Straighter than Parallel Parking

≈ t h i r t y - n i n e ≈

"Her side?" Mackenzie's father huffs testily, straightening out his collar as he eyes Karlo's slightly wrinkled black dress pants and button-up. "Young man, your sister has a track record of being involved in a series of incidents. I am no fool. I know what type of person she is and that's enough to be said. I demand she get a suspension. Hell, she's been at it long enough that expulsion wouldn't be too far off the horizon!"

"Explusion!? Incidents!?" Janice cries, the blood rushing to her head. "Any incident I am a part of is never where I am bullying someone else. If anything, your daughter is behind half the gruesome things I have to clean up or stand to hold in."

But her words may as well have fallen on deaf ears.

With only her brother's hand in her hand grounding her, Janice finds herself slipping from the present. The once large room shrinks from the toxicity, and she tries to tune out the barrage of words against her in favour of putting a precarious rein on her emotions. In her tunnel vision, all she can see is her number one nemesis through all her high school days gleaming, proud; Janice is going to lose, it screamed, that snarky smile that tipped into all of Janice's nightmares.

In fact, she is so resigned in believing that she will be getting in trouble no matter what that she is startled when her Aunt voice rings in her ears.

"Are you done?" Aunt Maria cuts in, acid dripping from her words.

Ms. Montgomery whirls around, not bothering to hide her offence. "Excuse me?"

"You've been monopolizing this entire conversation from start to finish with no input from us at all."

The other woman upturns her chin. "I don't need your apology right now, what I want is for action—"

"Apologizing? Apologizing?" Aunt Maria repeats in disbelief. She turns to her niece, hissing, "Janice, get my phone and text Nilo Nails and tell them I'm going to need to extend my appointment for another twenty minutes. Tell them I have some filth to clean up."

Janice robotically does as she asks without hesitation (but replacing "my niece's possible expulsion" with "traffic jam" to make it more believable).

"Did you just say filth?" Mackenzie's mother sneers. "Bullies must run in the family."

"Yeah," Maria retaliates. "And in yours, it must be genetic."

Maria swipes a hand through the air before anyone can get an edge in, jumping into the heart of the matter. "Let's just pause for thirty seconds since you've had your turn. Your daughter's upset, over having to do a few worksheets, yada yada. Okay. And? You want suspension of a kid because your daughter didn't have the spine to ask Janice—who is basically five inches shorter than her and has some godforsaken inability to say no when asked of anything—to do her own work? Let's get this straight, Ms. Montgomery, since we're bringing up her track record. Janice has never been involved in any incident where she was not provoked. And I did review the case file on my niece before—"

Oh, yeah, Janice thinks dimly, wasn't she harping on my file that first night home?

"—and it is blaringly obvious that almost each incident has something in common with your loving, innocent, poor stressed-out dandelion daughter. Want to know what it is? She's the one either reporting it, crying a victim, or a mouth piece for one. Isn't that strange to you?"

"My daughter has a strong sense of honour!"

"Honour?" Aunt Maria throws the words back like they taste like gasoline, and she spits them back as flames. "Your daughter has called my niece an immigrant orphan, a Latino charity case, a white-washed brown souled idiot, amongst other things. And those words don't just cultivate out of no where. You are utterly and completely aware that your daughter is a spiteful little minx when she wants to be, because you have taught her that."