Father Knows Best (2 page)

Track with me on this:

There are approximately six and a half billion people in the world, right? Let’s say, then, about three and a quarter billion of those are women. Cut out those who are jail bait, married, or blue-haired, and we’ll postulate that one billion are left, give or take (yes, I am randomly making this number up, but who gives a rip?). Subtract all those who live on other continents or in other parts of the country, or who are just plain skanky, and surely there are at least fifty thousand eligible women left from whom my dad can choose, right?

Right?

Even if there are only, say, ten thousand left, I think that’s a pretty darn good crop of options. Heck, five hundred is a decent dating pool considering most people—hot or homely—don’t have the luxury of more than a handful of choices, even when they sign up for every single one of those online dating services at the same time.

So who does Daddy Dearest choose out of those ten thousand hypothetical women potentially clamoring for his attention?

Yeah. My boyfriend’s mother.

No, you didn’t just hallucinate. No one had a seizure.

You heard me correctly, much to my abject horror.

My father is actually dating Dylan Sebring’s freakin’ mother, and they are playing tonsil hockey on my porch right at this very nauseating moment.

Let’s all pause to harness the gag reflex, shall we?

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Hork!

I mean, can you even wrap your brain around the myriad levels of wrongness about the whole sordid, creepy-ass, unfair affair? Not just the making out on our porch part, although, geez, get a room!

Wait! I take that back. Glug.

Whew, the very concept of a room, with all its implications, made my heart pound in a get-the-cardiac-paddles-and-“Clear!” kind of way. But, I’m talking, the wrongness of the entire thing.

Look, I’m a reasonable person. I can understand my dad liking Ms. “Call me Chloe” Sebring. I like her, too, for crap’s sake. But the very fact that I am dating her son should render her immediately and permanently off-limits to anyone related to me, most especially my father.

There should be a law.

With consequences. Painful ones.

I am not overreacting!

Seriously, what if they’re totally into each other?

What if, God forbid, they eventually get married?

I shudder at the notion, wrapping my arms around myself as I stand by the front door making sure not to look out of the three glass panels up top.

Can you grasp the gravity of the marriage possibility? Should it occur, Dylan would be my boyfriend and my stepbrother, and if that doesn’t set off some mental banjo twanging in your head, then, dude, I just can’t help you.

Yeah, yeah—I know. He wouldn’t be my real brother, and amen for that, because my four current ones are more than enough overbearing brotherage, thankyouveryfreakingmuch, but it still lends a seedy ick factor to what has become a really perfect and well-deserved boyfriend / girlfriend sitch. It would ruin everything.

Too bad my dad just doesn’t get it.

He thinks I’m flipping out for no reason.

As freakin’ if.

I could hear the murmur of voices from the front porch—a relief, because that meant the groping had ceased, at least temporarily. I eased out a breath, and my shoulders, which had been practically clamped around my ears, dropped.

“Are they still going at it?” Caressa asked, from just behind me.

I jolted and spun toward her. What was she now, Stealth Girl? Leave it to Caressa to whip out the superhero skills at a moment’s notice. I hadn’t even heard her approach.

She reached her hand into the bag of microwave popcorn she’d just popped and craned her model-long neck for a glimpse.

“Don’t look!” I said, yanking her away from the windows, traumatized by the very thought of us pulling the voyeur act on my dad and—Ugh!—Chloe Sebring. I lowered my voice. “And please don’t use the phrase ‘going at it’ unless you want me to hurl. The images in my head—God!”

“Sorry,” she said, squinching up her nose.

“Hey, where’s the popcorn?” asked Meryl as she bopped down to the stair landing, all decked out in her monkey pajamas. She stopped, hand on the banister. Her forehead furrowed as she looked at the two of us huddled by the front door. “What on earth are you guys doing?”

“Spying on Lila’s dad ramming his tongue down Dylan’s mom’s throat,” Caressa told her, and in an inappropriately blasé tone, I might add. I forgot to mention, my friends think I’m sorta freaking out for nada, too.

Really, though. Ramming, Tongue, and Throat in one sentence with my dad’s name and Dylan’s mom’s name included? Evil.

But, getting to the point, that’s the salt-in-the-road-rash aspect to this whole porch debacle. My best friends, Caressa and Meryl, were spending the night before Caressa headed off to New York City for the summer of a lifetime; hence, they were officially witnessing the whole sordid affair, up close and personal, for the first time since I’d told them whazzup.

And then with the tongue-ramming comment.

Kill. Me. Now.

I suppose I should tell you how the whole nightmare went down. Mind you, I can’t explain why my dad ultimately decided to go for it with my boyfriend’s mother, of all people, because (1) I’m not inside his head, thank God, and (2) I don’t smoke crack; but here’s what I know:

After prom, when Dylan and I were An Official White Peaks High School Couple and everyone knew it (which fully rocked), Chloe Sebring arranged a meeting with my dad, the police chief, because she was worried that our coupledom would somehow interfere with Dylan’s work as a Police Explorer, which had snatched him back from the brink of hoodlumville and turned his life around. (So dramatic, but that’s how they see it. Even Dylan sees it that way). How us dating would affect his “job,” I have no clue. We’d worked side by side as Explorers for a whole school year and nothing horrible had occurred. In fact, we worked well together. But parents can be twisted like that, though.

