Romeo shook his head, defeated. He leaned toward my mom and said, “I should’ve left Kamiko with the babysitter.”

My mom leaned away from Romeo like he had leprosy or carried a highly contagious strain of flesh eating bacteria.

Kamiko smacked Romeo on the arm.

My mom jumped in her chair and winced as if she’d been the one Kamiko had hit.

“Ow!” Romeo shouted, turning to face Kamiko.

“Who’s the baby now,” Kamiko grinned.

“Why do you have to be so abusive, Kamiko?” Romeo rubbed his arm. “I’m not a cartoon, you know.”

“Maybe if you were, you wouldn’t be such a baby!” Kamiko squealed.

I secretly hoped my parents would be the ones who decided to slip out unnoticed because of how weird everyone was acting. Let them be the uncomfortable ones for a change.

This was my world, bitches!

Christos leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, “Having fun?”

“Totally,” I smiled at him.

I had the best friends, and the best boyfriend, ever!

Acid spewed from my mom’s mouth as she said, “I knew that Christos was no good the first time I met him.”

I stood beside her and my dad outside the elaborate chimpanzee exhibit at the San Diego Zoo several days later.

She continued, “He acted like a Boy Scout when he was staying at our house in D.C., but I knew it was only a matter of time until a boy like him showed his true colors.”

Christos and Spiridon had gone off to find some drinks for everybody because we were all thirsty. My mom had suggested the three of us stay and watch the chimps. I should’ve known she was scheming.

I had managed to make it through almost the entire week of my Spring Break without getting into any arguments with my parents. They hadn’t made a peep about me or my living arrangements or my Art major while we’d gone to Sea World, the San Diego Wild Animal Park, Old Town San Diego, Pacific Beach, downtown to the Gaslamp, and to Coronado Island.

We’d even toured the USS Midway aircraft carrier, which had been Dad’s idea. The Midway turned out to be amazing because our tour guide had actually worked on the Midway in the 1950s and told us lots of insider stories about his tour of duty.

I think my dad and Christos bonded a little while they looked at all the jet fighters on the deck and talked about how fast they went and all the missiles they carried. I was glad to listen to their man talk if it meant my dad wasn’t giving me a hard time about my art.

The only time my dad had said anything remotely negative was when we’d gone to Balboa park to see the San Diego Museum of Art. When we ended up in front of one of Spiridon’s paintings, my dad had said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” as he squinted at the title card next to the painting, as if maybe Spiridon had been lying about it.

Through all that, there had been no arguments. I think it had something to do with the fact that I made sure I was never alone in my parents’ presence for even a second. Christos or Spiridon were always by my side. I had fantasized that maybe everything between me and my parents was fine. I should’ve known better. They were ticking time bombs. They hadn’t flown all the way out to San Diego just for a vacation.

Leave it to my mom to finally go and ruin things. Her timer had ticked down to zero before my dad’s. It usually did.

The second we were alone at the Zoo today, Mom had taken the opportunity to pounce. Had we been standing outside the tiger enclosure, I’m sure the hungry tigers would’ve cheered her on and licked their chops, waiting to take a bite out of my carcass when my mom was done with me.

“His true colors?” Dad asked.

“Yeah, Mom,” I said, “what true colors?”

“Christos’ drinking,” she said with arch superiority. “I see the way he drinks at every meal. Every. Meal.”

“What do you care?” I sneered. Christos had been drinking less since they’d arrived, and it was the last thing I was worried about. At the moment, my parents scared me ten times more than Christos’ drinking.

“What do I care?” Mom frowned. “I don’t want you shacking up with an alcoholic.”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your business,” I growled. I glanced around and noticed that for the moment, there were no people hovering around this part of the chimpanzee exhibit. The last thing I wanted was an audience while my parents treated me like I was a child. At least the chimpanzees on the other side of the glass didn’t seem interested.

My dad said, “Sam, who you’re living with is certainly of concern to your mother and I.”

“Thanks for caring, Dad,” I scoffed.

“Don’t talk that way to your father,” my mom barked.

“Why not? It’s not like you guys are doing much in the way of parenting anymore.”

“I beg your pardon?” my mom said stridently.

“I went to the financial aid offices, you know,” I grumbled, “and they told me that I can’t get more student loan money as long as I’m your dependent, because of how much money you guys make. The government says it’s your responsibility to help pay the difference. Last time I checked, you refused.”

“Now, Sam,” my dad said with an edge, “we discussed this at length. If you are willing to change your major back to Accounting, like your mother and I asked, we’d be happy to pay the difference.”

“But I don’t want to change my major back,” I said. I did my very best to keep any hint of whining out of my voice. Why was it that I seemed to have regressed around my parents since they’d arrived? I didn’t like how their presence made me feel and act fourteen again. Like I was a little kid who didn’t know anything and my parents had all the answers, which I knew they didn’t.

“If you don’t want to change your major back,” Dad sighed, “then there is very little your mother and I can do.”

“Then why don’t you leave me alone?” I whined. “Why don’t you go back to Washington D.C.? I’m doing fine here by myself.” I folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t need your help.”

My mom chuckled, “I doubt that.”

“What do you know,” I growled at her. “I have a place to live, a job, and I like studying art. And I have an awesome boyfriend who cares about me. If you’re not going to help me, stop telling me what to do.”

“Are you sure?” my mom scoffed. “With all those naked young women around him day in and day out, it’s only a matter of time before Christos’ eyes start to wander. Then where will you be? Without a place to live would be my first guess.”

And like a bullet through window glass, my remaining confidence shattered into useless fragments. How did my mom manage to do that so easily? My heart skipped a beat or ten and my throat filled with porcupine quills as I tried to swallow a dry lump of dread that wouldn’t go down.

If I’d learned one thing about Christos since his trial, it was that he didn’t tell me everything that was going in his head. Was he thinking about the long term with me? Or was I passing fancy? Maybe he was interested in Isabella, or one of the other naked women he painted seven days a week. They were all gorgeous models. I wasn’t. I was just a regular girl from D.C. trying to study art. Why would a stud like Christos be interested in plain old Sam Smith when he was surrounded by supermodels?

No, that couldn’t be right. Christos had asked me to move in with him and had voluntarily hauled all my stuff into his house. That meant he was serious, right? He was in it with me for the long term. Right?

So why were my mom’s questions making me so nervous?

I felt tears begin to well. I needed to hide them from my mom or she would use them against me and go in for the kill. Before she had a chance to attack, I turned away from her and my dad to watch the chimpanzees to distract myself.

One of the older female chimps had walked over at some point and sat beside the glass only a few feet away from me. She looked up at me with the deepest, darkest, most compassionate eyes I’d ever seen, like she was looking into me, communicating on some primal level and trying to comfort me. She puckered her lips at me in a strange gesture. Was she trying to tell me something? No, that was crazy.