Straight No Chaser

Vite

daddy is very unhappy with my most recent bank statement.

he is a securities attorney with some economics degrees, so when he says things like "it's your money, and i can't control your spending, so i'm not going to try to micromanage you or walk through every purchase" (the first thing he said on the phone this morning), i never believe him. his whole life is counting money, accounting for money, making sure his clients and his children hold onto their money, with the alternative being that they hand it over to him.

and i don't blame him, because i did go rather crazy this first month. according to him, i've spent [insert obscene amount] this month, which is about three times as much as i spent the entire summer, and something like one-tenth of what i earned at verizon (most or all of that money was supposed to go into savings). inexplicable in his eyes, because while i warned him that i was buying marcus a birthday guitar, i did not think it wise to tell him i was also planning on driving from atlanta to dallas, and yes, that's westward, the direction in which a particular hurricane is destroying entire cities, daddy, but no, i promise we'll be careful. when he called that weekend, i told him marcus and i were out at dinner. that part was true; we were at a cracker barrel in birmingham.

but i can't tell him about the trip because not only will he be roaringly angry at me for putting myself just slightly north of katrina's path, and generally for leaving atlanta without permission, he will also connect the date of the trip back to the brattiness i exhibited over the summer, the fight i put up to have my car immediately, not in october after he'd had a chance to get it serviced, but right away.

i mean, it's my car; it's paid for; it's totally functional and i know what to do with it. i shouldn't have had to fuss the way i did. and mine are slightly less authoritarian than your typical black parents. i usually get my way, unless my way is something ridiculous. but he did start to get suspicious in august, when i insisted that i could not manage for the first two months of school without transportation. i attached it to the fact that krystle was moving off campus. i said things wouldn't be the same if we didn't have easy access to one another. plus, they'd already said no to my moving in with her, my one big request of the year, and i guess that tipped the scales in my favor.

i just don't want it to look like the dallas trip was what i was planning all along, even then, when we fought about the car for like two days straight.

i really don't like to lie to my parents. and i almost never do, especially not about big things, and not just because my dad's brilliant (meaning he almost always sees through such things). i really have more respect for them than that, and my conscience is already heavy from that whole experience, as much fun as it was. i would much rather just be a good girl.

but i have to come up with an explanation for the ticketmaster purchase. and i have to do it with the quickness.