High Before Homeroom

by Maya Sloan

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

Losers, now you can get the bad-boy rep the girls find positively irresistible! Unleash your dark side with the Doug Schaffer plan for drug addiction and rehabilitation! (Kids, don't try this at home.) At sixteen years old, Doug Schaffer knows two things for sure: 1. He is doomed to live in the shadow of his older brother, Trevor, a former high school football star who is stationed in Iraq. 2. Free-spirited Laurilee, the hot ear-piercing girl at the mall, only dates bad boys. Cue Doug's foolproof plan to tarnish his own unremarkable reputation. The first step is to develop a drug addiction. His mom's too preoccupied with organizing care packages for Mothers Support Our Troops Northwest Oklahoma City Chapter to stop him. Besides, he just needs to get hooked on meth long enough to come back from rehab a totally different person. Someone people notice. With the help of Trevor’s strung-out former high-school buddy, drug addict Doug has the confidence that loser Doug never mustered. He stays out all night, scores girls, and stands up for himself. Then Trevor unexpectedly returns home with a dark secret of his own, and everything Doug thought was true is shattered. Soon the brothers find a common ground they never knew they shared as they discover the price of pleasing others is the freedom to be yourself.

Release date: June 3, 2010

Publisher: Pocket Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

Laurilee’s legs are bare and faintly bluish beneath the pleats of her plaid jumper. She once told me that it is the same one she wore in Catholic grade school. A lot of guys would get a stiffy if a girl told them that. I’m one of those guys.

Laurilee and I crouch behind the Dumpster at the back entrance of Penn Square Mall. We lean against the concrete wall and smoke unfiltered Camels. I used to smoke Parliaments until I met Laurilee. I like the Camels. I like how the shreds of tobacco get stuck to the end of my tongue. I cock my head to the left and spit them out and it makes me feel like a man.

We keep an eye out for Terrance, the six-foot-four, pockmarked, probably undiagnosed-schizophrenic mall-security Nazi. By regulation, all employees are required to leave mall grounds when smoking, but we only have fifteen minutes and it’s cold. Laurilee has a scab across her knee. I want to run my fingertips around the jagged edges. I want to touch each of her flaws—the slightly stick-out ears, the bitten-down nails with chipped silver polish. I want to bury my face in her unwashed hair, the turquoise streaks fading at the temples. Instead, I pick at a zit on my cheek. It’s one of those you can’t see. Right under the skin. Those hurt the worst.

“Yesterday he was harassing these poor baby wanksters,” says Laurilee. I can hear her teeth chattering as she wraps her chapped lips around the end of her Camel. “They weren’t messing with anyone, just killing time by the fountain. They were probably twelve or something. He took them outside, made them take off their bandannas. ‘Gang wear,’ he told them. Ha. Twelve-year-old Okie Crips. Please.”

“Terrance must have been a crack baby,” I tell her. “Hey, you want my coat?” Nothing would make me happier. Laurilee wearing my coat, her smell seeping into the lining, wearing Laurilee for the rest of the day. Being inside Laurilee. I feel my dick stiffen. I cock my head, spit, and think about my grandmother naked. My grandmother has been dead for fifteen years, which makes this an even more effective mental exercise. Almost immediately, my boner goes away. Laurilee has pulled her legs to her chest and rests her cheek on one plaid knee.

“I like the cold. It wakes me up,” she says. I suck on my cigarette, imagining my lungs blackening and shriveling up with each inhalation. It makes me feel like I’m doing something that matters. I figure it’s the same reason some people cut themselves or puke up their food. At least you have control over something, even if it is your own annihilation. Besides, you never hear of sixteen-year-olds getting lung cancer. Cancer is for old people. Sixteen-year-olds get some rare, undiagnosable neurological disorder or leukemia. They lose all their hair and the whole football team shaves their heads in solidarity and then People magazine writes an article about it. I wonder, if I got an incurable disease, if the Make-A-Wish Foundation would get me a high-class whore so I won’t die a virgin. I look at Laurilee. Her turquoise streak matches the faded blue of the Dumpster.

“If you were about to die, and you could meet one famous person before you did, who would you pick?” I ask. Laurilee wrinkles her nose in concentration. Most girls would just roll their eyes and go, Ew, stop being so weird. Laurilee isn’t most girls.

