Blog of a Teenage Superhero

Chapter Twenty: A Love...Something

Dad rubs his eyes, straightening the crook of his tie. He peers over my shoulder at the boys on our couch. "Monet," he says. There are dark circles under his eyes. "This is the third boy." He drums his fingers to his crumpled collar. "I'm starting to worry."

And believe it or not, after two cups of coffee and a defrosted deep-fried twinkie, I can't even smile.

Chip sits up, a paper cup of cream-swirled coffee pinched between his forefinger and thumb. His hands are shaking. Kai tends to him, asking him what went wrong, cooing to him that everything will be alright, brushing out the boy's hair with my wooden comb as if Chip is his personal plastic pony. Finn presses his face in his hands, reddened skin peeking through his fingers.

"They're just friends."

Dad crosses his arms, his voice steadily rising. "I just want to know why, when I wake up, there's a blonde passed out on my couch. This can't be normal. I called two of my colleagues, and they agree, this isn't normal. What are you up to?"

"Dad, I'm sixteen."

"Exactly."

"Do you know any sixteen-year-olds with a harem?" My foot taps. Getting snappy with Dad isn't usual for me, but I'm more coffee than girl, now, and any second my sinuses will explode.

"The only sixteen-year-old girl I know of, beside you, is Mayweather's niece. Who's pregnant."

I stand up. Father-daughter talks don't happen in this house because both father and daughter respectively suck at them. Last time Dad tried to explain the delicacies of baby-production and my flourishing womanhood, we both sat in collective awkward silence, silently begging for the merciful release of death. He got my aunt—the one I don't even know the name of—to explain them instead.

"Dad, we can talk about this later. I gotta go to school." I'm hoping in Trig, I'll come to an epiphany. Staring at the squiggles of numbers, the clues will snap together. I'll 'Aha' and my brain will light up like a Christmas tree. Dad presses his mouth into a hard frown. "And the carnival."

"Your mother said—"

I told her not to say anything to Dad. And what did she do? I punt my backpack clean across the room with a single kick. "It's nothing," I say, just as the bag slams into the shelves. Ancient books crash to the floor in a heap of yellow pages. "She wasn't—"

"She wasn't what?" Dad regards me calmly. Under his relaxed gaze, I feel all shriveled up, like a little kid. "What aren't you telling me, Monet?"

A blush rises to my cheeks. On the couch, the three boys are staring. Dad intends to have it, right here, right now, no matter what it is. And it makes me angry, all at once, that my parents say I can tell them anything, and then they spread my secrets. That they encourage me to be uncompromisingly honest when they intend to embarrass me with that honesty.

I clench my fists at my sides, then let them fall loose. "Persephone Jamison," I say carefully, pronouncing the name slowly to emphasize the delicacy of it, the whispery 'S', the soft second 'p', the way the 'e' lingers. It's a nice name. "And I have been meeting in private. I kind of like her, you know, she's, uh, she's cute."

Chip stares down at his lap and Finn snorts. "I thought you liked Max." 

"I do!" My hands fly up. "I think Max is cute and I like like him. I just, you know, like Percy too. And I don't know if she likes girls, so..."

He laces his hands behind his head. "Well, Monet, you aren't just any girl." His eyes are such an intense green, they remind me of Percy's. The words, too, make my hands sweaty. Finn being nice to me is too damned weird. I turn away, toward my dad.