American Girls(40)

“And because your father is starting his own business, and I’d like to stay home with Birch, we won’t be able to afford your school anymore. We have a thousand dollars allotted for your activities for the year. Five hundred for the fall and five hundred for the spring. It’s really a lot, if you think about it, but that’s only if we take you out of Lakewood and put you at McKinley.”

My dad was staring right through me to the table behind us.

My mom checked her right boob again.

One of the baristas raised her overplucked eyebrow at me, like even she couldn’t believe this was going down at Starbucks.

“We looked at the test scores, and they’re really not that different at McKinley. It’s close to the house, and you can walk home if you need to.” My mom was giving me the same look she gives a chicken when she wants to see if it’s done or not. “We know that you have friends at Lakewood, but you’ll make new friends.”

“You make new friends,” I said. “I like my friends.”

I had complained about Lakewood every morning my mom dragged me there, but suddenly it seemed like an island in the Caribbean. Lakewood was small, and there was a park on the campus where we could go outside to eat lunch. The teachers at McKinley looked like weekend pedophiles, and the cafeteria might as well have been a prison. I’d heard stories from Doon. I didn’t need my mom to give me the hard sell.

“Now, Anna,” my dad countered. “This isn’t easy for us to have to say.”

“Then don’t. You don’t have to say anything, do you? You just want to because you have some anorexic teenager buying you pink shirts, and you’re too lazy to work now that the baby is born. And he’s a toddler now, in case you hadn’t noticed. He’d be happy if you went back to work. I wouldn’t want to stay around that crazy house all day, why would he?”

That made her forget about her boobs for a minute.

“That’s enough, Anna. I don’t expect you to understand how much work it is to take care of you and Birch.”

A woman at the next table craned her head to get a closer look, and I didn’t even care.

“Include me out,” I said. “You don’t take care of me. You take care of you. And stop touching your boobs.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about Birch.”

That was it. I was done with both of them. Poor Birch, who was still stuck on my mom’s boobs half the day, when she could easily have kicked him off and given him a glass of milk or something normal. He was going to have thousands of dollars in therapy bills. Millions. Good luck when they realized they only had five hundred dollars for that when he turned thirteen.

I was telling Jeremy all of this, the same way I’d run over the scene about a million times in my head, when I realized something that I hadn’t before. I realized that maybe, when we were at the Starbucks, my mom might have already found the lump in her breast. She might not have just been touching her boobs to see whether or not they were full, the way I’d seen her touch them about a million times since Birch had been born. She might have been touching her boobs because they were breaking her heart. And there I was, not helping things one little bit.

“You okay?” Jeremy asked. “You went missing.”

I had gone missing. And as much as I liked him and wanted him to like me, I wasn’t ready to tell him about my mom.

So I told Jeremy the rest of the original truth, that I had taken the five hundred dollars because I figured if that was all the money they had saved for me, at least I could be the one to decide how to spend it. It might have been real stealing to take seventy-four more dollars from Lynette’s wallet, but I figured they wouldn’t want me getting to LA and thumbing a ride. Not even they would think that was a bad use of money, in the end.

I stopped again because what I’d said sounded like the whole story, but it wasn’t. I’d left out the part that I’d made my mother swear not to tell my father, the real reason my mom probably first got it into her head that I needed to change schools, the thing that made me most like a Manson girl—though after seeing Sharon Tate’s grave I knew Roger was an actual mental patient for even starting with the comparison. I might have been a lousy person, but only an idiot like Roger would think that made me the same. I wasn’t. Not even kind of.

Still.

“There was one other thing,” I said. “This girl. Paige Parker. My friend Doon hates her because the guy she likes likes Paige more.” The whole situation sounded stupid and lame when I said it out loud, but I closed my eyes and spit the rest out. “Anyhow, Doon said that we could text her anonymously, so we did. Stupid things that were supposed to be kind of scary, like ‘I see you in your tutu, you whale.’ Then they got meaner and we attached some pictures. Like, Doon wrote that everyone wished she hadn’t been born at all and sent a picture of a gravestone and a gun.”

I held my breath a second before I finished. “But even though texting Paige was her idea, I was the one who sent the worst picture. After Doon had gone for the night, I found a picture of a dead fetus from an anti-abortion site. It looked like something out of a horror movie, I guess that was probably the point, and I sent it to Paige and wrote, ‘Your mom should have scraped you out early.’” I heard my voice start to shake and I closed my eyes tighter while I finished. “I didn’t even do it because I hated Paige. I know that sounds crazy, but I wasn’t really thinking about her at all. I was thinking about Doon and how funny she would think the message was, and that I couldn’t wait to tell her. It was like, in my mind, what we were doing really didn’t have a person on the other end, getting the texts.”