She glanced at her reflection in the glass patio door.This’s quite the look. She laughed. She untucked the towel, rearranged it. The cartoon character’s wide gaping eyes had exactly covered her breasts.
Then into the small house, ranch-style, three bedrooms. It was nondescript to the point of being invisible, built to rent, not own.
The clear autumn day was warm, but the AC was going full blast, as Hannah had set it, hardly necessary. Maybe if the girl didn’t wear sweats all day, she wouldn’t have to push the boundaries of the electric bill.
But some battles you fought, some you didn’t.
Allison Parker would never waste parenting capital on the trivial.
The sixteen-year-old sat on the brown leather living room couch. She had a pretty, round face, framed by shoulder-length center-parted hair; she was her father’s blond. Currently a red streak dominated the right side. She was huddled, lost in her phone, texting. Her feet were bare. She’d been painting her toenails—a deep mahogany—and had apparently been interrupted by a vital message.
Six piggies down, four to go.
“You’ve got math,” Parker said.
“I did it.”
“All of it?”
Fingers moving on the phone’s keypad, fast as startled hummingbirds. “Yeah.”
Parker finger-combed her curls. “Let me see.”
A pause. “Maybe there’s a little more.”
“Hannah.” Her voice was stern. The deceptions had been coming more frequently lately. Small, but a lie is a lie.
A sigh. “All right. I’ll do it.”
“Thank you.” Parker glanced at the coffee table, where the assignment sheets sat.
She’d let the girl take a mental health day. After the incident last November, her daughter had had to cope with three traumas: a mother who’d been badly injured, a father jailed for the crime and life under a microscope at school. (Every student would have known about the incident a half hour after it happened. Thank you, social media—though Parker supposed that fifty years ago, word would have spread almost as quickly via analog phone calls. And before that? Telegraph and twice-daily newspapers. Nothing can stop the spread of a good, horrific story.)
Hannah was certainly improving, but there were bad days. Howmuch of this was because of the incident and how much because of teenageness, though, was impossible to tell.
Without looking up from her toes, Hannah said, “The smell’s still there.”
The landlord had painted the house before they moved in and, yes, whatever he’d used had off-gassed an unpleasant sweetness.
“Won’t be long till we get our Greenstone.” A reference to the fortress the girl, at ten, had loved hearing her mother describe as she read a fantasy book aloud before bed every night. She’d gotten the Greenstone Lego set one Christmas, to her breathless delight.
Now Hannah gave no response. She fielded another text. Eyes down, she said, “Windows?”
Prone to paranoia and exceedingly security conscious, Parker kept the windows closed and locked at all times. This would be why the girl had the AC cranked up, of course. A bit of passive-aggressive sniping?
Probably.
Parker inhaled. She thought it was better. “We’ll air it out on Saturday.”
The girl sent another text.
“Hannah. Phone down. Now.”
With a tint of exasperation the girl complied.
Parker slid the assignments in front of her daughter, who scooted closer to the coffee table. Her mother scanned them. There were five problems still to do for class. Five out of seven. So not exactly just “a little more.”
Parker tapped problem 2.