A Different Kind of Forever - By Dee Ernst Page 0,94

possible.

Remove rubber band, stand upright, and shake your head.

Leave all the cut hair on the bathroom floor.

Mix one application of GothGirl Hair Color #666, Your-Mother-Will-Scream Black, in the bathroom sink, making sure to get a few flecks on the walls.

Apply half the bottle to your newly shorn head, leaving the rest to drip over the hair on the floor.

After rinsing, let hair dry without benefit of conditioner, gel, mousse or blow dryer.

Ta-dah! The Jessica!

Jessica growled. She’s not a morning person. She poured herself a cup of coffee, which she drank, of course, black, and started taking apart a bagel with her blackened fingertips, putting very small bits into her mouth a little at a time.

“I need a favor,” she said. “It’s really important.” She was slouched against the counter, squinting at the sunlight like a vampire.

I sighed. “No,” I told her, “you cannot get a tattoo.”

“That’s not it.”

“And you can’t get your nose pierced either.”

“Wrong again, Mom.” She sighed and munched more bagel, then and asked, very casually, “Could I sleep at Billy’s Friday night?”

Billy is her so-called boyfriend. He’s a year older and lives six blocks away. He walks over to see her on the weekends and they go out for walks, sometimes into town, where there are places to eat and have coffee. He’s a very quiet kid, with long hair that hides most of his face most of the time.

I put my coffee cup down very carefully. “Did you just ask me to spend the night at Billy’s?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. He’s having a sleepover party.”

“A sleepover party?” I looked over at Lauren for some sort of verification. Lauren was actually nodding.

“Yes, Mom,” Lauren said. “A lot of kids are having boy-girl sleepovers. It’s kind of the new thing.”

I was trying not to hyperventilate. “Who else is invited?”

Jessica shrugged again. “I don’t know. Kids. Jill, I think, and Avery. Maybe Matt.”

“And his parents are going to be home?” This was sounding more interesting all the time.

“Don’t know. Maybe.”

“What are all of you going to do?”

“Don’t know. Listen to music, watch a few movies, I guess.” She shook her hair away from her eyes so she could actually look at me. “We’ll stay up all night, Mom. It’s no big deal. It’s not like we’re all going to be having sex or anything.”

“Well, of course not,” I said heartily.

“So, can I go?”

“As soon as I speak to Billy’s mom, and Jill’s mom, and of course, your father, whom I’m sure will be thrilled with the idea.”

“Mom.” Jessica started to whine. “You can’t tell Daddy. He’ll flip out. Can’t you tell him I’m at Jill’s or someplace?”

I shook my head. “Sorry honey, but what if I get struck by a bus on Friday night and am in the hospital dying? You father would want to be able to bring you to my bedside so you can say a last good-bye. He needs to know where you are, Jessica. I don’t lie to him about stuff like that.”

She slammed down her coffee mug, then threw her bagel across the room where it landed, surprisingly, in the trashcan. She stormed out, muttering under her breath. I looked at Lauren.

“So, parents are actually letting their kids sleep over with members of the opposite sex?” I asked.

Lauren put her bowl and spoon in the sink. “Yes. It’s okay, I guess, because everybody is in a big room together, and if anything was going on, everybody would know about it, and that would be really embarrassing, you know?”

I smiled, but was not convinced. I didn’t think that a teenage boy, faced with the prospect of getting some, would consider embarrassment a major obstacle. Lauren went upstairs and I sighed into my coffee cup.

I love my children. I really do. And I still have some control over their actions. But I can’t help feeling that one day they’ll figure out that there are three of them and only one of me, and it will be all over, like when the great lioness is taken down by a pack of lowly hyenas by force of their sheer number.

I drained my cup of coffee and began to put the girl’s dishes in the dishwasher. I turned the kitchen tap slowly, then breathed a sigh of relief as clear water gushed out. Some days, that’s a real cause for celebration in our house.

Earlier that morning we had a plumbing event. The claw foot tub in the girl’s bathroom made a noise and coughed up something that looked like rusty