L.J. Porter/Leda Holbrook: Parents

So, I guess you've met Mom & Dad, or Juliana & Cora as I guess I've got to call them.  Things are going about as well as can be expected, I suppose, although that's not exactly great.

Don't take that the wrong way - for as much as this has got to be as weird for them as it is for me, they've put me first at every chance over the past couple of weeks, from making sure I knew what to do with a bra to where to wipe, and doing their level best to get me up to speed after skipping a grade.  "Juliana", especially, is always ready to jump in when I look like I may flounder talking to Leda's friends at the lunch table or something.  I appreciate it.

But, well, like Dad mentioned, things weren't great before all this, to the extent that maybe I should have known it was falling apart.  Sometimes, when I get back to our suite or they think they're alone in the bathroom or something, I'll hear them snapping at each other more, like Dad thinks Mom is trying to make him look foolish or only helping him half as much as me, and apparently the trip to Old Orchard or getting rooms at the Trading Post was the other person's idea.

And on top of that, Lena's got her own parents, and they apparently were worried sick about her being stuck in Maine, supposedly sick with Covid, and only texting rather than answering the phone.  The first time I picked up, they scolded me and asked a million questions, and it was really weird talking to these two people I really didn't know for like forty-five minutes, trying to remember what details would throw them off.  They've actually called every night this past week, and while I kind of appreciate that, too, it's also sort of intense?  Like, they're trying to be nice, and I'm scared that I'll say something that makes them even more worried.  Which maybe they should be, but according to everyone who's ever been at the Inn, they'll never believe why.  For instance, when Krystal/Mackenzie told me about how her own mother didn't believe her, even though it would explain a lot...?

Fortunately, the real Leda seems pretty cool; we text a lot, although she doesn't always respond right away and is kind of quiet about what sort of situation she's landed in.  She's doing her best to at least help be with running, to the extent that she can via text from wherever.  I need it - for all that cross-country looks like it's just running, and making sure you stretch beforehand, you've kind of got to know the road and have a plan for when you're going to give yourself a little more time for deep breaths and the like.  I did badly enough on my first practice day that the coach took me aside to tell me to let her know if there was any long-covid related shortness of breath or stuff like that, but also warning me that I could lose "my" scholarship if I can't run, so, no pressure.

The guy living my life seems okay.  He mentioned that he was going to have to break up with my girlfriend, which is a bummer, but he's like 40 and apparently not a creep, so what can you say?  We weren't actually doing anything, really, but it would still be gross.

Well, just thought I'd check in the way Mom & Dad have.  Now I've got homework - is it still homework at a boarding school? - and kind of glad to have stuff to fill me time.

-L.J./Leda

Lucas Porter/Cora Devers: Schoolgirl Stuff

So I see Marilyn is returning to her maiden name well before we can use our first names.  That's obviously the smallest change our family is undergoing, but it might be telling somehow.

I shouldn't be bitter, I suppose, but I can't help but notice the irony that we'd made the decision to separate just as I was going to need her help more than ever, because, as Marilyn mentioned, the whole family has become teenage girls, and though it's not a competition, I've maybe got the worst of it.  What Marilyn sort of skipped over is that she and I have clearly become the popular girls.  I had to turn Instagram notifications off because Cora's phone hasn't stopped buzzing since I started charging it a couple weeks ago, and she's asked me to try to keep it up because she envisions riding social media popularity to stardom or something like that once this is her life again.  Her account is actually milder than I feared - it's not bikinis and underwear or anything, but a lot of short-shorts and crop tops to emphasize that I've got a heck of a figure for someone turning seventeen just before Christmas.  And she clearly knew it; when I tried on one of her uniforms, I thought she must have had a growth spurt over the summer, but Marilyn says it doesn't really work that way for girls and showed me how much it had been hemmed up.  Cora, apparently, is that sort of girl.

And, yes, it's not just lots of social media photographs and short skirts - her phone is full of texts, that she's been busily fielding until I let her know that we were around, and it's a lot.  She keeps track of dozens of friends, is apparently a central part of the cheerleader group chat (eek!), and there are a lot from boys.  Some of them are safely in Malibu or that general area, but a disturbing number are in Burlington or that general area - some in high school, but more than a few at the University, and while real-Cora says I don't have to do anything I don't want and that honestly, me getting touchy with anyone sounded kind of gross to her, I'm not that big.

(Oh, and Marilyn didn't mention it, but Juliana is apparently also that sort of girl, and Marilyn has spent some time trying on her outfits and such, and apparently Cora and Juliana share clothes all the time because her new boobs are just as big and perky as mine, although she's got a bit more of a butt than I do.)

