If I'm Being Honest(8)

Or he won’t, and I will have lost what I waited a year for. There’s nothing I can do now. Nothing but wait.

I need a run.

I keep my running gear exactly where I want it, the way I do everything else in my room. It’s impeccably organized, which I’m proud of. My room isn’t big—nowhere near the colossal square footage of my friends’—and I hear my neighbors fighting through the wall on a regular basis. The paint’s peeling from the cream-colored walls where I’ve hung design boards for websites I’m working on. But nothing’s out of place. Every scarf has a peg on the rack by my door, every sheet of homework a place on my desk. Every issue of the Economist is in order on my bookshelf.

I put on my Beaumont cross-country shirt and pick up my shoes from next to the door on my way into the hallway. Inevitably, I wince.

While I keep my room neat and organized, the opposite is true of my mom’s treatment of the rest of the apartment. I walk by her room, where piles of laundry—dirty or clean, it’s impossible to say—cover the floor. She’s left pairs of shoes in the hallway, pink plastic heels and slippers she stepped out of and didn’t pick up.

I collect the shoes and take them into her bedroom. When I glance over at the bed, I’m thrown to find the sheets unfurled and the bed empty. Mom’s not usually up until closer to noon. I quietly reorganize my list.

Deal with Mom. Run. Find opportunity to sneak into her bedroom and sort laundry.

I find her behind the counter in the tiny kitchenette, stirring a spice of some kind into the blender. My hope she might be out of bed for a productive reason disappears when I take in her bathrobe and the foil folded in her hair. If she’s bleaching it, she’s not leaving the house for hours.

Her hair’s blonde like mine, which is where the resemblance ends. My mom has round, full features—like a young Renée Zellweger, she’d say. She does say. I’ve caught her modeling expressions in the mirror with pictures from Jerry Maguire pulled up on her phone. I, on the other hand, have my dad’s long, sharp features, his blue eyes and thin lips. They’re the only things he’s given me other than tuition and the Economist subscription, which he seemed genuinely surprised I’d wanted for my sixteenth birthday. It’s one of the rare birthday gifts he’s given me. Generally his financial contributions to our family are only those that make him look good to his colleagues.

“Is that cayenne pepper?” I ask Mom while I lace my shoes.

“I’m trying something new,” she says brightly. “Lemonade, cayenne, and kale. Deb lost fifteen pounds on it! Which reminds me,” Mom glances up, looking surprised herself to remember, “Deb cancelled on coming over tomorrow.”

“Wait, why?” I ask, pausing in the middle of knotting my shoe. There’s no way Andrew’s mom cancelled because Andrew doesn’t want to see me. Right?

“She said something about her in-laws still in town,” Mom says, hitting the switch on the blender, which lets out a horrific whine. I nod in relief. I remember Andrew saying something about his grandparents not having a flight home to New Jersey. It’s probably a good thing Monday night’s not happening. The idea of sitting in stony silence with Andrew while our moms hoot and hiss over school-board gossip puts the kind of knot in my stomach only a run will release.

Mom shuts off the blender, and it grinds to a shuddering stop. It’s a small miracle the machine still works, considering my mom’s had it since my dad lived in L.A. before I was born and she’s subjected it to innumerable cleanses in the past eighteen years. I finish lacing my shoes and eye the vomit-colored drink she’s pouring into a chipped glass.

She must detect the skepticism in my look, because she meets my eyes. “This cleanse is different,” she says, continuing triumphantly, “Jared Leto uses it.”

“Oh-kay . . .” I put my heel on the back of the couch and bend over to stretch my hamstring. “But you always start these cleanses and give up two days in. I just don’t see the point.”

Mom’s smile vanishes, replaced by a hard and defensive frown. It’s one of the fundamental truths of my mother’s existence. There’s insecurity behind every smile. “I can start a cleanse and quit it if I want, Cameron,” she protests. “What does it matter to you?”

“Nothing,” I say glumly, and switch the leg I’m stretching on the couch. This is the difference between her and me. My mother gives up on everything. First it was acting, the dream she moved to Los Angeles from Indiana for twenty years ago. Now it’s whatever kind of job she can get, whether it’s catering, cutting hair, or waitressing. Our lives might have been different if it hadn’t gotten harder to get roles when she hit forty. But aging isn’t welcomed in Hollywood, and my mom couldn’t take the repeated rejections. When the going gets tough, she’s gone—on to the next job or onto the couch. Rejection cripples her. I watched it happen after countless auditions, and I watched it happen throughout years of her trying to get my dad to marry her.

“It’s not like everyone has your metabolism,” she goes on. “Have some sympathy for the rest of us.”

Seriously? I swing my leg down out of my stretch, knowing she’s oblivious to how I’m in my running clothes about to go for a six-mile run. Instead of arguing with her, I change tactics. “What are you doing today?” I ask, even though the bathrobe and foil give me a pretty good idea.