Becoming Popular ✔ (EDITING)

Chapter Seventeen-"Well that's how I roll"

~Dedicated to misjudged mean girls~

Chapter Seventeen-"Well that's how I roll"

Ever since I started high school, I knew about the trip to Paris, France that every senior was allowed to go on and since I lived with my single mother who worked her butt off to support us both, I’ve been saving up for the trip since I was thirteen. So now, to learn that I was being given permission by my mother to go to Venice was a surprise on its own. I mean, yeah I was ecstatic, don’t get me wrong. Venice was probably the one place I wanted to visit and so maybe it had a little to do with Italian boys and oh-so-heavenly cheesy pizza that melted in your mouth, but to say that I was surprised to learn that I was going to Venice would have been an understatement.

It happened when I was in my room, packing for Paris when my mother entered my room. Ever since she had been dating Jeff, she was smiling more and seemed a whole lot happier than I could remember her being. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face and she wore simple jeans and a white blouse that made her skin glow. She always said I got my looks from her, but I suspected she just said that so that I wouldn’t ask her anything about my father. My ‘father’ was a big no-no subject at our house and a part of me didn’t blame my mother. She fell in love, got pregnant and then my father took off for the wind.

So when my mother told me that she had something really important to talk to me about, I asked her the most logical thing that came to mind.

“Oh my God, Mum, are you pregnant!?”

My mother’s eyes widened in shock before she composed herself with a slight laugh and sitting down at the base of my bed.

 She replied, “No Viv, I am not pregnant; although that would be a whole lot easier to explain to you than this.”

I instantly frowned, “Mum, is something wrong?”

“Well, no sweetie, it’s just that,” my mother began, biting her lip nervously before she continued, “it’s about your father.”

‘Father’, that one word made my body freeze in silence. I swear that I could hear my heartbeat and mum’s breathing accelerating to speeds that weren’t exactly healthy for either of us. Never in my entire life, except for that awkward stage when mum explained to me where babies came from, did my mother ever bring up my father. It was like a taboo subject, something we just accepted and moved on with our lives. I never brought it up; well I didn’t know how to without sounding awkward and my mother didn’t really care to explain about my father, so we just pretended that everything was okay.

And now… Now she was bringing up the one thing that I didn’t know how to respond to. I mean, all this time I was trying to get popular and here I had this huge issue in my life that I bet Jessica didn’t have to face ever and I actually thought I had a chance of changing my life? What if my mother was going to tell me that I was supposed to meet my father? Or maybe she was going to tell me that he was dead or that Jeff was really my father and I didn’t know!? All the while my mind was going through different scenarios; I hadn’t noticed that my mother had pulled out a white envelope with my name on it until the last minute.

“What’s that?” I asked, my eyebrows rising in curiosity.

My mother smiled reassuringly, “It’s from your father Viv.”

I frowned slightly before replying, “But…he…a letter for…me?”

My mother nodded, “I know, he hasn’t exactly made an appearance and I haven’t been the best of mothers since I didn’t speak about him, but please honey, give him a chance?”

I looked up at my mother’s pleading eyes and let out a sigh. Well if my mother wanted me to try, the least I could do was attempt to. I mean, all her life she’s had to look after me with no help from her parents or my father and for the first time that she did find happiness, my father had to enter the picture and ruin what little joy she had. So I had to try for her, right?