“Living or dead?” she asks.

“Either.”

“Mythological or real?”

“Whatever you want. It’s a theoretical question.”

“Jesus,” she says with a big grin.

“Jesus?”

“Black Jesus for sure. Young, sexy black Jesus. Is that racist?”

“Nah, but you can’t pick Jesus. Too easy,” I tell her.

“I didn’t know theoretical questions had rules. How about Satan, then?”

“Your final answer?” I say, in my best Who Wants to Be a Millionaire voice.

“Wait!” she says, sitting up straight. “David Bowie. That’s who I’d pick. Circa Ziggy Stardust. When he was all pretty and, like, sexually ambiguous.” David Bowie is Laurilee’s new obsession. Before that, it was Kurt Cobain. Then everyone else at school discovered him, so she had to move on. Old-school tormented musicians are making a comeback. Even better if they died from a suicide or drug overdose. Laurilee figures, since Bowie is still alive, she’s got him to herself for at least another couple of months unless he pulls a Michael Jackson.

“You’d pick David Bowie? Out of anyone?”

“Sure,” she says. “It’d be a nice way to go. He could sing me a lullaby as I drifted away. He could do my makeup. I’d be kickin’ it in my casket, all glammed out with glitter and false eyelashes. What about you, kid?”

“I don’t know.” Laurilee has always called me kid, even though we are both sixteen.

“You’re not dying, are you?” she asks.

“Not yet.”

“Good. I don’t want you to die. Who’d I smoke with on break? I’d have to smoke with one of the makeup-counter girls. Or those assholes from Hot Dog on a Stick. They don’t even give mall-employee discounts, those Stick dicks. Don’t die, okay, kid? I’d miss you.” She attempts, then fails, to blow a smoke ring.

I don’t hear anything after I’d miss you. Laurilee would miss me. That means she thinks about me when we aren’t together. I do some quick calculations in my head. During the average mall shift, we usually spend our two fifteen-minute breaks smoking by the Dumpster. Sometimes, if she isn’t too busy stocking headbands, she’ll clock out at the same time as I do for dinner break. If there are around 168 hours in a week, and I’m spending at least two of those hours with Laurilee out here smoking cigarettes by the Dumpster, and she says she’d miss me, then at some point during the other 166 hours of the week she must be thinking about me. You have to think about someone to miss them. And, at some point during those 158 hours, she must be naked. So at some point in the week there is an off-off-chance that Laurilee is naked and thinking about me at the same time. The thought makes my dick hard again. I can see her white body slick with soap, her hair wet, running one of those pink bath puffs down her body, missing me.

Then again, girls like Laurilee don’t spend their free time thinking about guys like me. I’d miss you is just a figure of speech. I’d miss you, it fucked me up good, I almost died, pass the salt.

As if she can read my mind, she sighs. “I’m spent. I went out last night.”

“Where’d you go?” I ask, my jaw tightening. Laurilee goes out every night. My jaw tightens every time she tells me about it.

“Infinity, down near Twenty-third. It used to be a church. You know the one? They gutted it, put in some strobe lights, wah-la. They still have those stained-glass windows, I mean, I think they do. I was pretty fucked-up, kid. I’ll have to ask Daniel.”

“The guy from El Reno?” I say, knowing perfectly well the guy from El Reno is named Marcus, drives an Oldsmobile he calls the pimpmobile, and spent two years in juvie for check forgery. Laurilee blows a raspberry.

“Please. Marcus is a douche. I’m over him. Now, Daniel. Daniel is on a whole other plane. He’s a Buddhist. And he’s got a tat on his neck. Of a dragon. Blowing fire and everything. God, I want a tat so bad. Someday I’m gonna get a tat. Somewhere you can’t even hide it. Daniel doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. He’s opened my eyes to a lot of shit. Buddhism is pretty cool.”

“Does he eat meat?”

