I never had a chance.
“Parker, where are you going?”
I cringed at the sound of my mom’s voice as I slowly turned towards her, letting my hand fall from the front door knob. As she marched towards me with a curious frown, I had flashbacks to all the times in high school that I’d been caught in the same position, though usually in the dark of night rather than broad daylight. I grimaced as I met Mom’s gaze.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were up.”
She glanced at the grandfather clock near the coat closet and gave me a look. “It’s almost noon.”
“Oh. You’re right.”
“Where are you going?” she repeated as she edged closer, her slippers silencing her footsteps. I wondered if that was why I never heard her creeping up on me.
“Scott’s place,” I said quickly. “He called me last night, he’s in town.”
"Don’t you two see enough of each other in Los Angeles?”
“Not this year. Besides, I have to give him his present.”
“Please tell me you two have outgrown exchanging those silly gag gifts,” Mom pleaded and I grinned.
“Of course not.”
She sighed and asked, “Did you get Michael anything?”
“I never do,” I replied flatly.
Mom’s frown deepened at my response. “But he’s your boss now.”
“Yeah, and he’s been a total ass about it—sorry.”
Swatting my arm gently, Mom shook her head. “Don’t say that. You three were like brothers growing up.”
“We still are,” I said with a shrug and I meant it. No matter how much I complained about him to Melanie or how often we got into squabbles over how to handle Sophie, at the end of the day, I knew that Michael and I had each other’s backs. At least, I hoped that he had mine. It was hard not to wonder how much longer that fraternal affection we'd shared would last in the real world. “You don’t have to like someone for him to still be family.”
“Gee, good to know.” Mom raised an eyebrow before looking towards the staircase. “Aren’t you going to take Sophie?”
I scratched the back of my neck; I’d known this was coming, along with the guilt trip that was sure to follow. “She’s still asleep.”
“Really?” Mom asked, studying the hands on the clock. “Can’t you wait to go until she’s awake?”
“I told Scott that I’d meet him by twelve-thirty,” I said. “Besides, it’s a bro day.”
“A ‘bro day’?”
“Yeah, you know,” I said, pausing to come up with an example. “Football, video games, no girls allowed.”
“Because of the cooties, right?”
“Exactly,” I said and Mom rubbed her temples in exaggerated dismay.
“How old are you again? Five? Six?”
“Seven, actually,” I replied and despite her attempt to stifle it, a single chuckle escaped Mom’s lips.
“I can’t believe you’re going to leave your guest here,” she said after a moment, her voice accusing. “Sophie was feeling pretty sick last night, I bet she’d enjoy the company.”
“I’ll bring back soup.”
“Parker,” Mom said disapprovingly and I held up my hands in surrender.
“Mom,” I said, racking my brain for a suitable excuse. “It’s not that I don’t want her to come, but she can’t because... Because I still have to buy her a Christmas gift. I was going to duck into the city before the shops close to get her something but if she’s with me it’ll be awkward and--“
Holding up a finger to silence me, Mom said, “Fine, go.” She eyed the keys that I was holding and snatched them from my grip. “But take your dad’s car. The Cadillac needs new tire treads, I don’t want you driving it in the snow.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that she’d picked me up in the sedan, but instead kissed her on the cheek and grabbed the keys to Dad’s Buick from the sideboard behind her.
“Bye, see you in a few hours,” I called over my shoulder, prepared to bolt before I could be tricked into waiting for Sophie to get up, but my mom caught my wrist, stopping me.
"Get her something nice, okay?” she instructed, the expression in her eyes serious.
I nodded, wriggling out of her hold, and promised, “I will.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
“Dude, sick,” Scott exclaimed as he ripped a mustache-shaped flask out of the duct tape and tissue paper that I’d wrapped his present in. He held the empty container over his upper lip and asked, “Think I could pull it off?”
I laughed and replied, “Not a chance.”
“In that case, I’m definitely going for it,” Scott said, pumping a fist into the air. “Yo, I got you something, too.”
Scott got up from where we were sprawled out on the floor of his bedroom to rummage through a suitcase near the door. Clothes spilled around the piece of luggage and I knew that he hadn’t bothered to fold anything that he’d managed to stuff inside. In fact, I doubted that he had any idea what, if any, of the clothing that he’d brought home was clean.
"Ah,” Scott mumbled to himself as he pulled a long, rolled up sheet of paper from the bottom of the bag. “Shoot. Sorry, man.” He turned to me and tossed the gift onto my lap. “I couldn’t figure out how to wrap it and I think it might’ve gotten messed up on the plane.”
