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Chapter Three
Point of View: Peggy


I was sitting in the living room when my daughter burst in the front door, barely clutching a thin blanket around her lingerie-clad body, with galoshes on her feet and eyeliner smeared all over her face. She looked worse than any rocker had ever looked. Alice Cooper, any of them.

"Where the hell have you been?" I snapped.

Krystal froze mid-step on her way to the stairs. She stopped and turned. "Ma, I didn't know you were coming today," she said in as pleasant a voice as she could muster. "Let me run upstairs and get dressed and --"

"Where were you? Why do you look like this? How much were you drinking last night?"

I knew my daughter well. Too well for her liking. She stood there at the bottom of the stairs, refusing to look at me directly, and clutched the blanket a little closer. "I wasn't," she muttered.

"What did you take then?" I demanded.

"Mom it doesn't matter, okay? I'm fine!"

"Krystal, you're sick," I snapped.

"I'm not SICK," she bellowed, "I'm not DAD." She turned and ran up the stairs.

Twenty fucking one years old and the girl still acts like a twelve year old sometimes. Well, luckily for her, I'm still a bitch - the only downfall to having had children at sixteen is that I'm still able to think like them today. I bolted up the stairs after here. "What kind of example are you setting for Amelia?"

"Amelia isn't here, is she mom? She's in boarding school."

"Because I don't want her anywhere near you when you're like this. This is unfathomably ridiculous."

"You're the one that came here to see me, ma," she snapped, "You didn't have to come here, you could just forget I exist, like you do with Amelia, like you did with me the entire time I was lived at home."

"I did not forget you existed."

Krystal rolled her eyes, "What the fuck ever mom, there's a reason I'm fucked in the head, okay? And it's not because of Dad. It's because of you and your bullshit games and if something is wrong with Amelia that she actually needed to go to boarding school, then don't go pointing your stupid perfectly fucking manicured fingers at me. Clearly if you fucked both of us up there must be something wrong with you, not us."

"Don't you dare speak to me like that, young lady!" I yelled.

Krystal stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door shut behind her. I reached for the knob and pushed it open. Krystal was inside, ripping her bra off of her chest. "MOM!" she shrieked, "HELLO? A little privacy?"

"We are not done talking about this."

"There's nothing to talk about," she wailed, "This isn't YOUR house, it's MINE. Gram and gramps left it to me not to you. You do not need to be in here snooping around in my life and my --"

"Krystal?" A man's voice floated up the stairs. "Krystal? Hello?"

We both looked at each other. "You have a man in here?" I snapped, "In my mother's house, you have a --"

"SHUT UP MOM," she yelled. Krystal launched herself across the room and into the hall, her breasts on full display. "GO HOME, FUCKHEAD!" she yelled down the stairs.

"You left your umbrella in my house!" came the reply.

"I SAID GO HOME!" she screamed again. She came back into the room and opened her closet and pulled out a loose t-shirt. She looked at me as though she'd just noticed me. "You can go home, too, ma, I'm busy."

"Busy what? Flashing the damn neighborhood with your chest?"

Heavy footsteps trod up the stairs. "Krys? Everything okay?" Suddenly a tall, blonde man came around the corner, carrying a long-stemmed red umbrella, a confused expression on his face, "I heard yelling and- I..." his voice trailed off. He looked at me, then at Krystal, who had luckily just finished pulling on her shirt.

I struck out my hand, "Hello man who is probably contracting STDs from my daughter," I said, "My name is Peggy Armaletto."

Krystal rolled her eyes. "That's Nick Carter," she said, "The Backstreet Boy."

Nick looked completely thrown. "H-hi," he stammered over the huh sound and blinked between Krystal and I.

"So how long have you been sleeping with my daughter?" I asked point-blank.

"Since last night when he took advantage of me," Krystal answered at the same time that Nick responded, "I haven't slept with her at all, I just moved in."

They stared at each other.

"Well okay then," I said, "I see you found a man as wonderfully slutty as you are." I shoved past Nick and into the hallway and started down the stairs.

"Hey... hey lady..." Nick's footsteps thundered after me, followed by Krystal's. He still had the umbrella slung over his arm. "Look, I dunno your daughter very much, and frankly she seems a little mental to me..." Krystal reached down and flicked him in the back of the head. "Ow!" Nick glared back at her a second, then turned back to me, "But what kinda mom are you to say that kinda shit about her? She's your daughter."

I shrugged. "I'm a mom who's had too much, I guess," I answered. "Don't you ever reach that point with someone when you've had too much and you can't be patient with them anymore? Because it's either speak up or watch them kill themselves?"

Nick looked down at his sneakers.

Suddenly a flash of a recent headline I'd seen went through my head. One of the Backstreet Boys had recently been committed to rehab. Of course he knew where I was coming from. Suddenly I felt terrible. "I'm sorry Nick," I stammered.

"Here's your fucking umbrella," he said, shoving it back to Krystal. He trotted down the stairs and out the front door.

I stared after him for a moment before looking up at Krystal, who was staring blankly at the umbrella.

"What the fuck was his problem?" Krystal asked.