the moment I was invited to WJ Prep, but for some reason none of it seemed relevant until I saw her talking to them in the hospital parking garage.
When the house has been quiet and still for a while, I creep slowly toward my bedroom door, overstepping dirty clothes strewn across the floor.
On my way out, I catch sight of myself in my tall bedroom mirror hanging against the wall. Turning side to side, I can see the effects of WJ Prep on my body. My muscles are still firm, but the rest of me is gaunt. As if I’m wasting away. My skin is ashen with dark circles under my eyes, the skin around them is red and bunched up into a pained stare.
The sight only motivates me more as I head for the attic door, taking care to step as quietly as possible around my mom’s bedroom. I’m not going to let these assholes waste me away to nothing. I will not lose everything I have worked for so far on account of their sick and twisted games.
Ignoring their rules and social structures and chain of command hasn’t worked. So now I have to find something that gives me the upper hand in their game long enough to find a way out of it. Suddenly, my mom’s mysterious connection to them seems like a potential light at the end of the tunnel.
I pull down the rectangular hatch door and fold-down staircase of the attic and make my way up, my hand reaching blindly in the dark for the pull string to bring some light. The bare lightbulb buzzes as it clicks on, revealing dusty floorboards that creak as I step across. Pipes and wiring twist up above me in between exposed wooden beams.
The moonlight is filtered through a grimy windowsill littered with dead bugs, casting an eerie glow on the room as I search through the faded boxes labeled with marker until I spot the one I had in mind. My mom’s high school relics, yearbooks included. I push past the smell of insulation and stale air filling my throat as I pull the box down from its stack.
Clouds of dust shoot out from the sides of the box as I shove it with my foot to the l
ight in the middle of the room, causing me to cough into the sleeve of my hoodie from the tickle it creates in my throat. I crouch down to open the box, the masking tape squealing as I peel it from the dusty and bent cardboard.
I pull out the glossy hardcover book and begin carefully flipping through the pages that catch on the stomach of my hoodie as I go. Briefly, I freeze at the muffled footsteps of my mom and Brendan echoing through the air vents, and I hope they can’t hear me in return.
I need to be alone right now. I have no energy for putting on a face for anyone. Not even them. Especially not while I have this rush of persistence to fight back. I need to ride this wave of energy for as long as it lasts and find out everything I can.
I almost flip right past a photo of my mom and have to go back several pages to look at it more closely. There she is in a puffy eighties-style prom dress, complete with permed hair. Standing next to her is a man captioned as Theodore Nickelson.
I race to my feet, shaking the grime from my jeans as I run over to another box of photos. One I haven’t looked at in years. Old baby photos, some that feature my father still lingering behind, though my mom had thrown most of them out.
I find one of him by my mother’s bedside in the hospital, her cradling me in a receiving blanket with him looking down from above, flipping it over to see the handwritten names…Lala and Theo with baby Ophelia.
Theo. Theodore. It couldn’t be.
My body stiffens at the sight of it. It never occurred to me that my mom could have met my biological father at WJ Prep. All she had ever told me about him was that he was complete scum who wasn’t worth her breath to speak about. Anything about him always brings on an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, which only worsens now that I know he also went to WJPrep.
More than that, there is the haunting missing piece of the puzzle. Theo’s full name. I feel like I know it, but I have to see it. My eyes dart between the yearbook and the baby photo of me featuring my dad. I can’t deny the resemblance, but I won’t accept what I fear to be true until I see evidence.
I remember Lily’s run down of everything. Weis, Blackwater, Whitworth, and…Nickelson. The founders of the Jameson Automobile Corporation and the cornerstones of the Elites.
Now my trembling hands hold two photos… One of the man I know to be my father. The other of a man with the same first name…Theodore Nickelson standing next to my mother at prom. Nickelson being the only name Lily mentioned no longer being around town.
I turn back to the yearbooks, needing to find every photo of Theodore Nickelson that I can. A few pages later, I really feel sick. First there is just one, but then a flood of photos quickly follows after. This man who looks like my father cozied up with Thomas Jameson and Walter Whitworth. The three of them with an arrogant lean against lockers or the side of the school. Football games, swim meets and even in the background of other people’s pictures.
They were obviously a clique, doing everything together. Meaning, if Theo was in fact Theodore Nickelson… My father…was an Elite.
Visions of my mom play on repeat through my brain. I analyze anything and everything I can remember for some kind of sign that tells me what this means. Was she with them too? How could she be so closely entangled with this sick society of games and hierarchy?
Her kind, smiling, caring face now seems like a mask, but even that conclusion is clouded in doubt. If I could get sucked up into this mess, surely she could have been tricked or forced just as easily.
I try to move through my baffled state well enough to clutch a couple of the most relevant books and photo boxes close to my chest and make my way back to the safety of my room.
I quietly race back into my retreat, locking the door behind me and collapsing across my rug with everything I collected. I open up the yearbooks again, spreading everything across my bedroom floor and staring for a long time. Scouring the pages for each and every mention of my mom or Theodore.
Soon the black and white images are running swirling circles around my head, pulling my hands to my temples. I can’t believe it. I throw the book across the room, wanting to be far away from it. It flies across the top of my dresser, sending makeup and hair products raining down in a clatter.
The sound is like the crumbling of whatever I thought I knew about my mom and her past. How I came into this world. It’s my own fault for not asking more. But she never seemed to want to talk about it, so I took her silence as all I needed to know.