I'd Give Anything(50)
“Don’t you still have favorite things?”
Avery wasn’t used to feeling sorry for her mother. It was unsettling. Her mother was protective of her, not the other way around. But suddenly the idea of her mother no longer singling out and labeling the letters, colors, foods, places that were her favorites, the idea that she’d lost interest or that she’d come to feel that one thing was just as good as another, made Avery inexplicably sad.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe if I thought about it I would realize that I do.” She smiled at Avery. “But the only favorite thing that springs immediately to mind is you.”
“Well, I think you should think about it.”
“Okay. If you want me to, I will.”
“Good.”
Maybe because Avery had planned on staying mad at her mother for much longer than a day and because she felt her anger slipping away, she said, “Mom, can you please tell me what was on the journal page that you tore out and burned? I won’t talk about it to you or to anyone if you don’t want me to, but I need to know. I can’t even explain why.”
The light in her mother’s face dimmed.
“Avery, I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“So that’s it? I can never know? What do you think will happen if you tell me? Will life as we know it end? Will the universe explode?”
“I can’t tell you because it’s not my secret.”
“Like only one person owns a secret,” scoffed Avery. “What about Dad’s secret? Was that just his?”
Her mother sighed. “I see your point. And I hate that I can’t tell you, but I can’t.”
“The truth will set you free. What about that, Mom?”
Her mother shook her head. “Not this time. Not this truth.”
Avery had waited until the lights went down in the auditorium of St. Michael’s School, before she’d gone in to find her seat. She’d told the woman sitting at a table in the school’s atrium selling tickets that she had to leave early, so she needed a seat at the very back, preferably on the aisle. The woman had said, “Well, that’s good because those are the only seats left. Next time, if you want a good spot, honey, you should get here earlier. They’ve probably already dimmed the lights, so you won’t be able to find your friends, either. The curtain’s going up at any second!”
Not finding friends—or people Avery might know—was the whole point, but she hadn’t told the woman this.
Avery had begun to investigate Cressida Wall. An outsider might have branded what she’d been doing as “stalking,” but Avery wasn’t obsessed and she wasn’t just idly curious about Cressida, either. She was seeking truth at all costs, and she knew the costs could be big.
As she had scrolled through Cressida’s social media accounts, Avery wondered at the ways hers and Cressida’s lives had almost certainly brushed up against each other without either of them realizing it. Friends of friends. Sporting events. Academic competitions. There had been that one debate competition, but there had to have been other moments when they’d been at the same places at the same times. In one photo, Cressida had her long, thin, graceful arm slung around the shoulders of a girl Avery recognized as the field hockey goalie for St. Michael’s. Avery wondered if Cressida had been there when Lucretia Mott played at St. Michael’s last November, if she’d sat in the stands with her blond hair tumbling down her back, her makeup light but perfect, wearing tall boots and a scarf, while Avery ran around, red-faced and sweating in her goggles and mouth guard.
In another photo, Cressida was wearing an apron and grinning behind the counter of a coffee bar. The caption read: “Having a latte fun at my new job!” Avery recognized the coffee bar, although it wasn’t the one she and her friends did homework in on Sunday afternoons. It was a few miles away, and one day about a week after her trip to the quarry, Avery told her mother she was staying after school to make up a test, and instead, she took a bus to Cressida’s coffee shop. On the way, Avery rehearsed nonchalance and sophistication, how her eyes would barely flit over Cressida’s face before she ordered a whole-milk cappuccino, instead of the coffee loaded with chocolate syrup and capped with whipped cream that was her usual choice. She’d brought a thick leather-bound copy of Jane Eyre, one of the books from her grandmother’s suitcase, to read while she sipped her drink and surreptitiously watched Cressida do her job.
Avery could not have said exactly what insights she thought she’d glean from watching a girl take and ring up people’s orders. Smiling at customers, writing names on paper cups, making change: Was there a method of performing these tasks that would belie—or not—a capacity for manipulation and blackmail, that might betray—or not—the conniving homewrecker lurking within the bright-eyed high school girl? Avery wasn’t sure. Maybe it would be more a gut feeling; Avery would see Cressida and just know whether the rumors about her were true.
But Cressida wasn’t working behind the register. She wasn’t making drinks in the intricate multistep way that always made Avery long to be a barista (the tamping down of the espresso powder was her favorite part) or bringing out food or busing tables, either. For well over an hour, Avery sat with her book open on the table in front of her, automatically decoding the words in the densely packed sentences of Jane Eyre without comprehending them and sipping her bitter, cooling drink, hoping that Cressida might breeze in with her scarf trailing and her golden hair clouding around her face. But she never did. When she took stock, Avery was happy to find that she was at least a tiny bit more disappointed than she was relieved at this.