“Fuck, yeah.” She gives a fresh shiver, even though the wind has died down. Her pale, goose-pimpled collarbone juts out like a coat hanger from the ragged top of her sweatshirt where she has unevenly cut out the collar. It kind of defeats the purpose of a sweatshirt, but it looks good on her. When I tell her I like it, she tells me she was inspired by a late-night rerun of Flashdance on TNT. It was two in the morning and I cut the neck out of every T-shirt in my closet, she tells me. I can’t explain it. I just felt like those collars were holding me back. My Mom was superpissed when she found out, half of them were these cashmere J. Crew sweaters she ordered out of a catalog, which made her twice as pissed. It doesn’t matter, I like pissing her off. Besides, they look better my way. I should be on one of those reality shows where you, like, make a dress out of banana peels and they give you a hundred thou and tell you what a damn genius you are. The eighties are back, anyway. When I remind her she wasn’t even born in the eighties, she grins at me. Past life, she says. Silly boy.

According to Laurilee, in her past life she was an Egyptian queen, a beggar girl on the streets of London with only her wits and pickpocketing prowess as a means of survival, and the descendant of a plantation owner and his slave mistress. When I mention that these revelations seem to coincide with cable reruns of Cleopatra, Oliver!, and Roots, she punches me in the arm. “Stop being so literal,” she tells me. When Laurilee grins at me, nothing else matters. There could be an earthquake, a tornado, the release of a fatal viral strain extracted from Asian monkeys that will eventually kill off the human race as we know it, and I wouldn’t notice. I’d just grin right back at her.

Now she’s cold, and if I had any balls, I’d put my arm around her shoulder.

“He’s a modern Buddhist. It’s all in how you define it. He believes in the four noble truths and all that, but he’ll still eat a steak. I couldn’t date a vegan, you know that. They have the stankiest breath. Besides, there’s nothing better than a big-ass juicy steak, don’tcha think? Like down in the stockyards? My mom took me once when I was a kid. You can get beer in a boot, how quality is that? I mean, I got a Shirley Temple, of course, because I was just a kid. But they still let me keep the boot. Then we went to that cowboy store across the street and my mom got me this kiddie-pink cowboy hat with a pink ribbon that tied under the chin. I thought I was cowgirl Barbie for the rest of the day, that’s how pretty I felt. I don’t know where that hat is now. I think we sold it in a yard sale. I wish I still had it.” She laughs.

I want to tell her that we can go back to the stockyards. I’ll buy her another pink hat. I’ll buy her the biggest steak she’s ever seen, one of those seventy-two ouncers. I’ll even cut it into bite-size pieces and feed it to her. And she can be naked while I do it.

“Hey,” she says, sitting up straight, “what time is it?”

“Four ten.”

“Uh-oh,” she says, running her hands through her hair as she stands. “You should have told me. Can’t leave Denise in charge for too long. She’ll probably pierce some third grader’s septum or something.”

If I lean my body across the Aunt Betty’s Cookie counter and look to the left of the food court, I can see Laurilee through the window of Trinkets. I’ve watched her pierce hundreds of ears. She rests her hand under each tiny chin and whispers as she lifts the piercing gun. The little girls rarely cry. I wonder what she says to them. I wish she’d whisper to me. Anything. A grocery list. The table of elements. After she pierces them, she holds up a mirror and they smile at themselves with baby teeth and rotate their heads from side to side, the tiny gold balls flashing in their earlobes. Her mouth moves. Sometimes I can make out words. Pretty, she tells them. Beautiful thing.

Laurilee stubs out her cigarette on the side of the Dumpster and puts the butt back in the pack. “You ever want to do something drastic?”

“Sure.” I imagine myself pushing her up against that blue Dumpster and shoving my hands under her skirt and between her cold thighs. I imagine her eyes fluttering, her low moan, the rhythmic clanging of metal against her back. Then I realize how retarded this fantasy is, not to mention unsanitary.

“Well, I’m gonna do something drastic. Just wait, kid. I’m gonna do something irreversible.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you’ll see. It will be a surprise.” She grins at me.

She’s beautiful. Not the kind of beautiful those asstard guys at my school can see. Not prom-queen beautiful. She’s a classic beauty, like a chick in a silent film. She’s got those big, liquid eyes that talk even when her mouth isn’t moving. Those dumbass farmboys at my school wouldn’t take a second look at a girl like Laurilee. A butter face, they’d mutter to each other. Her body is okay, but-ter face ain’t all that. A six out of ten. If I had on beer goggles. They could have been manufactured in a lab, those clichéd dicks at my school. Take a beaker and put in some reality television, whatever song is on MTV rotation that week, mix in some middle-class, white-boy poser slang—Ya, nigga, me and my boys was chillin’ with some smoke and a forty in the Wal-Mart parkin’ lot—shake it all up, and dump it in a petri dish. There you go: you’ve got every guy who ever went to Classen High. They are science experiments. They are Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at big cheerleader boobs, blond hair, the smell of hair spray. I’d almost feel sorry for guys like that. I mean, if they didn’t make my life suck so bad.