“No big,” I said, shrugging, as I cautiously removed the rubber bands that kept the paper coiled.
As I began to unravel the poster, I noticed that not only were the edges frayed and torn, but the corners of Scott’s mouth were also turned upwards into a smug smile. “What?” I asked, nervous to see what was printed on the paper. “Dude, this isn’t some Playboy thing, is it? My mom would freak.”
“That’s your business, not mine.” Scott laughed. “Check it out.”
As I unfurled the last corner of the poster, I gasped in surprise at the pair of wide, blue eyes staring up at me from the glossy paper. Golden ringlets tumbled around the girl’s face like a halo and a rosy shimmer colored her cheeks. Scott’s snickers grew louder as I punched him on the arm, both amused and annoyed that he’d given me a poster of Sophie Winters as my Christmas gift.
“Thanks a lot,” I said sarcastically, searching for the rubber bands that I’d cast aside. “It’s going up on my wall tonight, for sure.”
“Just like old times,” Scott replied, the self-satisfied expression on his face never wavering. I rubbed my right ear to hide the color that was rushing to it.
“I was twelve,” I grumbled, my gaze fixed on the tan carpet beneath me.
“Hey, to each his own,” Scott said with a teasing waggle of his eyebrows. I picked up a video game controller lying near my foot and chucked it towards his head. He ducked and as the device clattered to the ground, he asked, “Is that your way of saying you hate your gift?”
“There’s really no good answer to that question, is there? Nah, it’s pretty funny. Thank you, man.”
“Awesome,” Scott said, grabbing the creased poster from my hands and holding it in front of his face. “It took me two weeks to find this print, you know. It’s out of circulation, I had to order it off eBay.”
“Why not get a different one, then?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Scott gestured towards the form fitting black dress that the actress was wearing as she lounged on a couch, pink lips curved into a mysterious smile. The photo looked like it had been taken recently and I wondered if it had been one of the promotional images for the movie that she’d been dropped from earlier in the year. Scott looked at the picture again and shook his head. “I’ve got to admit that if she was a brunette, she would be ridiculously hot.”
I rolled my eyes and wondered what Sophie would say if she caught me coming home with the massive poster. The thought of her stumbling across it and having to deal with her mocking jeers—or worse, having her think that I was some sort of pervert—was enough to make me consider chucking it on my way into the city.
“So what are we doing?” Scott asked, changing the topic. He rolled the poster into a neat cylindrical tube before retrieving the controller that I’d flung at him. “I bought the new NFL game if you want to continue your losing streak.”
“Works,” I said, powering on the sleek, black video game console that rested on Scott’s television stand.
And yet, three failed touchdown attempts and a string of expletives later, I began zoning out, more worried about the errand that I’d have to run after leaving than leading a team of graphics to victory.
“What’s up?” Scott asked, eyes never looking away from the screen as his kicker lined up for a field goal attempt. A pixilated referee raised his arms to signal that it was good and I looked at my controller in disgust. Down by twenty-five points in the second quarter, my enthusiasm for the activity had waned to next to nothing.
“I don’t know what to get Sophie,” I admitted, chewing thoughtfully on a nail as I prepared to begin my next drive.
My confession seemed to startle Scott, who missed tackling my running back as he made his way down field on a kickoff return. I managed to get my character to Scott’s forty-yard line before being dog piled by computer-controlled defensive linemen. Even the virtual rendition of the act made me cringe as I imagined lying at the bottom of the heap, nothing more than a mess of jumbled bones.
“I didn’t realize you two were so close,” Scott said, pausing the game to study me. “Now I almost feel bad about the poster.”
“We’re not.” I grunted as I shook my leg, a million invisible needles alerting me that it had fallen asleep. “But, you know, since she’s staying with me I figure it’d be weird not to get her anything.”
“Yeah, I don’t really get that, either,” Scott replied, scratching his mop of sandy-colored hair. “Why didn’t Michael just set her up in a hotel nearby if he’s so worried about her?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing for three weeks,” I grumbled. “My mom’s completely sold on the whole thing, though. She’s been treating her like the daughter that she never had.”
“Aw, are you jealous? Don’t worry, I always thought you filled that role pretty well for her,” Scott teased and I snorted, rolling my eyes at the jab.
“Seriously, though, what do I get someone who can afford a private island?”
“An umbrella and a beach towel,” Scott said with a straight face, not missing a beat. “Maybe sunscreen, if it’s in your budget.”
