In Her Skin(51)

Instead I say, “That might be overstating it. It’s nice. Taylor and her friends are nice. The teachers are nice. The classrooms are nice.”

“You’re showing the strain of all this nice.”

I lean in. “It’s not what I’m used to.”

“You’re a con, Vivi.” You say this too loud, too carelessly. I check to see if anyone is near enough to hear. “What’s that your mother told you? Imagine yourself in another lifetime—a privileged private school student, for example—and become that person.”

I cringe. That was one of too many weak moments in the last few weeks, when I told you Momma’s theory. I had thought sharing Momma with you would bring her back in a small way. Instead you use it to make me feel like part of a failed carny act.

This time, you lean in. “Not all of us can be intuits.”

Taylor appears at my side and you say you’ll see me at home, and you thank Taylor for being “so cool about this,” as though she’s not getting credits or something. Even Taylor looks embarrassed, and relieved when the next stop is my introduction to “the guidance team,” a meeting she is allowed to skip. The team is a man named Brooks Willoughby and a woman named Vonnie Lee, and I am assigned to Vonnie, which is good, since Brooks is fondling his mustache, anticipating getting his hands on my brain. Vonnie closes her office door behind me, an office plastered with posters of small people in front of mountains and canyons and bike trails, suggesting that I Reach and Achieve and Dream. Vonnie has the enthusiasm of a woman just back to the workforce after raising four kids through to college, in her midfifties, grateful for her job, and slightly afraid of her computer. I can use this.

Vonnie shimmies into the seat behind her desk. “Sooo. How is your day going?”

Don’t say it, don’t say it. “Nice. Everything’s … nice.”

“The Parkman School is a nice place! A welcoming place. A safe place. I am an alumna myself.”

“You don’t say?”

“Now I won’t tell you the year, and do not guess!” she says, waggling her finger. Vonnie, you are shockingly uncool. “I’m sure your parents discussed this with you already, but it may take a while for us to determine the just-right classes for you.”

Just-right means not hard: “I understand.”

“And of course your 504 plan will reflect the special accommodations you require.”

“Five-oh … special accommodations?”

“An individual plan. For students like you.”

“Students like me?”

“We provide every girl an equal opportunity to excel.”

“Oh. Huh.”

“Let your parents know that I will be sending the draft 504 plan in an e-mail over the next few days. As soon as I figure out how to convert it to a pdf-thingy. No rush, we still have time, but I know they’ll want to review it with Dr. Silver.”

Okay, so my plan has to do with Harvey Silver’s twelve-minute diagnosis. My amnesia. I’m okay with this. This makes sense.

“I will. Um, thanks.”

You are waiting against the wall when I leave the guidance office. When I ask where Taylor went, you shrug and say you were just trying to be helpful. I ask you what that means.

“I pointed out to Taylor that she had done the majority of what she needed to do today to get to her ultimate goal—volunteer credit, which goes on her application to Princeton—and that doing any more would not help her case. That she was wasting approximately two hours that could be spent doing other work necessary to make her Princeton dream come true: i.e., attend the classics review before finals happening right now. Anyone can be made to do what you need them to do. You have to understand their greatest desire. Once you know it, you have power over them.”

This is your gift, knowing which nerve to pluck.

“Or maybe she was just sick of me,” I say.

You smile. “Maybe.”

Since I don’t know where Taylor is, I have nowhere else to go, and my day is over. You realized this, and already called me a car. As I am driven through the Fenway the driver hits a backup in Longwood and makes a turn that leads us all over the city trying to get near Kenmore Square. Boston is layer upon layer of life, parking lots and alleys and networks of underpasses and overpasses, rooftop gardens and filthy sidewalks. The driver grumbles, he does not know this city, has only been here a few days, and I tell him the Citgo sign is our beacon, and finally we turn onto Commonwealth Avenue. I feel the rush of the car more than I should. My world has shrunk, small enough to fit into a snow globe that you shake any time you’re in the mood to play.

The spiky parts of you that I’ve known are there are multiplying, or becoming poisonous in their concentration. I’m not sure which. You prick and withdraw so quickly I’m never sure if it actually happened until I spot the blood. You like to remind me that you hold my perfect life under glass in the palm of your hand, in little ways, like when you sit at the kitchen island and ask in front of the cleaners, or Gerry, if the cops ever found my abductor. Or when you wonder out loud how your diamond earrings went missing but miraculously reappeared in the same spot.

What’s most alarming is the way Mr. and Mrs. Lovecraft ignore every one of your strange suggestions. I know that you do not like to be ignored.

While you enjoy threatening me with expulsion, you also enjoy reminding me that I haven’t the freedom to leave if I choose. You like to suggest this boy and that boy you know as potential boyfriends under the guise of teasing, but the point is I will never be with Wolf again. You itemize and price the gifts I am given by your parents, cataloging my debt. When we are alone in your bedroom, doing the things we have advanced to doing, you give me side-eyed looks that used to excite me and now make me feel pathetic, as though I cannot help myself from helping myself to you, but you can. You are a table of desserts and I have no restraint. Your faint disgust does not stop me, because I am used to those looks from people on sheets underneath me, though it should.