FINE LINES

CHAPTER 2

“Hey, little man,” I say.

“Hey, big girl,” he answers back. He is the only person in the world who can make a reference to my size without making me cringe. Jason would call me that even if I was skinny enough to shop at Pumpkin Patch like the other girls in my senior class.

“Now that I’m alive: how was school?” I ask him and look to my mother. “How was Billy today?” I ask her.

Billy is my mother’s boss, a boss that sends her flowers every other week, even though she’s a happily married woman. She always tosses the flowers – expensive flowers, I always note – in the trash. I know she would never cheat on dad but I worry sometimes that Billy will fire her if she doesn’t succumb.

Jason says, “Great!” at the same time my mother says, “Horrible.”

Jason looks up at both of us and pouts, but he is smart enough to go play in his room. My mother and I watch him go with matching sad expressions. Even though he doesn’t remember him, he misses my dad.

“What happened?” I ask her when Jason is out of ear shot. The smile that had momentarily graced my mother’s lips is gone, leaving frown lines that weren’t there when my dad was last here two years ago. My fingers involuntarily rise and stroke my mother's cheek. I don’t want those frown lines to scar her face before he gets back in a month. They stand out like faint creases in a folder piece of paper and I hate Billy for turning my mother’s beauty and my father’s job in the army, protecting people, into a bother.

Mum sighs heavily, heavily enough to have me worried that she will never breathe in again. She misses my dad too.

“Same as usual. That... that... man had the nerve to joke about Andrew dying–”

“Don’t say it, mum.” I’ve heard it all before – the terrible scenarios Billy hides behind trashy humour – but it doesn’t lighten the stone in my stomach each time I think about it.

“We’d know if something happened, okay? Billy’s just getting the idea in your head to warm-up your maternal juices,” I say to lighten the mood.

As I’d hoped, she laughs. “Maternal juices,” she echoes mockingly. “What am I paying your school to teach you?” She asks and I laugh too.

“Oh, you know: Remedial Sex, Advanced Drugs and Intermediate Alcohol. The general stuff, really,” I say with a shrug. She smiles and already one of the creases around her mouth disappears. My mum is so incredibly beautiful when she smiles. She has the blue eyes that Jason inherited but her hair is fair, almost blonde, and she is trim and small – unlike me.

What I love most about her is that she has always treated me like an adult. Two years ago, at the tender age of sixteen, I wrote a book for fun and put it on the internet. An international publisher read it, loved it and now – two years later – I have two novels in the Crime’s Best Sellers list. My books have been published in three other countries: Germany, Singapore and America are now my favourite places in the world.

When I told my mother I wanted to go under a pseudonym so I could finish school without anyone knowing how big of a nerd I was, she told me to go with my gut. Even though she believed I shouldn’t hide such an accomplishment from my friends, she still supported me and kept my secret. She even found time to manage all the boring stuff that comes with being a published author for me. Without her, I wouldn’t be travelling across America for signings and to lecture at a school for young writers like me. Without her, I’d be an overweight nobody with an empty Microsoft Word document. As sad as it sounds to some people, my mother is my best friend.

“You look exhausted. Where were you today?” my mother asks me, cutting my reminiscing short.

I smile sheepishly. “At the gym.”