Author's Note: I'm back. Where was I? Well, I've developed PPD, or postpartum depression, which really stinks. I went to a special PPD support group and I've been trying to recover, but I'm told that it may take a year for me to feel better. I just wanted to say that working on my comic story has been a nice break from RL, and that I greatly value the notes from kind readers like Cloudshadow22, Aubrette, Littlegirlblue, and others who reviewed or PM'ed me recently. You all encouraged me to keep writing.
The events in this Chapter occur in the evening on Thursday, January 29, 2006. Jake's birthday party will be on Saturday, January 31. (I made that date up, but I think it fits with the cannon.)
Chapter Twelve
"Quil's Mom"
Utter humiliation. Bella drove home as fast as her rusty heap of a truck would go, her face burning red with embarrassment and her backside burning with road rash. If only she could go back in time and prevent the horrible, horrible scene that had ensued when Quil's mother had come home from work and caught the lot of them in the living room in various states of un- and cross-dress. She wiped the back of her hand across her nose and blinked rapidly against hot tears.
Quil's mother thought she was a whore. There was no prettier way to say it. And it was all thanks to that sweet little twerp, Seth Clearwater, and the pack of lies everyone had told to prevent an adult from discovering the motorcycles under the tarp in her truck bed. Well, the bikes were no longer weighing her down, she thought, as she jounced over a pothole and the backend skittered with freedom.
Mrs. Ateara—Joy, she wanted Bella to call her!—had looked them over for several long, painful minutes before she spoke. The first thing she wanted to know was whether Bella was all right, considering the humongous bandage on the back of her thigh. Bella knew she was a terrible liar, so she had looked to Jake.
"We were hiking," he said smoothly. "Bella slipped and skinned her leg on a hillside. Lots of gravel."
Mrs. Ateara had pursed her lips, but Jacob maintained eye contact with a perfectly bland expression on his face.
"I skinned my elbow, too," he added, showing her a scratch he'd probably sustained helping Bella on the road.
"Okay," said Mrs. Ateara. "So, what's in the truck? Under the tarp."
"Oh, you do NOT want to look under there, Mom!" Quil said, and when she seemed even more curious, he fabricated an atrocious tale about science class and composting, eventually persuading his mother that the tarp concealed, of all things, a load of manure. He said Bella had obtained it for him from a dairy farm south of Forks.
"Before you went hiking," Mrs. Ateara said flatly, directing her words to Bella. "Let me get this straight. You got out of school this afternoon and said to yourself, 'I think I'll fill my truck with cow poop for my friend Quil, in the rainstorm, and then I'll drive it out to La Push and leave it sitting in my truck for a couple hours while I hike on slippery hills with my buddies.'" She raised a dark eyebrow at Bella and waited for her reply, while behind his mother's back Quil gave Bella a thumbs-up sign and a toothy grin.
"Yep," said Bella. "That's what I did." Then she hid her face in Jacob's knees again.
"Uh huh," said Mrs. Ateara.
Bella could hear the ticking of a clock somewhere in the kitchen during the silence that followed.
"That sounds like a load of bullshit to me."
Everyone blanched at Quil's mother's words until she guffawed at her own joke. The boys joined in with nervous chuckles, and it seemed like they were all going to get off the hook until Mrs. Ateara dropped the bomb of her final question: "And where, pray tell, are all of your pants?"
Seth cracked first, leading to the biggest whopper of the afternoon. "We were playing a g-g-g-game," he stammered.
"A game?"
"It's called...Musical Pants!"
"Ah," Mrs. Ateara had said. "I see."
No, Bella had wanted to say, you do NOT see. This is not what it looks like! But Quil's mother handled everything with strict efficiency then, hustling the boys off to Quil's room to get dressed and then sending them outside with instructions to unload the manure at the old garden patch on Grandpa Ateara's allotment, which was on the other side of town and would take "at least half a freakin' hour," according to Quil as the boys scurried out. Then she had turned to Bella and said, "I hope you're playing safe Musical Pants, young lady!"
Bella groaned aloud in her truck as she sped homeward, wishing she could erase the memory of that excruciating half hour before the boys had returned. Her thigh burned and throbbed every time she depressed the clutch. It was a toss up as to which was more painful, her leg or her recollection of tea time with Quil's mom.
"Call me Joy," the older woman had said, handing Bella a pair of sweatpants that she said were from her old volleyball team.
Bella tugged them on with hardly a glance.
"Now sit and pay attention."
