Chapter 3Paternity Prank Gone Deadly Wrong

The silence that followed wasn't just quiet; it was a vacuum. The waiters froze mid-pour. The string quartet stopped playing. People live for drama, but a mother publicly annihilating her daughter’s character? That was a spectacle you didn't see every day.

Every eye in the room pivoted to me—the shameless, cheating wife.

Nobody in their right mind would assume a mother would fabricate something so grotesque about her own child. But Diane was not in her right mind.

She lived for this. She fed off the shock value of crossing unspeakable lines and then hiding behind the shield of "I'm just kidding."

When I was twelve, she pretended to slip and fall in the shower. She screamed bloody murder, begging for help. I was terrified. I ran out of my bedroom, didn't even stop to grab a robe, and sprinted into the hallway in just my underwear.

I found her standing perfectly fine in the doorway, holding her phone up, the camera lens pointed squarely at me. She was suppressing a laugh. "Oh, honey, look at you! Say hi to my coworkers! We're on a video call!"

I nearly threw up from the humiliation. When my dad and brother came home, she spun it effortlessly. "I was just pulling a prank to see if she cared enough to rush to my rescue! How was I supposed to know she'd run out half-naked?"

Later, as an "apology," she bought me a beautiful, pristine white sundress. I wore it out to the mall with my friends, feeling pretty for the first time in months. But people kept staring. Finally, a woman pulled me into a restroom. "Honey, you've got a heavy leak back there."

I twisted around to look in the mirror. Someone had taken bright red acrylic paint and smeared it across the back of the skirt.

I ran home crying hysterically. Diane just chuckled, sipping her coffee. "You've been so gloomy lately, I just wanted to lighten the mood. Why are you so sensitive?"

My dad and Derek had laughed until they couldn't breathe.

"Don't blame your mother," my dad had wheezed. "You should have checked your clothes before you put them on."

"Yeah," Derek added. "Mom was just trying to cheer you up. Apologize to her for yelling."

They never understood—or didn't care—that that one "joke" resulted in me being mercilessly bullied for the rest of middle school.