Love Me Love Me (English)

1

June

"June, quit biting your nails! Your classmates will think you're nervous."

Grasping the steering wheel a little too tightly between her fingers, Mom narrowed her eyes and glared at me.

"Spoiler alert, Mom..." I took a deep breath. "I am nervous."

I surrendered into the passenger seat, but my mom showed no signs of letting up. She hounded me with even more questions, as if the first day of school wasn't already stressful enough. "Are you sure you slept well last night, honey? You could stand to put on a bit of concealer to hide the bags under your eyes."

Concealer? Yeah, right. Wearing makeup to school would trigger the blowout of the century.

"Mom, I can't win with you. I'm..." I stopped myself. Curse words were strictly forbidden in the White-Lebowsky house. "...ugh, forget it."

I let out a deep sigh and looked out the window at the Laguna Beach neighborhoods that we passed by. They all looked the same to me: neat, orderly rows of small, freshly plastered houses covered by red, Spanish-style roofs with perfectly arranged shingles and meticulously manicured gardens.

My new life seemed perfect on the outside, but realistically, it was anything but. It was like a book with a cheerful-looking cover hiding a tragic story in his pages.

Private school, a two-story house, and sunny 77℉ weather year-round. Those were the exact words my mom used when she announced that she was subjecting me to another move. We lived in Seattle the year before, where it was cold and rainy for most of the year.

She did everything she could to make it sound convincing, especially after living in such a gloomy city for more than five months. I hadn't lived there long enough to get used to the weather and buy the right clothes when she told me it was time to go. She knew I wouldn't have agreed to move states twice in one year, so she phrased this move as the best opportunity that she'd ever been offered.

"Ask someone if you don't know which classroom to go to. Don't be shy around your new classmates! I know you're not shy."

Would it kill her to not bombard me with unsolicited advice? Wasn't changing schools for the millionth time depressing enough?

I glanced at her, and I let myself be fooled for a few seconds by her low messy bun that gave her the typical rebellious artist vibe.

My parents divorced three years earlier. Somehow it had never occurred to me to ask myself if I would've been better off staying with my dad in Virginia. At least he wouldn't have turned my entire adolescence upside down by uprooting me from one part of the country to the other. Mom and I had moved to four different states, and I'd changed schools three times already. From here...who knows? Type-A career artist April Lebowsky was on a mission to travel all over creation to exhibit her lame artwork. The only people who even liked her stuff were old people, even though she'd never admit it. I'd never seen anyone younger than seventy at any of her exhibitions. Could that really be a coincidence?

"Fix your collar honey. And why are you sitting like a man? You'll wrinkle your skirt," she scolded.

"And since when do men and women sit differently?" Patience wasn't exactly my mom's strong suit, and I took advantage of every opportunity I could to make her lose it.

"June don't start with me. You know what I mean."

I surreptitiously looked over my ungroomed legs which only made me crankier.

"No, Mom, I don't. And you know what else I don't get? Why you didn't sign me up for public school like you always do. I can't stand this awful uniform." I let out a heavy sigh, blowing a lock of hair away from my nose.