Just Do This One Thing for Me

Drew's mother, Heidi, leaves a lot to be desired as a mother. Her main source of income is to review products she gets for free and then sells, but she also has child support for Drew's younger brother Lachlan (under the guise of working for the orthodontist who is Lock's real father), and illegal Social Security payments for her mother, Sharon, who has been dead for several years. She splits these with her even sketchier sister, Krystal. Heidi is not overly interested in raising Drew, Lock, or middle sister Carna, and leaves most of the details of child and house care to Drew, who is a senior in high school and is counting the days until she can escape to the University of Wisconsin. When Heidi gets tickets to go to a Justin Timberlake concert in Mexico, she has no qualms about leaving the kids for a week, and Drew is used to it. The three kids spend Christmas with the girl's father, Malcolm, and his girlfriend Stephanya. When it turns out that her mother's flight was canceled, Drew is a little worried that she isn't in touch, but there are other distractions. Krystal has tried to fill a prescription for marijuana muffins in the grandmother's name, which has alerted the authorities, and an agent shows up asking to speak to the grandmother and Heidi. Drew manages to put him off. When Carna comes across Heidi's body in the garage, the girls are not quite sure what to do. Drew knows that if they alert the authorities, the kids will be split up, and since she has been dealing with most of the parental chores, and the weather is freezing, they decide not to tell anyone about Heidi's death, which seems to have been caused by a free hazelnut latte. (Heidi was allergic, but cavalier about it.) It's not easy to pretend to the world that Heidi is still alive; it involves putting off the investigative agent, texting Heidi's friends as if she were alive, and going to school while trying to run Heidi's internet review business. As time passes, Drew manages to find someone to cremate Heidi's body and not say anything; they pay him enough money from a stash of Heidi's stowed in a gun cabinet that he would be in trouble if anyone found out. Drew has a boyfriend, Darden, who is occasionally useful, and with whom she doesn't want to split, and he's another level of complexity. Things go along well for a while, but can't go on forever. When the investigative agent manages to get some real dirt on Heidi, it propels the girls into staging Heidi's death and relying on unexpected resources to continue to be together.