How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,22

head office of a cosmetics company, and her hours were long. She’d done her best for us, considering she was a single mother who couldn’t supervise us all the time because she was busy working to pay the bills. Now she sat in the kitchen in her smart suit and heels, with her hair styled in a bob that made her look ten years younger than her age, and I felt a quiver of kid-fear left over from childhood as she gave me a steely stare.

“Jason, sit down,” she said, pointing to the kitchen chair across from her.

You’re twenty-four, I reminded myself as I pulled out a chair and sat down. Just remember you’re twenty-four, not twelve.

“I’m very worried about you,” my mother said. “You’ve seemed so… aimless ever since you came home from the Marines and ended it with Charlotte.”

“You don’t need to worry,” I said. I was wearing pajama pants and a zip-up sweatshirt over a t-shirt, and I zipped up the sweatshirt now, as if it would give me extra protection against this lecture.

Mom pressed her lips together again. “I didn’t like to argue with you at the time, but I can finally say that I never thought she was right for you.”

She had no idea. “No,” I agreed. “She wasn’t right for me at all.”

“So, fine,” Mom said. “That’s over. Her loss. But now you’ve moved back in—”

“It’s just temporary,” I said.

“And you’ve moved into the basement instead of into your old room—”

“You put boxes of stuff from storage in my old room,” I protested. “And Holly’s old room is girly.”

“And now you spend all of your time either down in that dark basement, doing God knows what—”

“Mom.”

“You’re out all hours of the night, and you have a bruise on your cheek, and you quit your job!” she finished, her cheeks flushed. She really was worried, I realized.

“Um.” Maybe I should have had this conversation with her sooner, but I hadn’t known she was this concerned. “Technically, I didn’t quit the bank. I got fired.”

She leaned back in her chair and looked at me.

“I hated that job,” I said, not liking the look on her face. “You know I did. I’m not a bank guy. I never have been.”

“Are you depressed?” she asked. “It’s okay, you know.”

“No,” I said. God, I was an asshole, making my mother worry like this. I could be so oblivious sometimes. “I’m not depressed. I promise.”

“You smell like alcohol,” she said. “Like a bar. You go out late every night, and your clothes smell like a bar when I do your laundry, and it isn’t just once in a while, it’s all the time. If you’re developing an alcohol dependency—”

“Oh, my God.” I put my head in my hands. “Okay, look. Mom, I’m not a drunk, and I’m not depressed. I’m a bouncer. I smell like bars because I’m working in one, not because I’m out drinking all night.”

“You’re working as a bouncer?”

I said nothing.

“You fight with drunk people? You throw them out of bars?”

When you said it like that, it sounded pretty dodgy. “The money’s good,” I argued. “And I don’t fight very often, really.”

“But you got that bruise.”

I rubbed my cheek. “It’s going away.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be violent. You never have been. And now you’re around drunks and… girls all the time. The wrong type of girls.” She paused. “I mean… some girls just don’t have good role models, that’s all.”

As humiliating as the situation was, it was kind of amusing to see my mother trying to be a loyal feminist while worrying about her son being corrupted by trampy bar girls. “What do you mean?” I said innocently. “I need a new girlfriend.”

She looked alarmed, probably picturing me knocking up some girl after I licked tequila salt off her tramp stamp. “Dear God, Jason, please be careful. Don’t throw away your future.”

Ah, this was the heart of it. My future.

My mother had always been the best kind of mom, but she pretty much figured I should be president, an Olympic athlete, and the one to cure cancer all rolled into one. There are worse things than having a mother who puts you on a pedestal—Dean, who grew up in foster homes, could tell you that—but I was starting to realize that I wasn’t going to live up to exactly what she thought I was. I hadn’t gone to college. The Marines had made her proud, but now I wasn’t a