Free Hold Still by Nina Lacour Page B

reacting like this over something so small.
    “Why are you laughing?” Mom asks me, her voice hurt and angry.
    “I can’t help it,” I say, giggling now. “You’re acting psychotic.”
    She stops talking. She stares at me hard, then wipes her hands on her apron. Calmly, she walks to the stove and turns it off. She turns toward me and I brace myself for a hug. But she brushes past me, lifts the cutting board from the counter, and scrapes the chopped onion in the trash can.
    “I’ll be in our room,” she says to my dad, and leaves the kitchen.

27
    I eat three grape Popsicles for dinner and keep a few Cure songs playing over and over pretty loud so I won’t drive myself crazy trying to hear if my parents are talking about me. I don’t care about not getting along with them. I mean, it’s completely normal, right? I can’t think of anyone who always gets along with her parents. Ingrid used to fight with Susan and Mitch all the time, even though I thought they were pretty nice. Still, I keep waiting for a knock on my bedroom door because we’re just not like that, my parents and me. We snap at one another sometimes but we don’t really fight.
    The knock comes about an hour later, just a light tapping on the door that I can’t hear over the music at first.
    “Honey?” Mom says. “Someone’s here to see you.” I can tell from her voice that she’s just talking to me out of obligation. She hasn’t forgiven me yet.
    I walk to my door and open it. My mom’s eyes are swollen and her mascara is smeared off. It hurts to look at her.
    “Should I send him up?” she asks.
    “Okay.” I peer skeptically at my sweatpants and ratty T-shirt; whoever it is, he is not going to see me at my best.
    Mom patters back downstairs.
    I hear her say, “Go on up. Last door on the left.”
    Quickly, I throw the covers over my bed, trying to fake some semblance of order.
    “Hey,” says a guy’s voice.
    I turn around.
    Taylor Riley is standing in my room.
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Oh,” he says, looking confused. “Well, we’re having a quiz tomorrow in precalc. He just announced it today. And it’s on the homework but you don’t know what the homework is, so I thought I should come tell you. You know, in case you wanted to, like, glance over it or something.”
    I don’t answer him because I’m staring at his shirt. It says, in big letters across the front, Will WORK FOR SEX.
    He looks at me. “What’s wrong? Is there something on my . . .”
    He looks down at himself. I watch his face turn pink and then red.
    “Oh my God,” he says. “Oh shit. I completely forgot I was wearing this. Oh my God, your mom. I can’t believe she let me into your room.”
    He looks so embarrassed, and I would laugh except for how weirded out I am that he came over to my house to tell me about the homework.
    “Do you think she noticed?” he asks.
    “It’s kind of hard not to.”
    “Yeah, but does she wear glasses usually? I mean, she wasn’t. So maybe she couldn’t really read it because it was blurry?”
    I say, “She doesn’t wear glasses,” and I can’t help but laugh because he’s acting so funny and his face looks red next to his blond hair and those sideburns. “So what is the homework?”
    “Pages eighty-seven to eighty-nine. Odd problems only,” he recites.
    “Thanks.”
    “Okay,” he says. “Well, you can study now.”
    Then he pulls his shirt up over his head. I look at my feet. “What are you doing?”
    “Turning my shirt inside out. Just in case I run into your dad on my way downstairs.”
    “Why do you have that shirt anyway?”
    He shrugs. “Jayson and I saw it in Berkeley at one of those T-shirt stores and I thought it was funny. I guess it’s kind of lame.”
    I don’t want to think about Ingrid’s journal entry again, so instead I think about what I would do if Taylor started to kiss me. I imagine him reaching out for me. I would forget about everything bad for a little while.
    My face