Open on my mother’s lap is my diary.
“Oh. My. God.”
“Honey,” Dad starts.
“Why is Mom holding my diary!?”
“Let me finish. Your mother and I have been worried about you because you’ve been practicing so hard.”
“First you want me to stick with swimming and now I’m practicing too much?”
He puts his hands up in surrender. “I know what this looks like…”
“It looks like you couldn’t be bothered to sit down and talk to me and instead read my private journal.”
Dad sucks both his lips into his mouth, as if he’s trying to stifle himself from saying something he shouldn’t.
“Dee, could you take it from here? I need to go put my fist through a wall if I have to say that asshole’s name.”
Mom puts her hand on dad’s beefy arm. “Zeke. You’re not going to put a fist through the wall over this.” And then to me, she calmly says, “Try to look at it from our perspective. As parents, we know there’s always risks when it comes to our child spending so much time with coaches outside of our supervision…”
Dad is now pressing the meat of his palms into his eye sockets as if to block out the mental image of whatever he’s read in my diary. Oh god, what part did he read?
“What I’m trying to say is…” She holds up my diary. “Has Coach Ford made any advances on you?”
I squint. “Advances?”
“Has he touched you?”
“No!”
“As a coach, has he put his hand on you at all, even in a professional way?”
“No! God!”
“Has he given you any indication that he might be attracted to you? Made any comments to you about your body or the way you look? Found reasons to be alone with you?”
“Mother! No! He barely makes eye contact with me! I am totally, utterly fixated on him and he wants none of it. And now I’d like to go put myself into a sugar coma and go to bed. May I do that?”
Dad is combing his fingers over his scalp, inadvertently giving himself lunatic hair. Mom puts her hand on his knee.
I stomp into the kitchen, grab a pint of ice cream out of the freezer, a spoon, and a tea towel to wrap the pint in so it doesn’t melt too fast as I scarf down the whole thing.
“Maybe this was the wrong way to approach you with our concerns,” she says as I tromp toward the stairs.
I stomp on the first landing. Turning, I smile at her ironically. “You think now, looking back, that maybe an ambush was the wrong move?”
Dad is grumbling and shaking his head, even after being assured Coach Ford has never tried anything and wants nothing to do with me, physically.
Mom sucks in a breath and holds up the diary. “So this…this writing is just fantasy?”
“Clearly! If it was more than that we’d be sneaking off together right now!” I gesture wildly with the ice cream.
Dad stands up. “That’s it! I’m calling the AD! And then I’m calling Headmistress Moody, and then …”
“Zeke, you will do no such thing,” Mom insists. Dad paces back and forth. This power she has over him would be fascinating to watch if I weren’t so angry.
I put my hands on my hips. “Wait a minute. Dad, weren’t you Mom’s teacher? Didn’t you date Mom when she was seventeen and you were twenty-four?”