SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!

Shit! Shit! Shit! That's triple shit if you're counting. I could not believe I'd been so incredibly naive. How could I have trusted her? She always told everything to mom. Now mom knew and there would be that special kind of mom-hell to pay. When, o when do I get to be an adult?????

I glanced at the calendar. Two weeks 'til finals, then a week of exams; one last bash with my buddies and then it would be time to board that bad boy and fly home.

Oh why had I told Ali about Ernesto? It was a FLING!!! The fact that Ernesto'd taken it so seriously and had bought me that ring was....well, to my mind, so totally inconsequential.

I went back to that call. Ali and I'd been chatting. My younger sister - my only sibling - was fresh out of high school. She'd taken a year off to work and was finally - to my graduate study addled brain - showing some signs of maturity. During that call - where we were commiserating about the goofiness of men -- well the men in our lives anyway -- I'd felt some sort of common bond. Kind of like the way I'd felt the summer I was 10 and she was five. I'd fallen off of our horse and given myself a broken leg and one hell of a concussion. She'd taken care of me and kept me company while I was bed ridden and for the first time in her short life she wasn't a complete PITA (pain-in-the-ass); she was actually funny - and good company.

It was that feeling that led me to relate the Ernesto story. Shit! Shit! Shit! Why had I forgotten that she still lived at home? Why had I forgotten that she couldn't, wouldn't, keep anything about me, my life, to herself?

Mom, I supposed, would be already planning the wedding shower. Expecting Ernesto and his brother Alois to come back with me to meet her, my dad and the chatty aunts that made up my family.

I had to nip this in the bud. I pushed the [play] button on the answering machine again. My mother's voice filled the room. "Hi Honey! Just calling to see if anything is new?" I grimaced. Yep, she definitely had heard....Shit! Shit! Shit!