Make no mistake, she likes me and everything—it’s not that. In fact, she likes me a heck of a lot more than Dylan’s last brittle, bitchy girlfriend, Jennifer Hellspawn Hamilton, who is all about the hair bleach and the acrylic eye-poker nails and the airbrush tan. Oh, and Jennifer hates my ass with a white-hot, fiery passion—have I mentioned that small detail? Whatev.

It’s just that Ms. Sebring—I mean, Chloe—didn’t want such a positive part of Dylan’s life, the Explorer thing, to be compromised or whatever by the fact that he’d begun dating the police chief’s daughter. Words were brought up, like nepotism, favoritism, other isms.

You know how adults think. Illogically.

Still, I didn’t even blame her for seeking reassurance. At that point, it was NBD—no big deal. I knew my dad would tell her that Dylan and I are very professional on the job, blah blah blah.

The meeting, initially, was very normal and parentish, with none of the usual underlying agendas. Chloe didn’t knit my dad police-themed pot holders or anything, like so many of the other badge bunny single women in town who barfingly warm for his form (and there tons of them because he’s a hottie—mentally harmful, but true). As far as I know, she didn’t even sport the ultimate push-up bra with the low-cut, too-tight top, or whatever other slutty tactics these man-hunting women usually employ.

It was just my dad meeting Dylan’s mom to make sure all was cool with us dating and the Explorers, blahbiddy.

That’s it.

But they got to talking and who the hell knows—spring was in the air, I guess. In any case, my dad suffered some sort of catastrophic, socially-crippling-to-his-only-daughter, brain malady and asked Chloe to join him for dinner in the middle of town in front of everyone, and she said yes.

Two errors in judgment, right there, people.

And they say teenagers can’t make good decisions.

Snarf!

A couple of steaks and a bottle of wine later, and the rest is history. Actually, if you want to be technical about it, that whole story qualifies as history, but you know what I mean. Steaks and Shiraz are one thing, but now my dad’s Officially Dating my boyfriend’s mom, and my life basically sucks because of it. Trust me, you just don’t want your boyfriend to give you a wake-up call Sunday morning and ask, “Hey, is my mom over there?” Not that this has happened yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

It’s all so freakin’ inbreederish.

And gross. Have I mentioned the grossness?

But I didn’t want to think about it anymore. This was supposed to have been the ultimate girlz night, and I refused to let my dad’s egregious indiscretion ruin it. See, Caressa’s Grammy-winning dad and his Grammy-winning young colleague, Bobby Slade (former inappropriate crush of Caressa’s—long stupid story), managed to score her a totally kick-ass summer internship working in makeup and wardrobe with a Broadway show in New York City, which is what she wants to do for a living someday.

I’m serious! It was all, Bobby knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy, and after these unseen guys (or their “people”) made the obligatory phone calls, she scored the job.

This kind of thing only happens to Caressa, incidentally.

I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who might be able to snag me a part-time gig at Burger Wonder, manning the legendary zit-producing fry machine, but that’s about as thrilling as it gets in the mundane world of Lila Moreno.

Caressa? Whole different universe. What with her pops being who he is, they have connections, which is super coolio for her! Her dad, Lehigh Thibodoux, a.k.a. Tibby Lee, is now producing Bobby Slade’s next single; Bobby’s finding Caressa a killer summer job. It’s like a thing with these entertainment industry people, this networking. Magic to the rest of us poor saps, but business as usual to them.

Anywhooo, Caressa jets off for the Big Apple Sunday afternoon. Saturday was set aside for packing and parent time, so this was our last evening together until she gets back in August. Wah!

I refused to spend any more of it fretting about my dad putting the moves on Chloe Sebring right out in public, even though, good Lord, the man should know better.

Not. My. Malfunction.

I grabbed the popcorn bag out of Caressa’s hand, even knowing my tummy was so cramped and swirly, I couldn’t possibly swallow a single kernel. But I wanted to at least fake feeling normal despite all the madness and humiliation clouding my world.

“Come on,” I said. “Forget them”—as if it were that easy—“let’s go upstairs.”

Once inside my room, I flung myself backward onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

So not with the forgetting.

Meryl gently extracted the popcorn bag from my clutches, then she and Caressa sat down on either side of me. Meryl took a handful of corn, then passed it to Caressa.

“It’s not so bad, Lila,” Meryl said, softly.

I snorted. Always the optimist, our Meryl.

“Mer’s right,” Caressa said, crunching a mouthful of Orville’s Tender Whites. “So your dad’s dating Dylan’s mom. Big whoop. It’s not like he’s dating his little sister.”

“Gross!” I pushed up on my elbows. “God, Caressa!”

“Well, you know what I mean,” she added sheepishly. “They’re both adults is all I’m saying. I mean, look at the bright side. He could be dating Jennifer Hamilton’s mom.”

Great. Stir my ultimate nemesis into the cauldron of ick. That bleached-blond hagatha had done her level best to ridicule me and make my life a nightmare last year, all because I was WORKING (
Hello!
) with her boyfriend and—oh yeah—she’s an insecure dope. I hate her guts.

I lay back down and crossed my arms tightly over my midsection. “Okay, that would suck, granted. But it’s not the point. Chloe’s my boyfriend’s
mother
. Besides, Hellspawn’s mom is still married to her dad and Dylan doesn’t have a little sister.”

“I know.”

“Theoretical,” Meryl said.

“Yeah, just an example of how things could be worse,” Caressa said, holding up her palms.

“At least you know your dad will always approve of your boyfriend,” Meryl offered, all chipperlike, as if that angle would cheer me up.