Chapter 2

Wednesday December 23

I sent Mr. Demarco an apology text yesterday after I crawled out of my hole. I’m still bummed about the future, but I’m going to try not to think about it right now. I don’t want to ruin Christmas.

I was only able to read about half of the disks from my mom’s box. They did, in fact, contain some BMP image files that my mom had created with some primitive paint program. Some of them are quite pretty, so I arranged to have a few rush prints made and then shipped out to Grandma’s. They should arrive tomorrow evening - Christmas Eve.

The disks also contained some MP3s, some early-web GIFs, and my mom’s diaries, written in an archaic word processor format.

The diaries cover from the end of college to shortly after, right before she married my dad. They’re pretty patchy - it looks like she went for months without writing anything until something was heavy on her mind. I only skimmed the files - most of it was pretty mundane: jealousy at her sister, doubts about her ability to get a job with an English degree, doubts about whether she was getting married too soon. There was one passage that absolutely floored me, though:

My mother keeps nagging me about the dress, but I just don’t feel right about it. I can’t tell her why, of course. I need to talk to Father Cooper - ask him whether it’s truly acceptable for me to wear white. He told me that what I had done back then didn’t count, but I’ve believed that less and less as the years have gone by.

Am I reading this right? Is it possible that my mother - the woman who took me to church every Sunday of my pre-college life, the woman who sentenced me to prayer when she caught me masturbating with a carrot at age twelve - wasn’t a virgin when she got married?

I asked Dad. Flat out, over dinner, “Hey Dad, was Mom a virgin when you guys got married?”

His face turned to stone. “It’s not my place to answer that,” he said. “Frankly, it’s not your place to ask.”

It sounds like Mom was writing a diary on her computer since she was a teen, so maybe there’s something more illuminating on the other disks. She had an Apple IIGS then, whatever the fuck that is. Finding a way to read from that file system is going to be a real puzzle!

Dad just went to bed. He’s going to start masturbating pretty soon. He doesn’t make any sound any more - I guess he figured out that he was being too loud. But it’s easy to tell based on his browser requests and then the lights-on, flush, lights-off routine. It seems that every night he starts by looking at the new posts on Reddit GoneWild, but he always goes back to a small handful of bookmarked hotties to finish. I’m not judging him, of course. It just raises questions that I never thought I’d be asking about my dad.

Thursday December 24

After I finished writing last night, I started really wondering how I would stack up against the girls in the Reddit forum. I might not be the absolute top, but I’m sure that I’m prettier than a lot of those girls. Just for kicks I decided to sneak into the bathroom - the only mirror available to me - and snap a couple shots. I would never in a million years post them, of course. I just wanted to see what it would look like. It turns out that taking good naked selfies is harder than I thought. I know my body looks good, but the actual photos were bad.

Today I went to my old favorite computer repair store to see if Ted had any ideas on how to read the rest of my mom’s disks. This isn’t a big chain electronics store where the employees only know the bare basics - Ted has been fixing computers since before I was born. He’s known me since I was eleven, so he gave me an honorary uncle’s “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown up!” when he saw me. Anyway, he has some antique Apples at home that can probably read the disks. We’re going to meet up next week.

Ted asked what I planned to do for a living once I was finished with college. A week ago I would have proudly explained my plans to go to work for the FBI, but now I was dumbstruck. Ted could see that the question bothered me, so he didn’t press.

As lunch time approached, I found myself thinking about Martin. In high school, Martin was one of the boys who frequented the Saint Frances Photo Club - a secret website where boys posted up-skirt photos of the girls from school. I hacked the site and spied on them for a while. Most of the boys there were pervy and crass - like teenage boys are, I guess - but not Martin. He legitimately appreciated the beauty - not just of the girls in the photos, but of the photography itself. If anyone could tell me how to take good naked selfies, it was Martin.

I gave him a call, and he was free, so we met for lunch at a Tex-Mex place near the mall.

We spent most of the meal just catching up. Martin is in college studying graphic design. Alvin had a bad experience with pot that sent him to the emergency room, so now he has quit drugs all together. Lynn is engaged to be married. Marcie joined a band and they’re getting tons of hits on YouTube. Martin was surprised that I didn’t know about Marcie: she and I used to be best friends. I explained that we drifted apart.

Somewhere in there I asked if he knew how Ethan, Becca’s brother, was doing.

“He kind of dropped off everyone’s radar for a little while,” Martin told me. “He seems pretty well adjusted now, though. He’s studying philosophy at some East coast university, and plans to enter the Seminary.”

“Seriously? He’s going to be a priest? Wow!” I said. “Do you know if he’s in town for the holidays? It would be cool to see him.”

“No, he couldn’t make it,” Martin said. “Which is too bad. I guess his sister’s going through some stuff, and he really wanted to be here for her.”

“What’s going on with Becca?” I asked, concerned.

“I don’t know,” Martin said. “Just that she’s really depressed but won’t talk to anyone about it. Her parents are worried.”

We talked about other stuff for a while, and then eventually I steered the conversation toward pictures. “So Martin,” I asked, “are you familiar with Reddit GoneWild?”

Martin froze, like I had caught him in the middle of some shameful act. It was adorable. I touched his hand and smiled disarmingly. “It’s not trap. I tried taking some pics of myself - just for kicks - but they were awful. I was sorta hoping that you could give me some pointers.”

We were done with lunch, so we went out to his mom’s SUV and I showed him the selfies I had taken and explained why I didn’t like them. He seemed stunned by the experience at first, which is silly - this wasn’t the first time he had seen me naked. Martin and I had had a brief physical relationship in high school. I almost lost my virginity to him, but it just wasn’t right between us.

Once I started asking specific questions, the artist in him came out. He started giving me all sorts of critiques. “Bathroom incandescents are usually really bad for pictures, because they give off yellow light. You can fix that to a degree with Adobe Lightroom, though. Okay see here how your abdomen is badly lit? That’s because you’re back-lit. If you lowered your shoulder here, you could block out this light here, and you’d get much better exposure where you want it. Plus it would be really sexy.”