“Useful,” I muttered, setting down my controller. I hesitated before asking, “What do you think about jewelry?”
Scott raised an eyebrow and gave me a strange look. “Parker, I realize that your current living conditions are probably screwing with your head but you do know she’s not your girlfriend, right?”
“No,” I said automatically but then corrected myself. “I mean, yeah, obviously.”
“Alright.”
“Come on, I’m not delusional.”
“Don’t do it, then,” Scott warned. “Go buy her a stuffed animal or something. Maybe a nice bottle of tequila, I'm sure she'd appreciate one of the two."
“Seriously?”
“Uh, yeah.” Scott nodded furiously. “Dude, I don’t care how famous she is; all girls are the same when it comes to stuff like this, and trust me, she’s going to read way further into it than she needs to.”
“You don’t know Sophie.”
“But you know I’m right.”
“Sorry if I don’t jump at the idea of taking advice from a guy who’s been in a slump since August,” I muttered and Scott scowled.
“Yeah? Let’s take a look at your lifetime stats and then we’ll see who has the right to talk.”
“Okay, chill. I get it. You’re probably right, but my mom told me to get her something nice and I’d feel bad bringing home some sort of toy for her,” I said. "Or booze, for that matter. I have a feeling she'd take it as a diss more than anything."
Scott gaped at me. “So what you’re really saying is that you want to get her something nice.”
“I guess.”
“I forgot. You’ve always had a soft spot for crazies.”
“Sophie isn’t crazy,” I said and Scott cocked an eyebrow as I struggled to come up with an alternative description. “She’s a little… well, I mean, she’s Sophie,” I trailed off lamely.
Scott stared at me for a minute, his hazel eyes serving as a window to the gears whirring in his head. I shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny until finally his expression changed to one of understanding and he shrugged. Turning back to the game paused on the television screen, he said, “I take it back. Get her whatever you want.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It turned out that I had much better luck at sneaking into my house than out of it. As I slipped in through the front door, I shimmied off my jacket, awkwardly wrapping the poster of Sophie within the folds. I started for the living room and then paused. The smell of dinner cooking wafted from the kitchen to the foyer, the hint of honey-glazed ham in the air complimented by the sweet aroma of an apple spice cake that I knew had just been pulled out of the oven. My mouth began to water and like a dog conditioned by a bell, I turned towards the scents down the hallway before shaking my head and forcing myself to focus on the mission at hand.
I deposited Sophie’s present beneath the tree before hurrying to my room and stuffing the gift from Scott into the farthest corners of my sock drawer. Even upstairs I could smell every morsel baking and once I was satisfied that the evidence had been sufficiently hidden, I made my way to steal whatever scraps I could before Mom called us all to dinner.
As I stood outside the doorway leading to the kitchen, I heard Sophie laugh and the sound of flipping pages. Mom was speaking in hushed tones and a strange knot in my stomach told me to wait before barging in. I leaned against the wall in the hallway, listening.
“… Parker has always had a very active imagination,” Mom said and I could picture the smile on her face as she led Sophie on a stroll down memory lane.
“How so?” Sophie asked. I was surprised to hear the genuine curiosity in her voice.
“I doubt he does it anymore, but when he was younger, he always used to run around pretending that he was in a movie. He’d come up with the craziest characters for himself, too, and he’d make us guess his identity.”
I grimaced knowing I’d done exactly that while I was shopping for Sophie’s gift. I’d pictured myself as a world-renowned thief, casing out the joint before returning to lead my pack of underground criminals in a major heist. In hindsight, slinking around a major department store on Christmas Eve likely contributed to the strange looks that I kept receiving from the salespeople, but on the bright side, at least they were attentive when I got around to asking them for help.
“Honestly, I’m pretty sure he still does that,” Sophie replied. “It’s like, one minute he’s totally normal and the next I feel like I’m talking to a James Bond impersonator. It makes it kind of hard to get a read on him.”
“I realize that this probably won’t make you feel better, but he’s my son and I rarely have any idea as to what’s really going on in his head. I’m pretty sure his friend Scott is the only person who has ever had any luck on that front.”
“Michael’s brother?”
“Oh, you’ve met? Then I’m sure you realized the two are complete opposites. Frankly, I’ve always hoped that Scott would rub off on Parker a little bit more than he has.”
“In what way?”
