Of course she didn’t forget to add that it wasn’t her fault that she was a single parent. She’d been a perfect wife, and my father had been a perfect fool. The punch line to every one of my mother’s lectures is basically the same:

EVERYTHING
is my father’s fault
for leaving us.

But she can’t just jump to that conclusion. She has to weave her sticky web of motives, fears, and psychobabble. My mother reads a lot of self-help books, and after eleven years of therapy she considers herself an expert. So by the time we reached our apartment she’d proclaimed that my cheating was because I blame myself for my parents’ divorce. I don’t think I’m worthy of my father’s love. And I cheat in the pathetic heart-wrenching hope that if I get better grades, my father will love me more than he does his new daughter.

My mother had that all worked out, but when she came around to the part about my being suspended until I name the person I got the test from, she got quiet.

She said, “I can see that you’re in a real bind. It’s an ethical dilemma and we’ll have to think hard about it.”

In other words: She had no idea what I should do about the fix I’m in.

I promise you, though, that after I do whatever I end up doing, she’ll have loads to say about why it was wrong,

and all the
deep,
twisted,
psychologically pathetic
reasons
that I did
what I did.

Meanwhile, my mother said I should tell my father. She said that explaining the “event” to him would help me understand it myself, and that it would be part of my healing process. I think she was just afraid to tell him herself. Afraid he’d blame her for letting me get in trouble. He blamed her for my catching strep throat last summer!

Anyway, it ended with her crying and hugging me, and telling me she loves me, and promising to pay more attention to me and my needs.

Then she got on the phone to talk it over with her girlfriends, and I went to my room.

I knew I should call my father, but maybe it could wait till I saw him on Sunday. I was really in no hurry to hear what he’d have to say about it.

I checked my e-mail. The only message was from the boy who says he wants to lick the wax out of my ears. Is that gross or what? When I told Katie about him, she said she bets he’s a man, not a boy. She thinks he’s one of those perverted pedophile old guys who prey on innocent unsuspecting girls like me.

Maybe so, but sometimes he’s funny.