Of everyone in her life, Jayne was the least suspicious that her life could all come folding down into chaos. As a matter of fact, her life could be very well characterized as the absolute avoidance of anything folding in on itself, saving her socks and her lawn chair on Saturdays once the game was through. Yes, Jayne's life was the picture of well-kept, and she was proud of it. She was organized yet massively involved; sweet yet uncorny and interesting; independent yet seamlessly affiliated and loyal; opinionated but not “political.” she was the moderate conservative millennial vision of perfection. Strong, Judeo-Christian informed morals met a fun-loving and "real" attitude that was all at once spiritual yet inoffensive. She would mark “strongly agree” on the personality test when faced with the statement, "my faith is very important to me," and say that she was "spiritual, but not religious." She was a soon-to-be professional something-or-other who dreamed of being the modern woman in all her feminine glory. All the while she would maintain a happy and equally well-trimmed husband, an impeccable record of promptness in volunteering for the PTA of the schools of, transporting to and from practice/dances/play-dates/, and otherwise hovering over her 1.5 kids, and a Pinterest page to make Martha Stewart look like the Joe Dirt of interior design. A 21^st century domestic Margaret Thatcher, she was. She would have been ecstatic had she been approached to guest write an article or have her home featured in Southern Living. Between sorority meetings, Netflix with friends, church on Sunday mornings, dinner with her boyfriend (a pre-law student), visits home, impromptu weekend road trips, and posting memes about the difficulty of college life, everything was thoroughly documented, selfied, and posted on all appropriate media. Everything was all smiles, everything was all communal, everything was all in its place. She had a 15 year plan. She even had her wedding planned, down the guest list, and if Martha would just get over being kicked out Sigma Epsilon and stop gossiping about everybody over not paying her dues she might get back on it. But, that's for another time. A place for everything and everyone, and everything and everyone in their place was how she liked it.

It was how she loved it.

And everything in her power was levied constantly to keep it that way. Unpredictability, anxiety, and discomfort in general was to be rooted out at every turn by careful planning, studious studying, punctual arrival, and quick judgments about who was and was not toxic/a waste of time/negative/too serious. But life, most unfortunately, had a quirky tendency to not go according to plan. Jayne hated this and wanted nothing more than to be able to finally and ultimately be in control of the universe…. Well, at least her own… And not in a crazy, vindictive kind of way. Just in some way that made everything she couldn’t see coming more visible and susceptible to being captured by the pages of her planner. So, the inconvenience and feeling of discontent that attended the illness of her mother was quite deep.

She had to come home for several days in the midst of the spring semester when the polyps on her mother’s lungs were diagnosed as cancerous. It was something she had avoided thinking about and something which had prompted more prayer than many anything else in her life to date, but here it finally was. The masses on her mother’s lungs were thought be a litany of things upon their discovery, but after months of waiting and inconclusive testing, it was finally determined beyond a reasonable doubt; her mother had cancer. She had gone to school in state, the school which she already had dozens of matching outfits for due to many football games already attended, so she wasn’t too far from home. She was guilty of the fact that she more stressed about missing classes and trying to work at home where there were so many distractions and creature comforts than she was sad and worried about her mother being cancerous, but she didn’t really know how to shake this vague feeling of shame, so she would spend long hours talking to her mother while she was trying to email professors and take quizzes online as best she could, in an attempt to clear her conscience.

Conscience was a funny thing for Jayne. Is was probably the only part of her psyche which was entirely free from other people’s opinions. Only subject there to her own criticism and judgement, she felt much more comfortable with it than her thoughts of other’s thoughts. Those were distant, inscrutable yet just evident enough to be bothersome. Her conscience was squarely within her control, and she liked being there. The sins she avoided were generally the ones she could make up for herself, as those could easily be cleaned up, were obvious and were simply a matter of behavior modification. If other people made sideways glances or started drama, she was helpless, but if her conscience acted up, very well, for the emotional ball was clearly in her court then. Her thoughts did at times bother her, but what was one to do about thoughts? No one ever got hurt by thoughts. They never hurt your reputation, anyway. Reputation. That was a huge one for Jayne, as well. Upon this rock she had built her church, and the gates of public reproach would not prevail against it. Reverencing her reputation made her avoid having too many male friends around, avoid having her boyfriend stay over the night, avoid being absent from class, avoid being disheveled, avoid being drunk enough to forget what happend, and avoid being too confessional, appearing too concerned, or ever (ever) appearing helpless or “not okay.” She told people it was okay to be and do these things, undoubtedly, and she thought it was fine for them, but she was strong. She was dignified. She was on top of things. She had a resume and a CV to build. That’s why Martha’s stunt, or so it seemed, was so egregious. It reached to the very core of her being.