“I’ve got something for you,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. You’re cool, man. You’re fine. I reach nonchalantly into the front pocket of my Aunt Betty’s apron, wishing to God I hadn’t been so eager to see her that I’d taken it off, wishing to God I didn’t have to wear an apron in the first place, and pull out the copy of Leaves of Grass I’ve been carrying around for two months. “Here,” I say, holding it out for her like it was a stick of chewing gum. “I thought you might like it. He was this crazy, bearded hippie. Before there were hippies, I mean. Kerouac loved him. Remember that guy I told you about? Kerouac? The one who took those road trips?” I hear the urgency in my voice. Shut up, fucktard. Just shut up. “He was bisexual, too. Before it was, like, cool. I mean, he tried everything. That was his philosophy. Girls, guys, it didn’t matter. He probably even did it with animals. Just kidding. He loved animals. As pets, I mean.” I laugh. I am a fucking idiot and I want to die.

She takes the book from my hand and looks down at it. She smiles, and then I do too, because she’s like an infection. The kind you want to get. The kind you brag about. Laurilee is the kissing disease.

In an alternate world, where I am not a pussy, this would be where I’d step close to her, wrap my arm around her waist, pull her to my ripped chest, and say, my voice sounding like Daniel Craig’s James Bond, my hot, nonvegan breath on her slightly stuck-out right ear: Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

But in this world, I have scrawny arms and no swagger. I look down at my high-tops, the sides of the soles scrawled with doodles. When I bought them, they seemed old-school, ironic. Now they look infantile.

“Thanks, kid,” she says, and kisses my cheek. “You’re sweet. I’ll read it when the shop gets slow.” I will feel the imprint of her frozen lips during the rest of my shift. I will think about her pussy and knobby knees and warm tongue in my mouth while I bag engorged cookies for mall-walking housewives in sweatpants. I will write Happy Birthday, Nancy! in pink icing on a cookie cake and think about Laurilee naked in Kama Sutra poses with Buddhist Daniel, his Adam’s apple bouncing like a pinball beneath his tattooed dragon with each sweaty grunt. The sound system will pipe in the Muzak version of “Light My Fire,” complete with eighties synthesizer and harps, like the sound track to my mediocrity. I will hum along as I cut heart shapes out of premade dough.

Laurilee smiles at me, clutching the book to her chest with one arm, as though the pages will keep her warm. Her tiny incisors are sharper than most chicks’. I’m a vampire, she once told me, and snarled. Better watch out or I’ll bite you! Now she laughs, and the tinkling echoes off the cement walls and metal Dumpster, like wind chimes in a Tijuana slum. Not that I’ve seen Tijuana, except in documentaries. It’s just that Laurilee would make a gutter beautiful.

“You’re a real sweetheart, y’know that, kid?”

Laurilee gets off work before I do, leaving Trinkets to Denise, knowing no little kids come in for piercing past bedtime. I watch her walk to the escalator, clutching her ripped backpack with the anarchy patch. She stops suddenly in front of the down escalator, as though she has forgotten something, and turns toward me. I am staring at her, like a stalker. She grins and waves. I wave back like an idiot. Like she’s going off to war. Then she hops on the escalator and the last thing I see, before she disappears, is the faint blue of her temples. A timer goes off, and I jump. The Snickerdoodles are ready.

It’s dark when I walk from the bus stop to the split-level, ranch-style house that looks like every other split-level, ranch-style house in our neighborhood, except for the overgrown lawn. None of the neighbors has complained. They know Trevor isn’t here to mow, and they probably figure I don’t know how to do it myself, even though any douche can mow a lawn. Of course I wouldn’t put on quite as good a show as Trevor does, getting all sweaty and whipping his shirt off, taking breaks to pour water over his head like it’s halftime. And the truth is, I kind of like it like this, with the weeds growing up the side of the house and the neighbors pretending they don’t see what’s happening. It’s like a yearlong excuse to have a brother fighting in Iraq. A get-out-of-jail-free card. I wonder what other stuff I could score if I really thought about it, like how they give you a free Grand Slam at Denny’s on your birthday. It occurs to me that it’s a lot easier to like Trevor when he’s in a desert eight thousand miles away.

