You Found Me

I reached over to pull out another fistful of popcorn, my eyes not leaving the screen, where Kat was giving her speech about how much she hates Patrick in 10 Things I Hate About You.

“Ugh,” Jenny sniffled, reaching up and wiping under her eye, “I hate when she cries like that. It tears me apart every time.”

“There, there,” I soothed, patting her back softly. “It’s okay. It’s just a movie.”

“But it’s so real!” she cried, amping up the dramatics.

I chuckled and shook my head. “Alright, that’s enough. I need more soda. You want any?”

“Sure,” she replied. “Just get me whatever you’re getting.”

“Will do,” I responded easily before ducking out of my room, shutting the door solidly behind me.

I walked through the living room, where my dad was watching an old episode of The Twilight Zone. “Hey,” I threw out as I walked by.

“Hi, sweetie,” he responded, his tone a bit distant. “How’re you feeling?”

Unlike my sister, my dad knew that Jared had dumped me in the worst way possible. At first, he was ready to roll up his shirt sleeves and beat the shit out of him, but I talked him down from the edge and told him that I didn’t care. Obviously, since he was my dad, and he raised me, he knew I was lying. At least he knew that ripping Jared to shreds wouldn’t solve the problem.

“Fine,” I shrugged. “I’m moving on.” Lie. But whatever.

Dad let out a sigh that was so soft, I almost missed it. “Okay. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”

I nodded and disappeared into the hallway. Just before I entered the kitchen, my eyes wandered over to the picture of my mother hanging on the wall.

She looked just like me, with her dirty blonde hair, her dark brown eyes, small and pointed nose, medium-sized lips, and teeth that were just a smidge too big for her mouth with a small gap in the front. For some reason, maybe the fact that I had some of my dad’s genes in me, too, I looked nowhere near as beautiful as her.

Looking like her always made me a little nervous when I thought about it at length, as I sometimes did right before I fell asleep at night. If my face translated all her genes to make me look like her, did that mean that maybe, possibly, I could get breast cancer like she did? That I’d die when my kids were only entering elementary school, leaving them completely motherless, questioning their ability to be effective parents in their futures?

Part of me felt disgusting, thinking about those kinds of things. After all, my father had been the best parent ever. He always made sure that Ariana and I had everything we needed and more, that we were happy. He came to all of our school performances (Ariana had been in chorus and show choir, I’d been in all the school plays, usually as supporting roles), parent-teacher conferences, sports games (that was mostly Ariana, with her field hockey and soccer obsessions). If Mom’s illness hadn’t been the talk of the town, no one would have noticed, probably, that we only had one parent, since he was always there.

So why was it that, despite how perfect my father was, that I felt like I didn’t have enough knowledge to know how to be a parent? Maybe it was because I’d never had a mother or a mother figure at all, since Dad never really recovered from the pain he felt from Mom’s passing. Though he’d been on a date here and there through the years, he never got serious about anyone, since no one compared to the high standards Mom had set in his mind.

Shaking my head to get rid of the depressing thoughts, I entered the kitchen and went straight to the fridge, grabbing a couple cans of Diet Coke to bring upstairs with me.

“Enjoy your show,” I granted to Dad before I ran back up the stairs, back to the chick flick where everything worked out perfectly in the end.

“Thanks, honey,” he responded, only flicking his green-gray eyes over at me for a second before they returned to the screen.

In the room, Jenny had paused the movie and had her nosed buried in her phone, her thumbs moving so quickly across the tiny keyboard that they looked like little blurs.

“Who’re you texting?” I questioned nonchalantly as I settled down on the bed, handing her one of the cans of soda.

“Thanks,” she murmured as her face filled with a violent blush. “And you don’t know him.”

“Him?” I teased, my voice thick with implications. “Alright, spill. Who is he, what does he look like, and would be make me drool with how attractive he is?”

She let out a dreamy breath before answering. “Alright, his name is Darren, he has dark brown hair and light blue-green eyes, and your mouth would turn into an actual waterfall of drool if you saw him.”

“Oooo,” I cooed with a small smile. “Do you have a picture?”

“Uh, not on my phone, but we could pull up his Facebook on your computer, if you want.”

"Let’s do it!” I agreed, reaching over the side of the bed to pull my laptop up to rest in front of me.

There was a silence as I logged into Jenny’s Facebook, typing in her e-mail and password from memory.

“Are you sure this is okay with you?” Janny asked suddenly, startling me, though I made a conscious effort to keep from jumping with shock. “Like, talking about boys when you’re still hurting from Jared?”

“I’m not hurting from Jared,” I replied monotonously. “I’m fine. And this is what best friends do: gossip about boys.”

Jenny opened her mouth, probably to protest, but I interrupted her, finding Darren’s profile with perfect timing.

“Oooo…” I cooed, clicking on his profile picture to make it bigger. “You’re right. He is beautiful.”

“I told you!” she squealed, getting sidetracked.

“How did you meet him?”

“It’s the classic cliché,” she explained. “I sat down in summer school, prepared for the worst summer of my life, and he happened to sit right next to me. And then, he smiled at me and asked me if I had an extra pencil, since he’d forgotten to bring one. And he’s forgotten to bring one every day since.”

“Sounds like a very forgetful person,” I teased.

“Oh, please,” Jenny snickered, rolling her dark blue eyes and ignoring my second statement. “I think he’s trying to come up with an excuse to talk to me, and he can’t come up with anything else.”

“So he’s dumb?”

Jenny burst out laughing and slapped my shoulder. “Leigh!” she whined through her chuckles. “He’s not dumb! He’s just…not creative?”

“However you want to put it,” I trailed off, taking a gulp from the can of Diet Coke. “But very few people are both intelligent and pretty.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “Right. Just you.”

I snorted with laughter. “Too bad I’m not either.”

“You’re just saying that because you just got dumped,” she stated plainly, reaching over to take my computer from me. “Trust me, you’ll gain back your confidence once you get over him.”

I opened my mouth, getting ready to argue that I was over Jared, but she brought up a video on YouTube to change the subject.

“Behold,” she introduced, plopping the computer back on my lap, “the honey badger.”

“This is the honey badger. Watch it run in slow motion. It’s pretty badass. Look, it runs all over the place.”

Oh, God. Sometimes, Jenny knew exactly what I needed.