"No, and you wouldn't even if I did want you there." I chuckled and pulled my phone from my back pocket as it buzzed. My mother. "I gotta take this. The world might be ending."
"Your mom can't find her favorite brand of shoes at the mall?" Lucinda poked at me and shook her head. "No clue how you ended up odd man out within your family, but I'm sure glad you did."
"Why is that?" I opened the door and shuddered as the chill of winter wrapped around me.
"Because we wouldn't be friends otherwise." She laughed.
I waved to my friends and answered the phone as my stomach tightened. There was no one in the world I dreaded talking to as much as I did my mother. I wasn't good enough, smart enough, or working nearly hard enough for her. This coming from a woman who hadn't worked a day in her life and looked like a Barbie doll, thanks to a group of surgeons who got paid quite well to keep her that way.
"Mom. What's going on?" I kept my tone even. I might not be my mother's favorite, but to disrespect her would bring more harm than good, and besides, my father raised me to be a better person than that.
"Valentine, why didn't you tell me that you weren't planning on running for the Presidency of Gamma? You're the Vice President now. That I have to hear these things from Marilyn Jacobs is upsetting. You know she's just looking for a reason to make me feel inadequate. Why do you keep giving her one?" My mother's voice was tight and filled with tension.
I let out a slow breath, praying like hell that she wouldn't hear me and-
"Don't you sigh at me. This is serious business." She continued to grumble as I jogged toward the library. Huge piles of snow lined the narrow path that someone had taken the courtesy to create earlier that morning. My mother was forever concerned about Marilyn Jacobs, much like I was concerned with the dealings of her bitchy daughter, Carolyn. Funny how some things just moved from generation to generation – whether we wanted the
m or not.
"Mom, I'm not sighing at you. I'm jogging to the library. It's freezing out here. Give me a minute and I'll talk about this with you. I can't breathe right now." I pulled the phone from my ear as she started up again.
Why she couldn't just let me be was beyond me. My older sister Allison wasn't badgered her whole life; but then again, she had been the measure of success by which all my failures were compared and left wanting.
I opened the door and walked in as a group of giggling girls walked out. Their excitement labeled them as freshman, and I was almost jealous. The thought of graduating in a year and a half left my insides turning to ice. To say I was scared was a mild understatement. I wasn't capable of pulling my weight in high school and now college. Real life was going to eat me alive.
My mother's voice rose up from the phone as I lifted it to my ear and forced myself to sound much more pleasant than I felt.
"Sorry, Mom. That was a long jog. I'm in the library. I have a paper due for my business law class tomorrow," I whispered as loudly as I could without grabbing unwanted attention from the people working at the checkout desk.
"You're out of breath. Have you been going to the gym? Your father and I don't pay for you to go to the gym just to spend our money on the hope that you'll stay in shape, Valentine."
I found an empty table near the back of the library and quietly sat my stuff down before dropping into one of the chairs. The last thing I needed that morning was to have my mother remind me that if I didn't stay in shape, I wouldn't be a prime candidate for a man.
"You know that if you let yourself continue to gain weight, you'll end up alone and living with me and your father." She let out a frustrated sound, and I leaned back in my chair, unwilling to give her fuel for the forest fire she was creating. "Start using the gym membership or we'll cancel it."
"It's part of the campus fees, Mom. You can't cancel it, and I'm not getting fat." I ran my hand through my dark brown hair and glanced around to make sure I wasn't being disruptive. "Besides, basketball is starting back up, and I've been on the courts, which I assure you is a great workout."
"Basketball." She huffed loudly. "That's a boy's sport, Valentine. You need to stop spending your time on things that aren't going to be part of growing your future."
"Like the sorority that you made me join?" I closed my eyes and dropped my head in failure. I hadn't meant to bring it up. It was like putting a target on my head and handing my mother a loaded gun.
"That sorority, young lady, has the ability to help you get any job or any man that you want. It's a powerful group of women, and you not even trying for the leadership role, which is rightly yours, is disturbing." She was running out of breath, which means the drama was just starting. "What's even worse is that you let Marylyn’s daughter take the presidency. You have no clue of how incredibly disappointed and embarrassed I am."
"I'll try harder, Mom. Sit down and don't get upset over this." I opened my bag and tried to ignore the sickness swirling deep inside my stomach. I loved her, I did, but she was a monster most days of the week – and that was when she was in a relatively good mood.
"How do you know I'm not sitting?" she barked into the phone.
"I can hear you pacing. You know your blood pres-"
"I'm not interested in having a pow-wow with my child over my blood pressure. What I am interested in doing is hearing that you're going to stop wasting all of the opportunities that your father and I are creating for you and that you're going to actually do something with yourself." She was yelling by this point, and I was over it.
"Yep. I am. I'll call you later, Mom. I love you to the moon and back." I dropped the call as tears filled my eyes. I'd promised myself a million times that I wasn't going to cry another tear over her disapproval of me. It wasn't going to change or get better, and I'd quit trying to please her after my first year of coming to college. The fact that I was still in the sorority house pleaded the opposite of that, but it was a small offering of peace toward her. That's all I had left in me.
A text came through from Katelyn that the Sigma Chis were having a “last night of winter break” party later that night. I told her I would go, but only if there was beer and hot guys.
Hot guys. Yeah right. I barely wanted to see the good-looking guy that I had been dating for the last six months, much less anyone new. Paul Wright was the all-American heartthrob on campus, and where I'd promised myself I wouldn't get involved too seriously with anyone during my college years, his blond hair and blue eyes left my heart fluttering too often to refuse.
Me and every other girl on campus.