She was scrolling her newsfeed before bed, the side of her head on the pillow clutching her phone to her face, when the first crack came. A sheet of terror like cold water flushed over her. She literally jumped from the bed and felt her heart skip a beat as if she had just seen the sort of ghastly image in a nightmare that makes it hard to go back to sleep and leaves you panting. This was so similar that she felt that surely she had been asleep. She was afraid to look at her phone before she knew that she was awake. She went into the kitchen with a pit in her stomach that felt like she had just eaten a shot-put. She saw her mother at the kitchen table, looking up at her with a stressed yet gentle smile, the kind that looked like a fold on an old but familiar bed-sheet flapping in the wind, getting ragged on the edges.

“hey kiddo,” she said quietly, almost at a whisper to avoid waking up her father who was in the den asleep on his recliner. Jayne gulped hard and couldn’t help but avoid the feeling of just having done something awful that her mother didn’t know about. Sheepishly she responded, “Hey. You feeling alright?”

“Yes, but are you?”

“What do you mean? I feel fine.”

“No,” The “no” was drawn out ever so subtly in such a way that made it sound gentle and inquisitive, concerned. “Step here into the light, honey.” Jayne did, slowly and wide-eyed as if she were a little child with a stolen toy behind her back which she would be forced to give back when discovered. Oh, how she longed for that to be the case. To give this sickening thing back to some other dimension where it didn’t exist and didn’t happen. Or, for that matter, to be a child where everything was decided for her and these things didn’t happen. “Oh, honey, you look as pale as a ghost! What’s the matter?”

“I do feel sort of nauseous. I guess I’m just about to start. You know how I get.” She was lying. She had just finished. “Hey,” she was able to peep out, mustering all of her skill of concealment which was, admittedly, great; “Speaking of starting, I think I’ll just eat all of your Häagen-Dazs and veg out. Been studying for a while, and I’m cramping really bad. You’d be cool with that, right?” She titled her head and squinted her eyes while cracking a small grin to indicate her jest, to which her mother simply smiled back and gave a faux roll of her eyes towards the fridge, signaling consent. “Thanks mom,” she said, giving her a hug and gathering the other half of a pint of vanilla Swiss almond. Or was it brownies a la mode? She quite possibly couldn’t have noticed if she tried (which she didn’t) as her hands were shaking and her legs were growing wobbly as she walked down the hall back to her room. She got into her room and managed to shut the door before she let out a sigh that neither relieved nor released anything inside of her. Her heart felt knotted up and the shot-put in her stomach was as heavy as a bowling ball as she reached for her phone, which only came after what felt like 30 minutes of clutching her sweat-shirt and breathing in and out rhythmically in an attempt to still her heart. She unlocked the screen, immediately closing her eyes and feeling faint. Sitting on the bed she looked at her phone again, this time only to stare at it in intense and utter shock, as if she had been traumatized. She was traumatized.

She saw Martha, clearly the photographer, in a selfie with a heavily spray-tanned girl. They were clearly at a party. The spray tanned girl was in an extremely short and tight pastel skirt and a top with an equally bawdy neckline. She was wearing an amount of make-up that made it look like she were heading for a red carpet event, and a bra to make her look like she was a Victoria Secret model. She had a drink in her left hand and a guy’s head under her arm, his face not so reluctantly pinned against her right breast. Her tongue was out in a rebellious, punk-rock sort of way and her middle finger was up on the hand she had the sloshed jock under. It was total, unreserved debauchery.

But there she was, staring at herself on her phone’s screen.