Directing Bella into a chair at the kitchen table, Mrs. Ateara handed her a cup of orange-and-spice tea that would have been delicious under other circumstances, but which scalded her throat as she gulped it too fast in her embarrassment.
Thence ensued an intensely awkward lecture on sexually communicated diseases and their effects on the genitalia. It was impossible for Bella to protest her innocence because she couldn't get a word in edgewise. Mrs. Ateara fired up her computer and, talking all the while about the painful symptoms of various ailments, downloaded a bunch of photos that were far more educational than even an egghead like Bella had ever wanted to see.
"I had this once," Joy said, pointing to a particularly gnarly example. "So itchy!"
Then she had bemoaned the difficulties of being a teenage girl with a wild reputation and the unfair double standard applied to boys and girls for promiscuous behavior—which reminded her that technically, Bella was breaking the law by fooling around with Quil and Jacob, both promising young men from good families who did not need to get mixed up in a paternity suit, and really, didn't Bella think Seth was a little young for her? Why, he had barely started sliming his sheets with wet dreams. She knew this because Sue Clearwater had asked her for laundry tips, guessing correctly that Quil created a good deal of such laundry.
Bella stared at her, blushing even harder for Quil's sake.
"It's only a problem on dark fabric," Joy said. "Don't look so worried!"
Bella choked on her tea trying to speak, but Mrs. Ateara went inexorably on, zooming in on the most gruesome photos, shaking her head at the possible consequences of Bella's behavior. She said she really ought to call Bella's father, except that she herself knew what it was like to be a girl with a broken heart—"Oh yes, honey, the whole reservation knows how that Cullen kid dropped you like a turd"—trying to dull her pain with sex.
"Of course, this was all before I started seeing Quil's father," Joy said, "but there was a time when a certain bastard by the name of Joshua Uley made me a lot of promises he didn't intend to keep. And I was not the only one he did wrong, believe me. But I took it pretty hard. Got kind of crazy for a while."
Joy recounted an eye-popping number of escapades that made Bella blush and avert her eyes. She studied the orange tiles behind the stove, the way the light reflected off the porcelain sink, anything to keep her mind of the lurid details. She counted the hinges on the dark brown cupboards—the mental equivalent of sticking her fingers in her ears and singing la la la la la—and had begun to count the squares on the tired, beige linoleum when she heard something that riveted her attention right back to where she least wanted it.
"...not tell him for his sake, you know? I think hearing about your behavior would just hurt his feelings. And I always liked him, you know, more than the others, because he actually wanted to date me, I think, not just screw around in the back of a car."
"My father?"
"Oh, yes. Is he still single? Lord, he really kept my mind off of Josh. He could do this one thing with his—"
Bella yelped and scooted so suddenly away from the table that she spilled her tea all over her flannel shirt and the floor.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Quil's mom said. "Of course you don't want to hear about that. But at least it shows you still have some sense of shame. Maybe you'll turn out okay."
She smiled brightly at Bella and mopped up the spill with a dishrag.
Quil returned then, saying that he had dropped off Seth and Jake at their houses. As Bella hastily thanked Mrs. Ateara for the tea and scrambled out the door, Quil whispered that he truly had dumped the load in the truck bed at his grandfather's lot.
"The bikes are in his shed," he breathed in her ear. He helped her climb into the cab, letting his hands linger a little too solicitously on her backside. "Nice pants," he smirked.
"Quit touching my butt," she growled, practically slamming the door on his hand. "And please," she added, rolling down the window, "tell your mom that we're not dating."
Quil blinked. It had started to sprinkle again, and little raindrops were gathering on his eyelashes. "Well, no," he said, frowning. "Not yet."
"Tell her I'm not dating any of you!"
He leaned one arm against her door and smiled up at her. "It's tough to decide, isn't it?" "Argh! Quil, she thinks I'm a whore!"
"What?"
"She thought—when she saw us all—she thought we were—you know—messing around!"
"Oh. Hey, I scored. She is so not discreet, and now I'll have a reputation! Whoo!"
Bella flopped forward, leaning her head on the steering wheel, and groaned. "You did not score, dammit. And I'm going to have a bad reputation. It's called a double standard, moron. You look like a stud, and I look like a slut."
"So..."
"Can you fix this? Please?" Bella wiped a hand across her eyes. "People already think I'm crazy. I can't be a crazy slut, too."
"Well, okay. Don't cry."
"She lectured me with horrible pictures!"
"Oh." Quil looked thoughtful, an expression Bella had never seen on him before. He pursed his lips together like his mother did, and his heavy, black brows sank low over his dark eyes. "Pictures?" he asked.
