Mad Monday
by Pan
Chapter 58:
No one was smiling on the car ride home.
My wife was in the back seat, using Belle’s face to stare out the window with the most feorcious scowl I think I’ve ever seen. Our son Ben was sitting beside her, annoyed that the beach trip had been cut off early. I don’t think he even noticed his sister’s change of clothes—I guess the bikini only showed slightly more skin than her previous outfit, but the way Mary wore it…it sure felt like a lot.
Belle was sitting beside me, in her mother’s body. She was trying to act cool and collected, but not doing a great job of it—between her clenched fists, jiggling leg, and occasional sigh of frustration, it wasn’t hard to tell how she was feeling.
And me? I was trying to keep my face as neutral as possible. As far as my daughter was concerned, I needed to seem just as angry as she was…but it was all I could do to stop myself from breaking into a huge grin.
It was working. All of it. The last thirteen days of stress had been completely worth it—in just two weeks, we’d managed to reverse our daughter’s attitude towards so many things
I wasn’t expecting her to suddenly become an honor student when they switched back (although lord knows she has the brains for it), but she would no longer be the nightmare she’d slowly become over the past few years. Hell, she’d been dating a literal drug dealer before Mary had forced a break-up.
After what she’d seen today, she’d turn her life around. I was sure of it.
When we arrived home, my wife immediately stormed inside, stomping Belle’s feet as she did. My daughter glanced at me, wearing a look of concern on Mary’s face.
“Do you want me to talk to her?” I said, and she shook her head.
“No,” she sighed. “No, I think…I think it’ll be better coming from me.”
I’m not a hands-off parent by any means, but heart-to-heart discussions with our daughter had always come more naturally to my wife than to me. And so I gave her a nod, and watched as she made her way into the house, walking the walk of someone who doesn’t really want to get where they’re going.
Under normal circumstances, I probably would’ve made my way to my office and buried myself in work until Mary came in and gave me the post-mortem. But I wasn’t confident that my daughter would be quite so forthcoming with her conversation with “herself”, so—after making sure that Ben was firmly plugged back into his Pokemon game—I sneaked upstairs and pressed my ear against my daughter’s bedroom door.
“Oh, yeah right.”
The sarcastic tone of my daughter was crystal clear. Mary was an adept mimic, at least when it came to Belle’s rebelliousness.
“I’m serious,” my wife’s voice intoned softly in response. “I know I’m pretty old now, but I seriously remember what it was like to be a teenager. Like it was yesterday.”
“Uh huh. Sure.”
“And so please, believe me—you’re beautiful. More than you realize. And that’s going to bring…attention. Like the kind you had at the beach today.”
“Yeah? What’s wrong with that?”
“So you need to think about what that looks like.”
“What, so I don’t embarrass you and Dad-d?”
I managed to suppress a laugh. Belle would never notice, but I’d heard it—my wife had gone to say “Daddy”, and had to cut herself off.
“No. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Even through the wall, I could imagine the look on my wife’s face. My daughter had inhabited her body for just two weeks, but already she’d started taking on the weary expressions that we all got when dealing with the immovable force of a teenage renegade.
“The problem is that what you’re looking for, it…it won’t come from them. It doesn’t cpme with attention from strangers, or causing trouble. It won’t come from Spike, or any boy. You want to be wanted, you want to feel confident in your body. None of that comes from external validation…it has to come from within. You’re beautiful, Belle, inside and out. I just hope that you learn to see it, sooner rather than later.”
I swear, the smile on my face could have lit up a dark room. Sure, the speech had been a little corny, but it wasn’t bad coming for a teenager…especially a teenager who had seen it as her God-given duty to show off her body and cause as much trouble as possible just two weeks earlier.
From within the room I could hear reluctant agreement from my wife, and I slipped back downstairs with a smile.
When my wife’s body rejoined me, she looked like the stress had completely melted away. I tilted my head to the side inquisitively, and she nodded in response.
“I think I got through to her,” she said with a smile, and I took her hand.
“I really think you did,” I agreed.
* * *