In the kitchen, my mother sits at the foldout table we used to use for backyard barbecues when the extended family came up from Little Rock. They don’t come anymore, except for every third Thanksgiving, and the foldout has taken permanent residence in the kitchen. We had a real dining-room table once, when I was a kid. It was one of those extender ones that you open up for family holidays. I’m not sure where it went, but I haven’t seen it in a long time. Now we eat on TV trays or standing at the kitchen counter, which is fine with me. Family dinners are overrated.

The floor is covered with half-assembled cardboard boxes and bags of packing peanuts. My mom is wearing a flannel nightgown. She hums to herself. There are stacks of candy bars, boxes of fruit roll-ups, six-packs of Hanes boxers, Juicy Fruit gum, piles of Sports Illustrated and Maxim. She has a piece of Scotch tape stuck to her bottom lip. She curls a yellow ribbon with a pair of scissors. Yellow ribbons are for dead soldiers, I almost tell her, except I don’t want to say the word dead when she’s thinking about Trevor. In Canada, the yellow ribbons also symbolize teenage suicide prevention, which is kind of disturbing if you think about it too hard. I googled awareness ribbons, figuring I could suggest another color, but they are pretty much taken. I never knew there were so many causes out there. Blue is nice, might remind the troops of the good ole American sky, but almost every shade is accounted for already. Sex-trafficking awareness is navy. In Spain, the blue ribbon symbolizes opposing the terrorism of the ETA, and in Israel it indicates support for the Israel unilateral disengagement plan of 2008. I’m not sure about the specifics of these events because they don’t teach them in Oklahoma History, and we aren’t required to take World History until junior year. I like the idea of ribbon awareness, though. I thought about an appropriate ribbon color for other guys like me, so we could recognize each other in the hall. Then I tried to figure out exactly what kind of guy I am, but the whole enterprise was depressing as hell, so I googled Laurilee instead. I realized I didn’t remember her last name, which surprised me, considering she is the only reason I wake up in the morning.

My mom has a patch of gray hairs coming in on the front of her hairline. She used to take care of stuff like that. She used to wear pink lipstick and smear on this cream she got at the mall that smells like a vanilla sundae. She stopped doing that stuff when Trevor left. Still, she’s prettier than I remember seeing her in a long time. Her face is practically glowing, or maybe it’s just the shreds of silver confetti stuck to the side of her face. She puts a fistful in every package because that’s just what every soldier in Iraq wants, silver fucking confetti to go with their yellow ribbons.

“Honey,” she says, without looking up, “did you ask your manager about the cookies?”

“I forgot.” I open the fridge. I scan for something edible that is not dehydrated, prefrozen, or shrink-wrapped. I should have stopped at Chick-fil-A. The Chick-fil-A people honor the mall discount. Probably because they are a Christian organization, and Jesus doesn’t believe in stiffing fellow mall employees, unlike those ghetto asswipes at Hot Dog on a Stick in their gay rainbow hats. I take a can of Dr Pepper.

“Oh, honey, we could really use the donation,” says my Mom, sounding disappointed. Disappointed mother is the worst sound in the world.

“I’ll ask him tomorrow,” I lie. I avoid talking to Roger at all costs, unless it pertains to my paycheck or a shift that coincides with Laurilee’s.

“They’re sending in more troops. Did you know that?” She looks up at me, midcurl. She is beaming, her cheeks flushed like a teenage girl who just made Homecoming Court. She lives for this. This is her purpose. This is why she wakes up in the morning. We have more in common than I’d like to admit.

“Yeah,” I say, and chug half the can of Dr Pepper. “I think I read that somewhere.”

“I called an emergency meeting for Friday.”

“Are they coming here?”

“Of course.”

“God, I hate those bitches. They cackle. I swear to God, Mom, I can hear them in my sleep. Like a bunch of hyenas.”

