"Remember to come straight home after school," she reminds me as I grab the car keys from the wall hook. "And don't leave the campus until school gets out, even for lunch. I'll be checking your phone to make sure you don't. And I'm going to call the principal to let him know you're not allowed off campus."
I grind my teeth until my jaw aches.
"You did this to yourself." She stops stirring the pot to yank on my sleeves and unroll them. "I don't even want to think about how you got ahold of clothes like that. I bet it was from one of those friends of yours."
Lately, she has been putting the blame on my friends whenever I do something wrong, like I've recently fallen in with the wrong crowd. But I've been friends with the same people since elementary school, and she knows this.
"It wasn't my friends." I grab a granola bar and a bottle of juice to take with me so I don't have to stick around and eat breakfast with her. "I bought those clothes myself."
"That makes it worse." She crosses her arms and stares me down. "That means you made bad choices on your own. You can't blame that on anyone else."
"I don't," I mutter quietly enough that she can't hear me.
"What did you say?" she asks as she reaches into the pocket of her apron.
"I said I'm going to be late for school if I don't get going."
"Fine." She withdraws her hand from her pocket, her fingers enclosed around my phone. "I'm only giving this to you so we can keep an eye on you. If it weren't for the tracking app, I wouldn't let you have it."
"Thanks." I snatch the phone from her and make my escape for the door.
"Remember who you are, Luna!" she shouts.
She has said the same thing to me every day for the last five years. I want to tell her that I don't know who I am, but that I'm definitely not the daughter she wants. Like always, though, I remain silent and nod before I close the front door.
Once I climb into the car, I text Wynter, one of my best friends on the planet since second grade. We were the first two members of our group of five friends. It all started with us, a bottle of nail polish, and Wynter coaxing me into rebelling for the day, although it didn't take that much effort to convince me.
"We can use fingernail polish remover before you go home," she said as she painted my nails a bright pink shade.
I was awestruck by the color. It was the first time I'd ever felt pretty in my life.
"This is fun. And it looks so pretty. Like princess-worthy pretty."
"It's totally princess-worthy," she said with a huge grin on her face.
I smiled, but then my happiness faltered. "I just wish my clothes matched."
"One day, they will," she promised.
And she made good on that promise the day I turned seventeen, and she bought me a new wardrobe, which now is nothing but ashes.
Me: Can u bring me some clothes please?
Wynter: OMG! She gave u your phone back!
Me: Yep. But only so she could keep track of me.
Wynter: She's so crazy. And FYI, I was already planning on bringing u some clothes.
Me: Ur the best. I feel so bad that u gave me all those nice clothes and now they're gone. It's such a waste.
Wynter: It's not your fault your parents are cray-cray.
Me: I know, but I wish they weren't. Their punishments aren't even in the realm of normalcy.
Wynter: Ur telling me. Remember that one time they made you write I Will Not Color On My Walls a thousand times?
Me: That one was pretty bad … I hated that u were there and had to see me do it.
Wynter: I felt so bad for you. And it never made any sense to me. I mean, they made you write it on the wall and then paint over it. I was like, seriously, wth? Why would u have her write on the wall about not writing on the wall?
Me: I never understood it, either. But I still don't think it's as bad as burning an entire wardrobe. And now she's got that stupid tracking app on my phone.
Wynter: Ari's on that. Give him a few days, and I'm sure he'll find some kind of way to get around it.
I smile for the first time in three days.
Ari has been one of my closest friends since sixth grade after his family moved to Ridgefield. Since his family didn't grow up here, a lot of people treated him like an outsider. My friends and I, being outsiders ourselves, took him under our wing and showed him the inner workings of our middle school.
I actually have four people I consider my best friends. Together, we make up a group of five very different people who somehow work together. Ari is our computer genius who's really into school and getting good grades. Whenever we have a computer crisis, he's there to hack into whatever we need. He once even changed Wynter's math grade from a D to a C so she'd pass Algebra.