The Mother Who Booked Me For Babysitting Without Asking Me

I babysat for two families in my last year of school. Word gets around, which is nice, and then word gets ahead of you, which is not.

A woman I had never met posted on the neighbourhood page that "the girl at number 12 does Fridays" and gave out my first name, my house number, and — I still cannot get over this — a rate she had invented, which was two pounds an hour below what I actually charged.

The first I knew of it was a knock on the door on a Friday at six, with two children on my step and a car with its engine still running.

I said I was sorry, there had been a misunderstanding, I had never agreed to anything.

She said, "But I've got a table booked."

I said again that I was sorry.

She looked at me — I was seventeen, in pyjama bottoms, holding a bowl of pasta — and she said, "You are being extremely selfish."

Then she left the children on my step and walked to the car.

I want to be very careful here, because I know how this reads. I did not take them in and I did not leave them on the step. I stood in the doorway with two small children and shouted her name, which I did not know, and then I shouted "Excuse me!" in the voice my mother uses, and my mother came out.

My mother, who is five foot two and terrifying, walked to the car and stood in front of it.

The woman took the children back. She said several things about our family that I will not repeat, and she posted, later that night, that number 12 had "let her down at the last minute".

Forty comments. I did not read most of them. My mother did, and she replied to exactly one of them, from a woman I did babysit for, who wrote: "Hollis has never let anyone down. She was never asked."

That comment has more likes than the original post.

I did not babysit again. Not because of that woman — because of the forty comments, and because I learned, at seventeen, that a village will always prefer a story to a person.