“Hey, I’m trying!”
“I know, Mom,” Kit said. “I know this is hard for you. I appreciate everything you’ve done to help me get here. I don’t want you to think I don’t.”
He sounded so grown up, she thought. And hated what he’d gone through to sound this way.
“Besides, you can’t point fingers at me,” Kit pointed out. “It’s not like you’re Ms. Congeniality either. You’re more antisocial than I am.”
“I am not,” she lied.
“I will text Aunt Rosita, and she will back me up,” Kit scoffed.
“Aunt Rosita is proof that I’m social! She’s been my best friend since high school!”
“Yes, but she’s all the way in California, and you haven’t been back there in ages,” he countered. “Besides, calling her once a month or whatever hardly counts.”
Maggie scowled, even though he couldn’t see it. “I have other friends.”
“Your only other friend is someone you’ve never met, that you DM on Twitter, who for all you know is an octogenarian war criminal in hiding who happens to like Robotech as much as you do.”
“And is a Sagittarius,” Maggie tacked on. “Her Twitter name is Macross Sagittarius.”
“Ah, yes. Her zodiac sign helps,” Kit said sarcastically. “Mom, we’re a lot of things, but social we’re not.”
But he could be. It would be healthier if he was, ultimately—not like “big man on campus” or a party animal, but just having a support network.
She wanted to push the issue. She hated the idea of him isolated, feeling lost on that huge campus. Her brain conjured up images of him wandering like a stereotypical freshman in an eighties comedy or something, but with more disastrous effects . . . the guy who was the butt of jokes, the isolated, shy “loser.” He might not have had a lot of friends in high school, but the ones he had loved him and thought he was hysterical—which, when given the opportunity to warm up, he really was. He’d even dated, although she didn’t know how far that went, nor did she want to （beyond a painful talk about sex that had proved embarrassing and largely unnecessary, and her putting a box of condoms in his bathroom “just in case”）。 He was a slow starter, but very charismatic once you got past the Wall of Shy.
But that wasn’t something she could just tell him. And she also knew she was hearing her ex-husband’s words in her head.
You spoil him.
He needs to learn how to deal with things on his own.
He needs to toughen up, goddamn it.
If he’s going to cry like a baby because somebody tells him to stop fucking up, then we’re failing him.
You think I’m the only person that’s going to be hard on him?
She closed her eyes. Not now. She wasn’t going to walk down that toxic old memory path now.
“How did you do this week?” Kit asked. “What did you do?”
“Oh, you know. The usual,” Maggie said, with a wave of her hand. “Lots of work. I went grocery shopping. Texted Mac. Called you.”
He let out an impatient breath. “Tell me you’re not going to go all Howard Hughes in that house.”
“I’ll stop short of peeing in jars,” she assured him, with a sarcastic edge of her own. “Besides, again—this is not different than before you went to school. I wasn’t waiting for you to go off to college to suddenly party my ass off, kiddo.”
“I just don’t want you to go full hermit.”
“Kit, what do I keep telling you?” she said, gently but firmly. “I’m the parent. You’re the child. Relax.”
He waited a beat. “Okay. I’m playing the no-hypocrisy card.”
“Wait, what?”
“You want me to get friends, but you won’t get friends?” He paused a beat. “That’s not exactly fair, is it?”
“Mac’s my friend,” she protested.
“Harrison’s my friend,” Kit countered. “Maybe I won’t make any IRL friends. Maybe I’ll only leave my room for classes and eating, and not talk to anybody I don’t have to. I mean, it works for you, doesn’t it?”
She tried desperately to see a loophole in his argument, but ever since Trev left, she’d largely abandoned “do as I say, not as I do” edicts because she hated how unfair they were. God knows, she’d gotten enough of them from Nana Birdie and Papa Chris growing up, and Trev had a stance that when you were an adult, you could do what you wanted—but as a child, you did what you were told. It was how he’d been raised and a big part of why he’d left his large and overbearing family behind in California. Trev’s family had been well meaning but intrusive. His parents had wanted him to go to college rather than working the manual-labor jobs he’d chosen, first in construction, then in logging. His grandparents had wanted him to take over their hardware store, but he hadn’t wanted that either. Also, as much as they’d been friends with Maggie’s grandparents, they hadn’t been thrilled when he’d started seeing Maggie. She often wondered if marrying her, as well as moving out of state, was a “fuck you” to them, since both had managed to get Trev cut off from his family completely. Kit had never even gotten to know his paternal grandparents. It was funny, then, that Trev had gotten just as autocratic when he’d become a parent.
Long story short, she wanted to teach Kit about parity, and while it wasn’t always feasible, she tried desperately not to simply impose her will on him.
On the plus side, it made their bond closer. He knew that when she told him to do something, it was because she had a damned good reason for it, not because she was being tyrannical or impulsive.
On the minus, it did mean he’d developed arguing skills a trial lawyer would envy and thought that everything was open to debate. She’d made a tactical error on that one, one that Trev would probably rub her nose in like a puppy with shit if he were still in the state and they were still communicating.
“What if I did something social?” she said. He laughed again. “Okay, now that’s getting insulting.”
“First of all, What’s social in Fool’s Falls?” he asked. “And secondly, What’s social in the Falls that you’re actually interested in going to?”
“As it happens, I bumped into Deb at Tasty Great when I went food shopping, and she invited me to her book club tomorrow. I thought I’d drop by.”
“You’re going . . . to a book club? By choice? With Ms. Deb?” The incredulity was palpable. “No way.”
“Yes way,” she said, even as her stomach fell a little at the thought that she would have to do the thing. “So, what about you? What are you going to do?”
His following pause was long, and she realized he was nervous.
“How about you go to a club meeting too?” she said. “Something you’re interested in. They’ve got to have something. Game design. Asian heritage . . .”
“Mom, I’m a quarter Asian,” he countered quickly. “I don’t even really look Asian. I seriously don’t think going to a club where they think I’m a fetishist is going to help.”