Page 14 of Enemies to Prom Dates
No reply after that. I smiled victoriously.
* * *
The Darcy Residence
Fitz
“Is the soup okay?”my mother asked me. “You’re not eating.”
The four of us were together at the formal dining room table. All other meals, we ate at the large kitchen table, but dinner, my mother said, was an event. Always served promptly at seven, which gave me enough time to get home from football practice, take a shower, and be seated at the table. Dad sat at the head, mom at the opposite end, and Gi and I across from one another.
We did this every night. At least when Mom wasn’t working and had to be present for a vote or at some political function. While she maintained a residence in Washington D.C., more often than not, she would make the daily commute home by train when Congress was in session. The Acela was only a two-hour ride from D.C. to 30thStreet Station in Philadelphia, which was only another twenty-minute commute to Haddonfield.
Still, I knew it was an effort for her. The four hours back and forth. She would tell me she used the time to read up on legislation, which made sense, but I knew it cost her politically. Deals were made over dinners and late-night drinks in Washington, while my mom was out the door and headed home as soon as she could.
She did that for us. For all of us.
All that effort she gave just to be here with us, she still had enough energy left to notice I wasn’t eating.
Ed was right. I did have the best mom in world and there wasn’t a lot I wouldn’t do to make her happy.
“The soup is delicious. I was just lost in my thoughts,” I said even as I took another spoonful.
She smiled. “How was your first day back? Gi’s filled us in with her details. Now it’s your turn.”
“Fine.” I shrugged.
I wasn’t going to tell them about Wick. About a list Gi might or might not be on. Or that Gi had actually ridden home with him and Bennet sisters. She’d asked me not to tell, so I didn’t. I wasn’t a snitch and Gigi knew it.
If our father found out she was driving in cars with boys, he would not be pleased.
I certainly wasn’t going to tell them I’d been fixated on the idea that Beth Bennet was having sex with Javier from The Club in some closet. Had they been doing it on a night when we’d been there having dinner? Was it possible if I made a wrong turn to the men’s room, if I’d opened the wrong door, I might have seen her?
Her pants down, her legs open, some faceless man pumping between her thighs.
I closed my eyes to force the image away and coughed when I found myself getting hard at my family dinner table.
“That’s it?” my father asked. His deep, rich, baritone voice always seemed to cut through the noise in my head. “Fine? What about practice? Coach finally going to acknowledge you should be QB One over that white boy, what’s his name?”
“Chas,” I said, which my father knew, because Chas and I had been friends for years. “And you shouldn’t call himthat white boy.”
“Oh no, no, no. We don’t play that game in this house. There is racism in this country but the dark side of it goes all one way.”
Oh no. I’d inadvertently tripped my father’s switch. He was, no doubt, about to launch into the history of slavery, followed by failed reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, Civil Rights abuses with a healthy dose of redlining, voter suppression and ending in why black lives mattered.
I knew all this. My sister and I studied black history outside of school. We spoke about the challenges of racism. We were careful to always understand that, while we were biracial, we were not white. That white was its own special class. Which was pretty obvious to us in a high school that was nearly all white.
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in the cause, I just didn’t want to hear his lecture right now.
Not when I couldn’t shake the thought of Bennet with Javier.
That couldn’t be true. Could it?
“Dad, I know,” I said, cutting him off before he could get started. “Coach is going to play Chas because it’s his senior year. He’s sentimental like that.”
“Hmm, hmm. Sentimental,” he scoffed. “Sentimental doesn’t win games. Sentimental doesn’t allow someone to propel themselves to the next level. When I was playing hoops in East Baltimore, we didn’t have time for sentimental.”
Uh-oh. Another trip wire. We were about to get the story of how my dad had used basketball to make his way out of the ’hood.
