Turning Seventeen

As I slid the back door open and made my way through the living room, I noticed how my mother had already begun adding her little trademarks all over the beach house. Sticky notes were stuck in the most random of places as if she needed to get whatever thought onto paper immediately, and the hardwood floor was painfully clean although we had been dragging sand in for the past two weeks. These two signs just proved how organized she had to be, the ways she kept her life the same — no matter where she went she always had sticky notes and cleaning, the two constants in her life.

“Honey is that you?” My mother called from the kitchen.
“Yes,” I said back and trudged my way into the kitchen. She smiled up at me over her newspaper, her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose as always, and a steaming cup of coffee at her side on the table.

“How was your morning,” she asked, but I could tell from the look in her eye, that she was just being polite. There was no way she was happy about my vanishing at five o'clock this morning to return almost seven hours later.

“Good,” I said, pulling out one of the wooden chairs and falling into it, exhausted.
“Mind telling me where you were?” And there it was, not the coffee-drinking-newspaper-reading-smiling mom from two seconds ago, but the organized-sticky-note-clean-freak mother that was evident throughout the rest of the house.

I sighed and closed my eyes for a minute, “Didn't you get my note?”

“Yes, but very vague don't you think?” She picked it up and read, “Going out for a run, be back later. I didn't expect for you to go out for more than a five hour run.”

“I went for a run and then saw Landon and we...” What's the word? Staying on the beach was, again, vague and talked on the beach wasn't quite it either. “And then we just swam and tanned for a bit,” which was partially true.

“Well, you could have checked in after a while just so I knew you were okay.”

I rolled my eyes, “What did you think would happen? I'd get attacked by sharks?”

My mother put down the newspaper and dropped her glasses on the table with a smack. Not a good sign. It meant a lecture was on the way. “I don't like your attitude, Kylie, and you could have drowned without anyone knowing.”

“I was with Landon, Mom.”

“A boy you barely know! Honestly, I thought you were much smarter than this, Kylie.”

I stood up quickly and pushed in my chair, not caring if it hit the table with a force that made rings in my mother's coffee. “Well I'm not as dumb as you think I am either.” And with that I walked away.