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I was quiet on the drive back to the bookstore after school, twisting the fabric of my skirt in between my fingers as rain splattering against the windshield and the screech of the wipers accompanied The Cure on the radio, tuned to the station dedicated to eighties throwbacks and unearthing nostalgic childhood memories for my mother. In the midst of my deliberation, I gave vague replies to her prodding, questions like how was school—fine—who did I sit with for lunch—just a few kids—did I have a lot of homework to do this weekend—not really.
I could tell that she was dissatisfied with my answers, especially after I spent literally months begging her to move back to Fairview after the divorce so I could finish out my senior year at Chanler and after weeks of excitedly planning our move and envisioning this perfect high school experience, I was suddenly suspiciously quiet.
There weren't many things that I kept from my mom—who had basically been my only friend for the past three years, as pathetic as that sounded—but I knew what she would say if I told her that coming back to Chanler hadn't really lived up to my expectations. She would repeat another gentle version of I told you so, even if she didn't mean to. She would softly brace me for the impact of not getting my old friends back, winning senior class president, the perfect senior year, instead encouraging me to try something new.
I had three years of new in Pennsylvania, but that never really changed anything. I had a new school, with new classmates, the same extracurriculars in new rooms—despite her persuasion, I wasn't trying out for the school musical—but after someone found an article about my dad online, all of the promises my mother offered when we first moved withered, and whispers bloomed in its place.
For the most part, it was just quiet gossip that came to an abrupt silence when I walked into the room, but some cracked jokes about matching with my dad on Tinder. At a school assembly once, a guy asked if I was going to post my nudes next and when I ignored him to study my notes from math class, he added that he would "delete the internet" if I ever posted my nudes, which earned him a hearty laugh from all his friends. I fought the urge to squirm, to focus on the ink of my pen instead of how my thighs spread out past the edge of my seat and dreamt of comebacks hours later that I would've never had the courage to spit back at him.
I never said anything. Not then. Not when people held up their phones with the censored picture of my dad, asking me either sincerely or mockingly if that was my dad. Not when someone actually stuffed the picture into my locker and filmed me opening the folded-up paper and realizing it was a full-frontal image of my father. The school never found out about it since it was on Snapchat, and I never told anyone because I knew it would infuriate my mother. She would storm into the principal's office and demand repercussions, which I worried would make things worse, but I was more worried about how much this would hurt my dad.
I had seen the profound ache in his eyes and the dimples in his chin at the thought of what this had done to us, and it pained me more than whatever the kids at school did or said. I wanted to protect both of my parents from that guilt, and it wasn't like it was that bad. The video thing really only lasted like two weeks, and everyone gets mean things said about them at school sometimes. I had to delete my social media because of the DMs, but so did my mom. It was hard for everyone, not just me, and it felt kind of selfish to make it about me when my parents' marriage was crumbling so painfully slowly.
