Always on Your Side (NaNoWriMo 2019)

33.

"Oh, my god, Helen. Your hair!" 

Nice to see you, too, Mom, is what I want to say in response to her horrified wails. Instead, I just flinch. Adam peeks his head into the living room to see what all the commotion is about and I try to brush past. "Your hair looks good," Adam says with a tone of rote politeness, either not reading the room or not caring what Mom thinks.

Mom stops me before I can even drag my luggage through the doorway. 

"Did your dad let you do this? It was in the custody agreement, he's not allowed to - " 

"Mom, I'm eighteen," I snap, shoving past her more forcefully. 

"You're still living - " 

"Under your roof, I know," I interrupt. She said the same thing many times whenever Brendon tried to assert the right to make his own decisions. "It's just hair, Mom! It was my birthday gift from Dad! Maybe be glad it was a haircut and not cigarettes." After forcing out the lines I'd been mentally rehearsing ever since I got the new style, I yank my luggage onto the carpet and roll it in a sprint towards my room, slamming my door behind me. 

The pixie cut and simple black dye-job was a distraction. A way to avoid talking to Marina about anything meaningful, a way to pretend her sister hadn't called me, that I didn't know she'd been crying over me, at least until we could have that conversation in person. So cute! she gushed, demanding selfies and sending me selfies with her sister in exchange. Now that I was home, I still couldn't face her. Without thinking about it, I grabbed Brendon's phone out of my pocket and returned to what had been distracting me from thoughts of that conversation through the entire plane ride - Cave Explorer.

Despite having tons of free time to play at Dad's house, I hadn't gotten very far. There were a couple more cave levels, a couple more dialogue boxes (or technically, monologue boxes, since the player character was the only person in the game) about how the boy had to get to the sky to be with his people, and one more long, tedious level that involved burrowing through a cave by tapping in a specific, repetitive way for a torturously long amount of time, then a boss fight. The boss fight was where I was stuck - a golem-thing rose from the ground where I'd been burrowing, and I had to jump from ledge to ledge on the mountain, dropping pebbles onto it to chip away at its health. I've improved and gotten further than my earliest attempts, but I can't beat it yet.

I open the game to where it last auto-saved after my most recent failure, a Game Over screen with two options: Try Again or Give Up. I select "Try Again," and am just about ready to move on to the second ledge when Mom barges into my room again. 

"Oh my god, Mom!" I snap, shoving Brendon's phone into my hoodie pocket. "Stop barging in!"

"Why?" Mom demands. "What are you trying to hide?"

"Nothing!" I put my hands behind me and lean backwards. "What do you want?"

She opens her mouth as if to yell, then closes it. Her next words come out calmer, but they're still the wrong words. "It's not about the hair. It's about you going behind my back. If you had talked to me about it before, maybe we could have come up with a compromise. But you - " 

"It's my hair! Why should I need to compromi - " 

"-Because you look like a lesbian!" she screams.

My mouth falls open. I can't believe the way she said that. The disgust, the rage... I knew she was homophobic, but it doesn't make sense. Why does it bother her so much that I am what I am?

I wish I could match her tone. It would make more sense for me to be outraged, screaming. But I can't. I can't get angry. Tears fill my eyes, and my next words come out in more of a whimper than a scream: "Well maybe... I am... a fucking lesbian."