I cracked. “I’m sitting right here, okay? You don’t have to talk about me in the third person, I’m sitting right here. I can hear everything you’re saying.”
“Aud.” My dad squeezed my arm again. “We’re just trying to keep you safe, that’s all.”
“What I propose,” Mr. Rice interrupted, “is that Audrey does her classwork here in the office every day. That way she can still participate in the educational experience but the disruption will be kept to a minimum.”
I was horrified. “Like a zoo animal?” I said before I could stop myself. “This is supposed to lower my profile?”
Arm squeeze from Dad.
And in the end, that’s what they agreed upon. Starting the next morning, my teachers would send my assignments up to the office and I would sit across from the secretary and do them. If I finished early, I could read. Joy.
I was shaking by the time my parents and I got to the parking lot. “This is social suicide!” I gasped. “It’s inhumane! And it’s sexist, too! If I were a guy, they’d be having a pep rally for me!”
“Get a grip, Susan B. Anthony,” my mom said. “Let’s just discuss this at home, okay?”
But the discussion at home was no better. “Look, Audrey,” my dad said as he loosened his tie. He looked tired all of a sudden, and I felt kind of bad. “You could have mentioned this video to us. You could have mentioned that when you said were going to a concert, that ‘going to a concert’ meant kissing musicians backstage!”
Both my parents crossed their arms and looked at me. The Great Wall of Authority.
“I didn’t do anything wrong! I just kissed a boy I liked!” I remembered the graffiti in the bathroom. “And that’s all we did! I didn’t know that his manager was going to take pictures and sell them!”
“You’re sixteen years old!” my dad said. “A lot could have happened to you that night! You’re lucky this is all it was!”
“Lucky? You call this luck?”
My mom inhaled through her nose. Total yoga breathing. “Audrey. There’s a lot of attention on you right now. A lot,” she repeated as the phone began to ring. “You live here: You know as well as we do that we’ve been getting calls for the past three days from every single news service in the country. And now we know why,” she added to my dad, who nodded and grimaced. “Some things are going to have to change.”
“Like what?” I asked. Please don’t say curfew, please don’t say curfew….
“Like you not going out as much. Like you going to work and going to school—”
“And not sleeping in class,” my dad added.
“—and then coming home,” my mom finished.
“So now I’m grounded?!”
“No, not grounded, just staying out of the spotlight.”
“Um, hello?” I knew I was starting to push my limits, but these were desperate times. “I never wanted to be in the spotlight, remember? It found me.”
“Audrey, we’re doing the best we can!” my dad interrupted. “You’ve kind of thrown us for a loop here! We read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, all right? Believe me, this is not what we were expecting!”
“Yeah, I know, Dad, I wasn’t expecting this, either! And at least you got a guidebook, y’know? Parents have, like, a million books telling them how to raise kids, but there’s nothing telling me how to be a teenager! I’m doing the best I can too!”
My mother stepped in. “Everyone’s on a time-out starting now.”
For a minute, there was only silence as everything calmed down a little. I kicked my shoe on and off, and my dad took off his tie and sat down in a chair, still looking like a steamed lobster. “Better,” my mother said. “Let’s not become one of those Jerry Springer families, okay?”
I didn’t have nails or cuticles left to bite. “Can I still call Victoria and IM her and stuff?”
“Of course.” My mom sat down at the table and I followed her lead. “We’re not trying to ruin your life, you know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Because if we ruin your life, then you’re going to be one of those kids that lives in the den and never moves out, and your father and I have plans to retire someday. It’s not in our best interest to ruin your life. We’d like to see Tahiti.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, c’mon, Audrey. I don’t even get a laugh for that one? That was good, I thought.”
I gave a tiny smile despite myself. “Can I go to work?”
“Absolutely,” my dad said. “We’re going to need every penny for the lawyer fees after I break this guy Simon’s manager’s neck.”
“Um, can I go to work now?” I pointed at the clock. “I’m going to be late.”
“Do you have a clean work shirt?”
“Maybe?”
Now it was my mom’s turn to sigh. “Laundry. Tonight. Starring you.”
18 “So if you’re lonely, you know I’m here waiting for you. …”
—Franz Ferdinand, “Take Me Out”
THE SCOOPER DOOPER hadn’t seen this much action since there was a power outage last summer and we had to get rid of all the ice cream in the freezer. (Normal people + free ice cream = anarchy. I almost had to put on riot gear.) Now, even though we were going into December, the crowds were getting bigger and steadier.