Mother Talk

It is as if everything from the noise, the light from the fluorescent bulbs that hang over our heads, and the greasy smells from the lunchroom pizza take a while to sink in and when they do, I mostly ignore them.  I ignore the fact that Adrianna and I aren’t friends.

“What was she like?”  Your mother?” I ask.

Adrianna’s tough, dirt brown eyes glare back, and in spite of my breakfast, my toes curl up inside my sneakers.  I study my shoes.  If I clean every last speck of dust and grime off of them with my shy blue eyes, maybe my world will get better.   Then I’ll move up to replace the baggy jeans that feel like they are sliding off my hips and onto the floor.  I’ve worn these jeans so many times and want to believe they are fashionable with their uneven holes, but they slide so low now you can see the lace from my underwear when I raise my arms.  I lost all this weight in a few short weeks from a diet of SoBe water sips and lettuce wrap nibbles.  And now everybody believes I have cancer.

I fidget with the holes inside the pockets and stretch the frayed denim.

“Look, I don’t believe in mothers,” Adrianna says.  “They are the same thing as Santa Claus, all make believe.”  She wrinkles her nose at the pizza.  Maybe it’s the giant pool of oil on top that makes it gross.  Maybe we’ve both gotten used to water and lettuce, or maybe it’s what she said about moms.

“What about fathers?” I ask.

“No mothers, and no fathers either,” she says.

A new gospel, a motherless and fatherless religion, this faith I knew existed.  And the way my jeans slip and slide around my hips connects pizza, specifically the avoidance of it and all greasy, fat filled foods as part of the testament too.  I see Adrianna’s nose crinkle up in the lunchroom’s yellow light, and I look at the oil soaked slice and push it aside too.

“My mom isn’t much,” I say.  But I don’t know whether or not I want to confess all the things I have been thinking about my own cold, fried, isn’t all there mother for years.  I look at Adrianna’s uneaten pizza and wonder if visits to outer space and visits with fairies can make me believe starvation satisfies and can make me think I have a good mother too.

It seems like Adrianna comes from messed up like me, and I can almost see her uneven place.  It comes across in how she stands, a little too high and proud on one side and then it’s like she droops over on the other, like she lets gravity pull her down.  The way she leans, she exposes her cleavage to the whole lunchroom.

“What does that mean?” Adrianna asks.  "Your mom isn't much."

I shrug and attempt to copy her posture.  My stomach growls louder.

“Either you have a mother or you don’t,” she says.   

I fit three fingers through the latest hole in my jeans’ pocket and I think how I want to be more relaxed so I can forget about mothers, forget about pizza, and forget about cleavage.