My heart raced as I typed as fast as I could: No. Tell me.
I held my breath, waiting longer this time.
U passed out. I’m sooo sorry I left u for so long. I didn’t know u were so wasted. What did u drink???? Did you hook up w Finch?
I don’t know, I typed.
Grace sent a sad-face emoji, and then, in a separate text: Something I need to tell you…There’s a pic of u being sent around. IDK who took it. But I think Finch.
My stomach dropped as I wrote: A picture of what? Do you have it?
Yeah.
Send it to me.
I steeled myself as an image appeared in the thread, too small to really make out. I tapped to enlarge it, then zoomed in to see my little girl, lying on her back on a bed, her breast completely exposed. I wanted to throw up, just as Lyla had last night, but my nausea turned to rage when I read the caption on it: Looks like she got her green card.
Fuck, I typed, forgetting I was supposed to be Lyla for a second, although I was sure she swore to her friends. What the hell does that mean?
IDK. He’s calling you an illegal or something. I guess because ur half Brazilian?
I’m a fucking American….And even if I weren’t…I typed, too infuriated to finish the sentence.
Grace replied: I know. I’m sorry. But at least you look hot!
I shook my head, marveling at the shallowness of the comment, and nearly outed myself—they’d both find out eventually, anyway—but decided against it. My heart simply couldn’t take any more.
Gotta go, I typed.
K. TTYL, she wrote back.
I deleted the thread, my head filled with awful images, some of them imagined and one of them very real.
* * *
—
“YOU READY TO tell me what happened?” I asked Lyla a few hours later, when she finally emerged from her bedroom, looking some combination of queasy and embarrassed. I was sitting in our living room, where I’d been waiting for her.
“You already know what happened,” she said softly, likely because she and Grace had pieced things together. Her phone was in her hand now. She put it on the coffee table, screen down, then sat next to me, probably to avoid my gaze. “I had too much to drink.”
“One drink is too many. You’re underage,” I said.
She slid down on the sofa closer to me, then dropped her head to my shoulder. “I know, Dad,” she said with a sigh.
It felt like a ploy, a bid for sympathy. I stayed strong. “So. How much did you drink?” I asked.
“Not that much, I swear.” Her voice shook a little, though I couldn’t tell if it was from emotion or from her hangover.
“Is that typical for you?”
“No, Dad….It’s not typical for me.”
“So is this the first time you’ve gotten drunk?”
She hesitated, which of course meant that it wasn’t, but also that she was considering lying about it. Sure enough, she gave me a straight, unwavering yes.
I stood, circled the sofa, and sat in the chair right across from her. “Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said, clasping my hands together, my voice firm but not loud. “I need you to be straight with me. I won’t punish you if you are, but you have to be one hundred percent honest. Otherwise, your life as you know it is over for a very long time. Got it?”
Lyla nodded but did not meet my gaze.
“When did you have your first drink?” I asked.
“Last summer,” she said, her eyes still glued to her lap.
“So you’ve been drinking since last summer?”
She hesitated for several seconds before nodding. “Yeah. Not all the time or anything. But yeah. Sometimes. Every now and then.”
I took a deep breath and said, “Well, let’s start right there. With drinking, generally.”
“Dad—” she said with a weary sigh. “I know—”
“You know what?”
“I know what you’re going to say….”
I stood up, calling her bluff. “Okay. Fine, Lyla. Your choice. We’ll just go the punishment route here.”
As I walked past her, she reached up and tugged on the back of my shirt. “I’m sorry, Dad. Sit down. I’ll listen.”
I stared at her a beat, then sat back down next to her, thinking once again of the birthday night Beatriz came back. She’d been drunk, of course. I made her leave, but she came back the next morning and stayed in town for about a week, promising Lyla she’d move back to Nashville—which I took as more of a threat than a promise. One night things got ugly, and Beatriz told Lyla that her dad had too big a temper problem for her to stay. Then she took off again.
That was seven years ago, and since then, I hadn’t been able to keep up with all the places Lyla said her mother had been living (Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Antonio, and back in Rio, to name a few) or the number of times she’d passed through town, graced us with her intoxicated presence, made Lyla a few empty promises, then disappeared again. With the help of a school guidance counselor I talked to following one of Beatriz’s more egregious interruptions, I’d vowed to stop denigrating her in front of Lyla, and I had kept my word up until now. This was too important. Besides, I told myself, alcoholism isn’t a character flaw—it’s a disease.
“It’s safe to say that your mom’s an alcoholic,” I began.
Lyla made a clicking sound and rolled her eyes. “Um, yeah. I know that, Dad.”
I nodded, choosing my words carefully. “Okay. Well, then, do you also know that alcoholism runs in families?”
“Dad, please! I’m not an alcoholic,” she whined. “I don’t drink like that. And besides, Mom is way better now. She’s been going to meetings.”
“Well, she’s still an alcoholic,” I said. “That doesn’t go away with meetings. And it will always be in your genes. It will always be a danger for you.”
“I don’t drink too much.”
“Well, the ‘too much’ happens gradually, Lyla. It’s a slippery slope. It was for your mother.”
“I know all of this, Dad—”
I cut her off. “Let me finish….Beyond that, we have more practical concerns…meaning all the bad decisions people make when they’ve been drinking. Take last night, for example….Do you even remember what happened?”
She shrugged and said yes, then added, “Sort of.”
“Sort of? So that means there are things you don’t remember?”
She shrugged again. “I guess.”
“Were you…with…a boy?”
“Da-ad,” she said, looking appalled.
“Answer me, Lyla.”
“There were boys there,” she replied. “If that’s what you mean.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. You know what I mean….Did you have sex?” I forced myself to ask. “Could you be pregnant?”
“Dad!” she shouted, putting her hands over face. “Stop! No!”
“So no, you couldn’t be pregnant because you didn’t have sex? Or no, you couldn’t be pregnant because you used birth control?”
She stood up and shouted, “Oh my God, Dad. Just go ahead and ground me! I’m not having this conversation with you!”
“Sit down, Lyla,” I said as sternly as I could without actually yelling. “And don’t you dare talk to me like that.”
She bit her lip and sank back into the sofa.
“Did you have sex last night?” I asked.
“No, Dad,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“How can you be sure if you don’t remember?”
“Dad. I’m sure. Okay? Just stop.”
I took a deep breath, then cut to the chase. “Okay, then. Who is Finch?” I asked.
She stared down at her fingernails, her lower lip quivering. “I know what you did, Dad. I know you talked to Grace on my phone. She sent me screenshots. I read the whole thing. Just admit it.”
I confessed with a nod, bracing myself for a self-righteous tirade about her right to privacy. But she somehow exercised a modicum of restraint.
“Who is he?” I said.
“He’s a senior,” she said.
“Does he go to your school?”
She nodded.
“Well, then,” I said. “I’m going to be letting the Windsor administration know about this.”
“Oh my God, Dad,” she gasped, jumping up, her eyes wide and frantic. “Don’t do that. Please!”