Even the Moon Has Scars by Steph Campbell Page B

another trip into the city for it. Is that understood?”
    Ms. Martinez grabs a small clutch from a drawer and adjusts her fur bolero.
    I take a step out of the way as she walks toward the front door.
    She just sent her son away. She told him not to bother coming back.
    I don’t know how to make sense of what I’m seeing. All my parents have done my entire life is work to keep me safe, to protect me from everything. Is this the Martinez brand of protection? If so, no wonder Gabe wants to escape it.
    “It was good to see you too, Ma,” Gabe says.
    She spins back to him. “Don’t be a smartass, Gabriel. It wasn’t charming from your father, and it certainly isn’t from you, either.” Ms. Martinez turns the door handle and says, “Good-night, dear.”
    I give her a quick nod and a small smile, though it must reek of pity.
    Because that’s what I feel. Pity for her.
    Pity that she can’t recognize how amazing her own son is. Pity that she’d turn her back on him. I don’t know the story, true, but I can’t imagine my mom and dad ever shunning me the way that Ms. Martinez just shunned Gabe. The way I bet she has his entire life. Where’s the drive to do better supposed to come from, when all you’ve ever known is how to be torn down?
    “Hey, you could always kick me to the curb like you did to him. Oh, wait …” Gabe says.
    Ms. Martinez whips back around to him and stomps his direction. She’s in his face with just five quick clicks of her heels.
    Oh. My. God.
    “Gabriel Martinez,” she says it so calmly that it scares even me. Gabe keeps his posture perfectly still and his expression relaxed. “If you’d like, I can call Ted right now and you can spend the rest of your senior year in juvenile detention, and that’s if you’re lucky—”
    Gabe opens his mouth to reply, and I close my eyes. I know it’s stupid and it won’t help anything, but I don’t want to see or hear this moment between mother and son.
    Instead, there’s silence. I crack my eyes open and both Ms. Martinez and Gabe are staring at me. I feel like I’m in a dream. A really awful, embarrassing dream.
    For a woman so consumed with impressions, she must have reigned herself in so that I wouldn’t see—or hear—anything else.
    Ms. Martinez smooths her dress down and gives her long, dark hair a good fluff then turns and leaves.
    I don’t know why, but when the door finally clicks shut, I half-expect that Gabe will rush to me. Maybe because if I were in his shoes, I’d want someone to hold me.
    Instead, he just stands there with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slumped. Like he’s dangling on the end of a thin limb and he has no one to count on—no one to reach out and help pull him in.
    Everything about his life is confusing to me.
    He has all of this money and freedom, but it’s like it only gets in his way. It’s like having all of those things prevents him from being the person he really is. Like maybe he doesn’t even know who that person is at all.
    And maybe he thinks no one cares if he’s a whole person or not.
    “I’m sorry about that,” he says. Even if he just tried to stand up to his mom, his voice now that she’s gone sounds full of defeat.
    “It’s okay,” I say. It’s not. I’ve never been more uncomfortable in my life. I’ve never longed for the overprotective comfort of my mom’s arms. I’ve never missed my room, my bed, all of it more than right at this moment.
    “You should put that away.” I motion to the part that was the purpose of this entire day that has turned from something so full of hope to something I sort of want to forget now. “We need to get home.”
    “Right,” he nods, barely looking at me.
    As he walks away, I wish there was a way I could turn this all around. That this night didn’t go to hell. But there isn’t. Because I’m just Lena Pettitt, the girl who was green enough to think that the world outside of my little house was somehow full of beauty and magic