"Yes," sniffed Bella. "From the internet. Pictures of—"
"Crotch rot. Yeah, I've gotten that lecture, too. Many, many times. Did she show you the one of the guy with—"
"Please! Just tell her I'm not a ho-bag!"
As she drove away, she thought that repeated subjecture to Mrs. Ateara's "Scared Celibate" lecture, complete with visual aids, would make almost anybody a little weird. Maybe she could cut Quil some psychological slack.
When she got home, she slithered gracelessly to the ground and pushed the truck's door shut with her hands, not her aching hip. Then she winced her way up the steps of the front porch, wondering how she could avoid Charlie's noticing the awkwardness of her gait.
She needn't have worried. Charlie was on the phone when she came in, talking in that curt, commanding tone he reserved for police business, and he barely looked up. There was a mess of manilla file folders spread across the kitchen table, and the fluttery, flimsy pink papers of carbon copy incident reports were scattered here and there.
Rummaging through the refrigerator, Bella came up with an apple and a carton of yogurt, which she chugged straight from the container: no time for a proper dinner today; she needed to pop another ibuprofen and lie down. As she was lurching toward the stairs, however, Charlie hung up the phone and called to her.
"There's been a report of a missing hiker," he said. He ran his hands through his hair and gestured to the chair beside him. Bella perched, very carefully and reluctantly, on the edge of it.
"It's the second hiker this month. She went out alone in the park and hasn't come back. Now I don't want to alarm you, but you said sometimes you and Jake go hiking, and..."
Hiking? This must have been a cover story for the motorcycles, but Bella could hardly remember all the lies she told Charlie before their big heart-to-heart talk on Monday. She knew what Alice would have said: Part of being a Cullen is being meticulously responsible. Perhaps, thought Bella, she should try harder to remember the lies. Or stop telling them. She felt a twinge of guilt, thinking of her recent promise.
"...and I know I said I'd talk to you more about my work, the things that worry me..."
Ack! Twist the knife a little deeper, Dad. Now she really felt guilty. Should she come clean?
"...thinking that maybe there's some foul play here. Two people missing..."
Of course if she told him about the motorcycles, she'd relieve her conscience but get grounded for a year. She'd miss her friendship with Jacob. She'd even miss Seth and Quil.
"...lot of responsibility to the people in this town..."
Nope. She would not tell him. And in true Bella-fashion, once she had made a decision, she felt relieved of the burden of considering possibilities and playing out the endless scenarios and ramifications of each choice. This was an easy one. Keep mouth shut; keep friends; keep self sane. Check.
"...Sheriff coming down from Port Angeles tomorrow morning..."
Yep, good choice. Her father was sharing his thoughts, so to her this felt like she, too, was keeping up her side of the deal. Her thoughts were now free to attend to other matters: Holy crow, my butt hurts.
"...and one of the deputies is spooked about the woods now. Don't know how I'm going to work with that. Says he saw someone, but there's no tracks. All the same, we've got to ..."
She watched her father's mouth moving, two pink lips flapping beneath the woolly-bear caterpillar bristle of his mustache and she noted that one of his teeth seemed to have a bit of coffee stain on it. He should get that cleaned at the dentist. Have I been to the dentist lately? Hmm.
"...even listening to me? Bella?"
Uh oh.
Charlie bore a crease between his brows and his eyes were snapping.
"Yes?" she squeaked.
Leaning forward, her father put a hand under her chin to make her look at him. "Stay out of the woods."
She met his eyes, saw the worry there. "Okay."
As she climbed the stairs to her room, she tried her best to walk without showing pain. When he called, "Bella?" she thought she was busted, but then Charlie asked her the most unexpected question: "Are you dating Quil? Jake's friend?"
"Quil?" She turned around, perplexed. "No, I—"
"Then why are you wearing his pants?"
To Bella's blank stare, he added, "It says 'Ateara' right across your..." He waved a hand at the unmentionable area of his daughter's form as he searched for a father-friendly word. "...rear bumper."
Bella spun around like a puppy, but couldn't quite see what her father was talking about. Then she remembered what Mrs. Ateara had said about her volleyball team. No wonder Quil had been so smug, helping her into the truck.
"Oh," she sighed. "These's are Quil's mom's pants. Mine got, uh, muddy, and she let me borrow these."
"His mom," Charlie said, looking at her from beneath his eyebrows. "Honestly? Because if you've got a new boyfriend, I'd think that would come under the heading of things-fathers-ought-to-know about their daughters-who-promised-to-share-stuff."