So, that's a lot, and obviously L.J. is going through it too.  He's not dealing with quite the exploding phone we are - Leda, apparently, is at this place on scholarship, which is going to be a lot of work for him - he's a year behind the girls and wasn't taking a lot of the top-level courses Leda was, and that's before you get to the cross-country team.  I suppose that there are worse sports for him to have to try and fake - imagine how exposed he'd be trying to play field hockey - but we're mostly concerned with trying to work our way through the summer reading list in a just a couple of days right now.

-Lucas/Cora

Marilyn Vance/Juliana Nakamura: Family?

Where to begin?  I suppose with the obvious - a week and a half ago, I was your average white suburban mom, complete with all the tension behind the placid exterior; now I'm a teenager again, and from what I'm told and can see with my own eyes, a Japanese-American father and a Latina mother, crossing my fingers that my high school Spanish from almost twenty years ago will be enough for me to fake it.  My husband and son are in a similar boat, although I'm sure that they feel having a different gender is a bigger deal than a different ethnicity.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know the gist of it, although I suppose it's worth going back a bit to understand what I'm dealing with here, although I'll try to get right to the point:  My marriage to Lucas was basically over before all this, and it was kind of a relief.  The end was better than the long decay leading up to it; instead of worrying about not being enough or resenting how success for one of us always seemed to lead to sacrifice for the other, and then worrying about how all of this was affecting L.J., deciding to divorce let us be practical and start to plot a way forward.  We've even been closer to friendly since we started hashing things out.

There was a kid in the middle of this, one who is probably reading this as I've encouraged him to read the blog and maybe contact some of the other authors who have been through what he's dealing with now, and while we obviously couldn't have expected this, we knew that the split was going to throw his life for a loop.  So, maybe underestimating him a bit - L.J. is 15 and feels everything so strongly! - we planned one last family trip.  We used to visit the coast of Maine every summer along with cousins, but that changed when Lucas's job took us from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver six years ago, and we were looking to recapture that before telling him everything just before we flew home.  But the place we booked was the Trading Post Inn, there was leftover luggage in our closets, and...

Well, you probably know the drill.  I'd been doing a morning run for the previous week, so I had my phone's alarm set, and when it went off I sat up quickly, feeling surprisingly refreshed and alert.  At first, I presumed I was just having a good morning, and didn't notice anything particularly amiss as a silenced my alarm, looked over to verify that Lucas was still a stationary blob under his covers in the other bed, and walked to the bathroom.  My skin was a little darker, but I'd picked up some color over the past week, and I didn't notice that I had much longer hair, jet-black at that, until I pulled off the headband I sleep in.  By then, I had turned the light on and was taken aback by what I saw in the mirror.

I didn't scream - at first, I thought that this was a dream where I had to live out some sort of weird fantasy of Lucas's, but when I stomped over to his bed and ripped the covers off to show dream-Lucas that I wasn't putting up with this...  Well, I'll let him describe himself and how he reacted; same with L.J.  Our son figured out about the luggage in his closet first, and that's how I've learned about Juliana Nakamura.

She, Cora, and Leda are classmates at the Burlington Academy for Girls in Vermont, and had come to Old Orchard without their parents to attend a music festival before returning to school.  I won't "doxx" Juliana and her friends, but suffice it to say that they have seemed to handle their change as well as can be expected, faking a story about testing positive for Covid before flying home, editing the photos they hadn't uploaded to social media because they were just boring pictures of them in their hotel rooms and sharing them in support of this story, and somehow rigging things up so that they could text home from their computers until we arrived.  Their parents have obligingly changed their flights so that we would go straight from Portland to Burlington where they are apparently best friends and suite-mates, rather than returning "home".  We didn't do anything so advanced for the people taking over our lives, although we did send emails to our employers and school district about our own positive Covid tests.

We arrived yesterday, and we're still trying to sort out living arrangements - Cora apparently had the single room while Juliana and Leda shared the other, but we're kind of not sure whether I should let Lucas and L.J. bunk together, or if he'd be more comfortable in his own room rather than sharing with his parents, or if he'd rather have me with him in case he needs to handle female problems on short notice.  We haven't mixed a whole lot with the other students who have already arrived yet - I get the impression that this group can be a little clique-y - but I'm already worried about L.J. a bit.  The last week or so has been a lot for him to take in, from proper hygiene to just rolling up stockings like you've been doing it for years.  He doesn't want to put makeup on, but his bare face does not look like what Leda puts up on Instagram, and his idea that he wouldn't need it in an all-girls' school showed that he hadn't really absorbed how that sort of thing can be more important among girls than in terms of attracting guys.

The thing that is really making me question myself, though, is that while I know it's only been a week, it sort of feels like "Leda" takes advice from "Juliana" better than "L.J." does from "Mom".  I don't know if I can explain it, other than him addressing me by that name even when no-one else is around, to try and make it a habit, or asking "how would you try to blend in?" when I try to tell him what he should do.

That's my question to the other former Inn guests:  How do you stay someone's mother when you've got to be something else practically 24/7?