“Watch it, Dougie,” says my mom, holding up the scissors at me. She can’t hide her smirk. She knows I’m right. My mom is the unofficial leader of the Mothers Support Our Troops Northwest Oklahoma City Chapter, not that it pays in anything other than personal satisfaction. The other northwest Oklahoma City mothers who support our troops hang on her every word, fawn over her package arrangements, argue over who will get her tea. She tells them what to do, like a sergeant, and they jump at her every command.

Since Trevor left, her days are full of lists and phone calls. It’s like she’s in college again, when she led a student protest against animal testing in the biology department. I can almost see that girl in her now, the art major in Birkenstocks and sarongs, with charcoal under her fingernails. At least that’s how I like to picture her, as one of those arty chicks who went to poetry readings and talked about Kafka and baked stuff out of wheatgrass. Now she is an administrative assistant to a bunch of good-old-boy lawyers. They wear cowboy hats and call her sweetie. On Secretary’s Day they pitch in to get her a gift certificate to Dillard’s.

Once I found a stack of her old canvases gathering dust in the corner of the basement. The splatters are obviously derivative of early Pollock, which I know because I saw a documentary about him on PBS and was pretty impressed by any guy who’d literally piss on his own work. But there is something even better in my mom’s paintings, something dark and interesting, like they were done by someone I wouldn’t mind meeting. Oh, Doug, she said, when I showed them to her. Put those hideous things back in the basement. I put one on the wall over my dresser. Every time I look at it, I think about how she ended up marrying my dickhead father, and it seems like something straight out of one of those chick movies she Netflixes and forces me to watch, usually starring Emma Thompson, where all the women are desperate to get married and in the end they fall in love with some asshole tool instead of the nice, available guy who isn’t as good-looking but would give them security and unconditional love and wouldn’t spend their dowry on prostitutes. Of course, in the end of the movie they are old maids living in some family cottage and it is a feminist statement. If you really think about it, my mom is a feminist statement, raising me and Trevor on her own.

I don’t remember my father’s face. For some reason, all I see in my head is a cross between Bill Paxton and the dad on Leave It to Beaver. I don’t think there are any pictures, and I wouldn’t want to see them anyway. Only an asshole would marry someone, knock her up twice, then take off to Mexico with some mentally unstable heiress he met at the Cock O The Walk. I don’t want to know anything about him, even if we do share the same DNA. DNA is as overrated as family dinners.

I watch my mom assemble packages and feel a rush of love for her. I grew in her belly. She used to bring me orange juice when I had a fever. She’s not so bad. Then I think about how there is nothing to eat in the fridge and she forgot to go grocery shopping again. “Can I have money for a pizza?” I ask.

“Just have a sandwich. Want me to heat you up a Hungry-Man?”

“Never mind,” I say, hearing the whine in my voice. She shoots me a sharp look. I open a bag of Chee•tos and lean against the counter. I chew loudly.

“How was work?”

“It sucked,” I say, making sure she sees my mouthful of neon orange mush.

“You got homework?”

“I guess.”

“You guess or you know?” she says.

“I did most of it at work.”

“I hope your grades are better this term.”

“I’m getting an A in English. We just finished The Sun Also Rises.”

My mom smiles and takes a sip of her Sleepytime tea. She’ll supplement it with a tranquilizer around midnight. “Hemingway.”

“The whole thing is about how Hemingway can’t get a boner.” I emphasize the word boner, just to see if I can get a reaction.

“I think I remember,” says my mom, unmoved.

“Mrs. Wallace won’t talk about that part. I don’t think she knows what a boner is.” Before Trevor left, my mother would have acted shocked at my lack of tact. Erection, she would have corrected me. The old Mom would have been even more pissed about Mrs. Wallace. She would have given a speech about the incompetence of the American educational system and how she wishes we had the money to send me to the white-flight private school across town where they have a pottery studio and how I’ll have to make the best of a mediocre situation and why didn’t I apply myself because with all my natural ability I could easily be the kind of kid who merits a school-issued bumper sticker on the back of her minivan? But now she doesn’t care. Now she is only half listening. It’s like when I was a kid, and I’d read an essay I’d written or act out my science-fair presentation for her. She’d worked all day and would be folding laundry or making dinner and would be this weird concoction of parent and ghost. A half-Mom phantom. When I complained, she told me she was watching out of the corner of her eye. I didn’t believe her then, and I don’t believe her now. It i