"Yes, honestly," said Bella, and she smiled. It really felt good, she thought, after her morally ambiguous inner dialogue about the motorcycles, to be honest about this, at least. "I can't even imagine...Quil is... he's..." an idiot, a pervert, a big-mouthed, desperate dweeb "...my friend. Like Jacob. And Seth. I'm friends with Seth now, too."
Charlie mirrored her smile, and she felt like sharing more.
"They helped me change my pants!"
Charlie's smile dropped.
Ooh, that came out wrong. "I mean, they helped me back to Quil's house when I slipped on a rocky hillside, and then Quil's mom lent me these pants. And I hurt my leg a little." There, that was kind of honest. Partly. Her leg was throbbing and she thought she could no longer avoid limping, so she waited for her honesty to pay off in the form of fatherly sympathy.
Charlie, however, zeroed in on the rocky hillside bit. "So you were hiking? God dammit, Bella, I just told you to stay out of the woods!"
"I know! I'm sorry!"
Charlie passed a hand over his face. "What happened to your leg?"
"Scratched it. Well, scraped it. A lot."
"You need to scrub it?"
"No! Please, no more scrubbing!" She paled. "Quil already—I mean, Quil's mom already scrubbed it clean." She started backwards up the stairs. "It's painfully clean, believe me." Just a few more steps. "I'll just go lie down now, if that's okay."
She backed farther up the stairs, gripping the railing to spare her leg. Charlie watched her go, an oddly speculative expression on his face. Just as she was about to slip into her room, he called her back to the top of the stairs.
"Yes?" She looked down into the kitchen, where he sat in the glow of the lamp with his head cocked to one side. His mustache twitched from side to side as he contemplated his words.
"So," he said at last. "Quil's mom. Joy." He stirred one finger in his cup of cooling coffee. "How's she doing?"
Bella stared at him. She felt her face turning pink even as she watched her father's do the same, but he held her gaze. Then she scooted into her room and slammed the door.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Not happening!
Bella cast around for something to stem her panic, and when she spotted her guitar, she snatched it up and perched on the edge of her desk chair.
Strum, strum!
G major, D major.
Strum, strum!
Playing felt good, but the sounds didn't fit her mood. Less frantic now, she rustled through Sarah Black's songbook and found the chord charts. She tested the variants labeled Gm and Dm.
Ah. THESE fit her mood. Minor chords were fantastic. They offered a whole new world of angsty expression! She explored further, working her fingers to form E minor, C major, and A minor. Keeping the book open so she could study the new chord charts, she practiced mixing up the minors with the two major chords she already knew, G and D.
Channeling her dread into the music, she found a chord combination that sounded like a cross between the Jaws movie music and the theme from Peter Gunn, an old cop show that Charlie made her watch sometimes. The sound was ominous, threatening. Almost before she realized it, she discovered some lyrics: "Quil's mom..." she sang. "Quil's mom..."
This song wasn't beautiful. She didn't try her faulty soprano. Instead, she let a deep, throaty alto come out, and she found she could sing louder and stronger this way. It felt kind of ...powerful. And whoa, that was a new sensation for her.
"Quil's Mooooooommmm!"
Hers was the voice of doom.
More words leapt in her brain, then whole lines and couplets. She set down the instrument and started scratching some lines in the same notebook where she had written her "Psycho Heartless High School Bitch" song about Lauren Mallory.
While she was writing, she heard her father talking on the phone downstairs. A horrible suspicion made her open her bedroom door and listen. She could only catch fragments of his voice, but it was enough: "...thanks...Bella...pants... been a while... party on Saturday at Billy's house?"
Crap. Crap, crap, crapitty crap—aw, shit!
She had done her best to avoid romantic movies, songs, and people. Now she was going to have to live in the same house as a person who had a date. The thought felt just as disgusting as if she had learned her father operated a home taxidermy business on the kitchen table.
Quil's mom was pretty. Like Quil, she carried a few extra pounds, but those pounds were in all the right places, translating into a plump chest and curvy hips. She had long shiny hair, which was kind of sexy for a middle-aged woman, and bright red finger nails. She had smiled and laughed a lot, even while she lectured Bella with hideous pictures of scabby crotches. Her father would notice those things, would like them. Not the scabby crotch pictures, but the smiles, the pretty fingernails, her nice figure. She caught herself fluttering her hands in the air like a spastic bumble bee. Bella shut the door and returned to her notebook.