“Scott has always been outgoing, whereas Parker,” Mom continued slowly, “doesn’t really like to open himself up to many people. He’s always had friends, but even when he was a little, it would take a lot for him to get excited or upset about anything, really. I remember whenever I would pick him up from daycare, other kids would be fighting over toys and he’d just be sitting there watching it all unfold. Very calm, very reserved.”
“I can see that. I’ve only really seen him lose his temper once or twice, and both times it was because I… Well, it was for a good reason.”
“Truthfully, at first I thought he made up those imaginary roles for himself as a game but now I think he does it because it’s easier for him to hide out in his head than deal with whatever’s going on. It sort of worries me that one day he’s just going to check out and never come back from whatever world he’s floating around in.”
I frowned at the pain in my fingers and looked down to see that I’d unconsciously balled my hands into tight fists. Mom was right, more or less, but the fact that she’d spouted her theory off to Sophie annoyed me more than it should have. I took a deep breath, waiting to see what else I’d hear from my spot beside the doorframe.
“Anyway,” Mom said after a moment of silence. I heard another page turn. “This is a copy of Parker’s entry into your meet-and-greet contest from a few years back.”
I felt the color drain from my face.
“Which one?” Sophie asked.
“It must have been around one of the last seasons of your show because I think Parker had just turned fourteen. Do you remember? If an entrant collected fifty tokens from cereal boxes and sent them in along with a picture and a letter, that person could win a walk-on role during one of the next season’s episodes.”
God have mercy.
“Oh,” Sophie said. “There were a lot of those. I wasn’t really involved, I just had to show up and shake hands with whoever won.”
“That’s what I told Parker but he spent about a week moping when he didn’t win. It’s kind of funny now but at the time I felt so bad for him. He was absolutely heartbroken because he had the biggest crush on y--”
“Mom, what the hell!” I exclaimed from where I stood, mortified by what I'd just heard and furious with myself for not stopping the story the moment it began.
Silence fell over the kitchen and after a pregnant pause, Mom tentatively called out, “Parker?”
I gritted my teeth as I tried to decide how I wanted to respond. While my first instinct was to jump off a cliff, I realized there was a chance that Sophie hadn’t caught the tail end of what Mom had said. Even if she had, if I pretended like it was no big deal--which it wasn’t--there was no reason for Sophie to think of it as anything other than what it had been: a childhood crush.
A childhood crush that ended long before I ever met the grille of her car.
“Parker? Is that you?”
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply before stalking into the kitchen and willing my voice to remain calm. “What the hell is for dinner? It smells great.”
I turned to where Sophie sat at the table, ignoring the shocked expression on her face as I snatched the leather bound photo album from where it lay in front of her. “Mom, what are you doing? I thought we agreed all photos of me in braces are off limits.”
“Oh, Parker, I’m sorry--”
I shot my mom what I hoped was a withering look and caught a glimpse of my beet red face reflected in the window behind her. To Mom’s credit, at least she looked guilty. “When did you get home?” she asked, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with nervous fingers.
“Just now,” I lied. “Is dinner ready?”
“Almost. Give it another half hour.”
I nodded curtly, tucking the book under my arm. “I guess I’ll go help Dad shovel the driveway.”
“I’ll come get you both when it’s time to eat,” Mom offered.
“Don’t bother, I’m going to go bury myself in the snow,” I muttered under my breath.
“What?”
“I said, great, I can’t wait to eat my weight in ham, though,” I replied before leaving to storm back up the stairs to my room, photo album in tow.
A chorus of anxious murmurs erupted in the kitchen along with the clattering of a pan as I shut my door in irritation. I stood still for a moment and counted to ten, trying to calm down. Of all the stories that she had to tell, I thought bitterly as I crossed the room to my dresser, stuffing the offending scrapbook inside.
It wasn’t lost on me between the poster and the album I was running out of space in my sock drawer to hide my growing mound of secrets.
-----------
A/N: Whee, the embarrassment. And now, dear readers, I'm sure you can appreciate why Parker has been skittish about his mom and Sophie mingling as much as they have. >:3 Fair warning to all of you, the next few chapters will be longer than usual because a lot still has to happen before Parker and Sophie return to the sunny shores of Los Angeles. Stay tuned and thank you all so much for reading and supporting.<3
Dedicated to my mom for all the horrifying childhood stories she's told about me over the years. Just kidding, sort of. Serious dedication goes to @KatrinHollister as thanks for all of her support. I encourage y'all to go check out her story, Seeker. It's unique, it's engaging, and there's demons. Can't beat the combo, amiright?