Page 68 of Serpentine Valentine
“Don’t talk back to me, Luna. Not about this. Take your photography class if you want to, but do not see Lex Gorgon again, is that understood?”
“What if I say no?”
The silence that followed was the eye of the storm. I knew no matter what came next it would be chaos, an utter collapse of everything I knewbefore. But I was on a roll, tumbling down a slippery slope I could only hope ended in being a better me.
“Then you’re out of here,” Mom said finally, so soft and silken, her words like snakes in the grass coming for me.
Only, I wasn’t afraid of snakes anymore.
I’d faced Lex’s Timber rattlesnake, kissed the serpents on her thighs, and sucked a bruise onto the snake’s tongue that licked her carotid artery on the side of her neck.
“You’d kick me out for being friends with her?” I confirmed, trying to swallow down the surge of hurt like bile on the back of my tongue. “Are you serious, Mom? She’s just a girl.”
“She’s the devil,” she snapped, “and she’s trying to take me down!”
Ah, there it was.
The truth.
She wasn’t scared of what Lex would do to me, but her.
I’d always known Mom was selfish, but it was as obvious and unchangeable as the sun or the moon in the sky. I’d never thought to take umbrage with it, never thought about how unfair it was of her to put herself first again and again. We’d moved every few years growing up so she could take new jobs at universities across the country even though it meant making friends was difficult. I learned to cook when I was eight, so I could make dinners for us both when she got home late from work. She never went to my field hockey games even though she liked to brag about my awards, and she forced me to do mother/daughter photo shoots every year so she could add to the collection of faux domestic bliss on the table behind her desk in her office.
I was just a part of her illusion to having it all. Something meant to be seen, not heard like some throwback to children from the eighteen-hundreds or even the fifties.
Well, no fucking more.
“Don’t you think Lex has more things to worry about than whatever you think she’s after you for? She was attacked on campus, and she had the courage to return. How can you hate her for that?”
Mom opened her mouth to say something, then curled her lips under her teeth to stop herself.
Something ominous churned in my belly.
“Unless…you actually did something to warrant her anger,” I murmured.
Lex was filled with rage, I knew that. I thought most of it was directed at Professor Morgan, a little to men who thought they were above consent, and women who judged her for what had happened on Halloween as if it was her fault.
But…I remembered the ugly anger in Mom’s voice as she’d spoken about what happened to Lex and her conversation with Professor Morgan. Suddenly, it was all cast in a different light.
Mom had never been a dumb sheep blindly following the lead of others. She didn’t believe Morgan hadn’t raped Lex.
She knew he had.
And she was trying to cover it up because a scandal at Acheron while she was president would hurt her chances of achieving her dream of being president of Cambridge University.
The pain of the truth arrowed through me so sharply I lost my breath.
“You knew what he’d done,” I breathed, tears pooling in my eyes as I stared at the woman who’d given birth to me and realized she was a dangerously selfish creature. “You hushed it up so it wouldn’t affect your candidacy at Cambridge.”
Mom stared at me with cold eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Luna.”
“Don’t fucking gaslight me, Mom.”
“Language.”
“Fuck your language,” I shouted, stalking closer, so enraged I couldn’t see straight. “Are you serious right now? Did you know about the others too? About what Jerrod Ericht had done? And the Delta Alpha fraternity that was in the paper this morning?”
She stared at me thin-lipped, hands fisted at her sides.