After an hour, she felt that she had a pretty good song. It was not about Edward, like her father had hoped. It was not about recovering from her broken heart. This song was a weapon for warding off more pain. She felt a little rabid, like a cavewoman fighting saber-toothed tigers with a spear. A six-stringed spear that vibrated tight against her gut, charged with the strength of her own fully-found voice.
Strum! Strum! Strum!
The minor chords vibrated with their dark, new thrill, and she didn't care if her father heard her.
(Em) Quil's mom... gave me some (C) pants
(Em) Quil's mom...said there is a (C) chance
you'll get an (Em) S.T. (G) I.
if (Em) you even (C) try
to live the (Em) way I lived in (G) high
(D) schooooooool.
Quil's mom...gave me some tea.
Quil's mom...asked if it hurts when I pee.
She knows about that stuff
cuz she was livin' rough
but she is happier now,
Quil's mommmmm.
My dad...has been lonely and sad
My dad... got hurt really bad
by his crazy ex
although he liked the sex
it was almost as good
as Quil's mom.
Bridge: (C) If he asks her out, she'll probably (G) say yes.
(C) If he brings her back here, it's gonna (G) suuuuuck!
(C) If they go in (D) his (G) roooooom,
I don't know (Em) what I will doooooo,
(Em) I might have live in my (D) truuuuuuuck!
My dad...called her up to say
"Quil's mom...will you be at the par-tay?
I hope you'll be there,
cuz I kind of still care,"
and I DO NOT LIKE
Quil's (G) mom.
Bella added an angry flourish at the end: Strum, strummy strum! Breathing hard, she set the guitar on her bed and logged in to her email account.
"Hi Mom," she wrote. "Having a bad day here. Charlie called up this woman..." She deleted that and started again. "My friend's mom caught me pantless with my other friend Jacob and..." No. There was really no way she could talk to Renee about this, she realized. Renee would either get hurt feelings or want to know if Bella were truly having sex with three boys, and she would then congratulate her. Logging out, Bella wished, not for the first time, that she could have had a normal mom.
She stood and peeled off Mrs. Ateara's pants. Though she meant to yank them off angrily, she had to settle for slowly and carefully with a lot of grumbling. But she did take satisfaction, after she had redressed in a pair of her own sweats, in wadding them up and flinging them down the stairs.
"Thanks," said Charlie. "I'll wash these for her."
Bella left her bedroom door open and played her song again. Loudly.
"Good job!" called her father. "Way to express your feelings."
"Quil's mom...is a scary beast!" She strummed harder. "Quil's mom...has infections with yeast!"
"That's quite common, you know."
"Quil's mom...cannot be your wife!" Strum, strum! "If Quil is my brother...it will ruin my life!"
"I think you're over-reacting, honey."
Bella put the guitar down. "That woman could have gonorrhyphilis!"
"You know she works at the clinic in Port Angeles? I'm pretty sure she doesn't have gonorr— What the hell are they teaching you in health class?"
Bella limped to her door as fast as she could and slammed it.
Charlie's feet thumped slowly up the stairs.
"You know, I think you're getting better." His voice was muffled through the wood. "This is a pretty typical teenage reaction you're having."
"Whatever!" she screeched.
"It's not even a date, you know." Charlie sounded a little angry now. "I'm just going to wash her pants and give them back to her at the party."
"You're returning her pants in a public gathering! Pants! What will people think?"
"Good point," he snarled. "I'd better make an announcement while I return them. Maybe Billy will have a stage set up."
"Great! That's just great!"
"I'm going to bed. We're going to talk about this tomorrow."
Bella heard the bathroom door open and close. She listened to Charlie brushing his teeth. Then she heard him walk to his own room and close the door.
That night, she lay awake for a long time. She had to lie on her right side to protect her aching thigh, and to add to her misery, anxiety knotted her stomach. When she had avoided romance for so long, what would she do if it came to get her father? She needed him.
Author's note. Thanks for reading! Please leave me a note/review; I cherish them. Tell, me should I let Charlie and Mrs. A. get together at the party? Can you sympathize with Bella's reaction to Mrs. A.? Did you try sounding out the chords to the "Quil's Mom" song on your pianos and singing along? Lord knows my husband had to listen to me sing this for a week. ("Quil's Mom"...is a catchy song! Go 'head...you can all sing along!)
Do please review if you liked it. Every now and then I meet an awesome reader who leaves comments as she reads each chapter, and it just makes my day. It's soooooo rewarding for writers when you do that. Makes all the work worth it to know that it makes somebody smile. I hope to hear from you!
