Nothing to See Here (2)
I grew up in the valley of that mountain, just poor enough that I could imagine a way out. I lived with my mom and a rotating cast of her boyfriends, my father either dead or just checked out. My mother was vague about him, not a single picture. It seemed like maybe some Greek god had assumed the form of a stallion and impregnated her before returning to his home atop Mount Olympus. More likely it was just a pervert in one of the fancy homes that my mom cleaned. Maybe he was some alderman in town, and I’d seen him all my life without knowing it. But I preferred to think he was dead, that he was wholly incapable of saving me from my unhappiness.
The school, the Iron Mountain Girls Preparatory School, offered one or two full scholarships each year to girls in the valley who showed promise. And, though it might be hard to believe now, I showed a fucking lot of promise. I had spent my childhood gritting my teeth and smashing everything to bits in the name of excellence. I taught myself to read at three years old, matching the storybooks that came with records to the words the narrator spoke through the little speaker. When I was eight, my mother put me in charge of our finances, the weekly budgeting from the envelopes of cash that she brought home at night. I made straight As. At first, it was purely out of an instinctual desire to be superlative, as if I suspected that I was a superhero and was merely testing the limits of my powers. But once teachers started to tell me about Iron Mountain and the scholarship, information that my mother could not have cared less about, I redirected my efforts. I didn’t know that the school was just some ribbon that rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. I thought it was a training ground for Amazons. I made other students cry at the spelling bee. I plagiarized scientific studies and dumbed them down just enough to win county science fairs. I memorized poems about Harlem and awkwardly recited them to my mom’s boyfriends, who thought I was some weird demon speaking in tongues. I played point guard on the boys’ traveling basketball team because there wasn’t one for girls. I made people in my town, whether they were poor or middle class, especially upper middle class, feel good, like I was something they could agree on, a sterling representative of this little backwoods county. I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.
I got the scholarship, and some of my teachers even raised enough money to help cover expenses for books and food, since my mother told me flat-out that she couldn’t afford any of it. When it was time to start school, I put on some ugly-ass jumper, the only nice thing I owned, and my mother dropped me off with a duffel bag filled with my stuff, including three changes of the school’s uniform black skirts and white blouses. Other parents were there in their BMWs and cars so fancy I didn’t know the names of them. “God, look at this place,” my mom said, heavy metal on the radio, fidgeting with an unlit cigarette because I asked her not to smoke so it wouldn’t get in my hair. “Lillian, this is going to sound so mean, but you don’t belong here. It don’t mean they’re better than you. It just means you’re gonna have a rough go of it.”
“It’s a good opportunity,” I told her.
“You got shit, I understand that,” she said, as patient as she’d ever been with me, though the engine was still idling. “You got shit and I know that you want better than shit. But you’re going from shit to gold, and it’s going to be real tough to handle that. I hope you make it.”
I didn’t get angry with her. I knew that my mom loved me, though maybe not in ways that were obvious, that other people would understand. She wanted me to be okay, at least that. But I also knew that my mom didn’t exactly like me. I weirded her out. I cramped her style. It was fine with me. I didn’t hate her for that. Or maybe I did, but I was a teenager. I hated everyone.
She pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter and while she waited for it to fire up, she kissed me softly and gave me a hug. “You can come back home anytime, sweetie,” she said, but I imagined that I’d kill myself if I had to do that. I got out of the car, and she drove off. As I walked to my dorm, I realized that the other girls didn’t even look at me, and I could tell that it wasn’t out of meanness. I don’t think they even saw me; their eyes had been trained since birth to recognize importance. I wasn’t that.
And then I found Madison in my room, the room we were going to share. All the information that I had on her had been provided in a brief letter during the summer, informing me that my roommate would be Madison Billings and that she was from Atlanta, Georgia. Chet, an ex-boyfriend of my mom’s who still hung around the house when she wasn’t dating someone else, had seen the letter and said, “I bet she’s from the Billings Department Stores. That’s Atlanta, too. That’s big money.”
“How would you know, Chet?” I asked. I didn’t mind Chet so much. He was goofy, which was better than the alternative. He had a tattoo of Betty Boop on his forearm.
“You gotta pick up on little clues,” he told me. He drove a forklift. “Information is power.”
Madison had shoulder-length blond hair and was wearing a yellow summer dress with hundreds of little orange goldfish printed on it. Even in flip-flops, she was model tall, and I could tell that the soles of her feet would be so fucking soft. She had a perfect nose, blue eyes, enough freckles to look wholesome without looking like God had blasted her with bad skin. The whole room smelled of jasmine. She’d already arranged the space, had chosen the bed farthest from the door. When she saw me, she smiled like we were friends. “Are you Lillian?” she asked, and I could only nod. I felt like a kid on The Bozo Show in my shitty jumper.