True Places(33)

Her mother smiled and reached for his hand. “Thanks, Whit.”

Brynn turned away in contempt. Her mother didn’t even have a real job. Sure, she ran around all day, but it wasn’t as if she had to. Other moms worked. Her mom kept herself busy, and now she wanted to take on a random stranger as a side project. Her dad was letting her mother have her way because he couldn’t say no to her. He was too nice.

Reid picked up his book. “Personally, I think Iris sounds intriguing. Is she going to go to school with us?”

Brynn hadn’t thought of this. Her brain lit up in flames. School was the one place where she had control over her life. “Not happening.”

Her mother said, “Not for a while. She has a lot of adjusting to do.”

Brynn stood up. “I’m done. This whole thing sucks.” She stormed out before her mother could say another word.

Upstairs, Brynn showered, wrapped her hair in one towel and her body in another, and retreated to her room, door closed. She pulled a half dozen outfits from her closet and laid them neatly on the bed, matching shoes and boots to each one. The process calmed her. Colors, textures, styles, levels of provocativeness all had to be meticulously balanced. It might only be a lacrosse game, but presentation was everything. She tried on the first outfit: her favorite skinny jeans (why had any other kind ever been invented?), gray suede booties, and a fluffy white sweater with a wide, low neckline. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on her closet door and turned first one way then the other, considering. Her legs were too long. With the white sweater, she resembled a Q-tip. She tore off the sweater, tossed it on the floor (so unlike her except when angry) and put on a pale-blue J.Crew button-down shirt she’d worn just once, leaving the top buttons undone so the lace edge of her push-up bra was just visible. Better. She texted Lisa a photo of her reflection.

LISA: Keep it.

BRYNN: Thanks, bb.

She stared at her reflection, forgetting for a moment about the clothes. Her face was the real problem. Tears stung her nose. Why did she have to have her father’s long, horsey face? It looked fine on him, sophisticated and strong, but on her those features were a huge liability. Her eyes were all right—blue and not puny—and her mouth was, well, a mouth. But her nose was a full inch longer than it needed to be. It was so unfair. Her mother was beautiful. She had big brown eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips. And her nose wasn’t anything you’d notice, which was exactly the point. Everyone said her mother looked like Julianna Margulies, except Brynn’s friends, who knew Brynn would go ballistic at the mention of it. In Brynn’s opinion, her mother was prettier than Julianna Margulies, because Suzanne had thick, honey-colored hair that contrasted with her brown eyes. And the worst part was her mother didn’t play up her looks at all, just pulled her hair into a ponytail, put on some lip gloss, and wore the clothes Grammy Tinsley bought for her, but never in the right combinations. Her mother was gorgeous without any effort. How unfair was that?

Of course, her mother always told Brynn she was a pretty girl, pointing out her fine blonde hair or her eyes, but Brynn had known the truth for a long time. As early as third grade, boys had started whinnying whenever she went past. Until then, she had been proud to have a beautiful mother. Slowly it dawned on Brynn that her mother wasn’t something she owned, and her beauty wasn’t shared. Worse, her mother could never understand how Brynn suffered because she was an ugly duckling. Beautiful people were totally blind to how much looks mattered. They automatically got all the attention—not just from boys but from other girls, too. Maybe when her mother was younger it didn’t matter as much, but now when photos were everything, and people spent all their time stalking each other, stalking themselves to see what everyone else saw, having a horsey face wasn’t just a little unfortunate. It was a catastrophe.

Brynn double-checked her outfit in the mirror, inspecting her butt, which she already knew looked awesome in the jeans.

Thank God she was tall and had money for the right clothes. Otherwise she’d be invisible, a nobody.





CHAPTER 15

Nurse Amy stepped onto the car door ledge to show Iris how to buckle the seat belt, then squeezed the girl’s hand. “See you for your checkup in a few days.”

“Thanks.”

Suzanne climbed in through the other door. “It’s not far at all.” She smiled and turned the key that started the motor. “I’ll go slow.”

Iris faced front and avoided looking out the side windows like Suzanne said. The movement of the car made her stomach queasy. She could run almost as fast as this, so it had to be because she was being moved instead of moving herself. Carried along from one cage to another.

The buildings were crammed along the road. One after another after another with little or no space in between. All the surfaces were hard except where trees grew out of square holes: maple and beech and other types she didn’t recognize. Suzanne turned the car onto another road and again onto another. The turns sloshed Iris’s insides, and she grabbed the side of the seat. There were more trees now, bigger ones, and the buildings had no signs, just numbers. Small patches of very short grass grew in front of each building.

“What are these?”

“Houses. Each one is for a family, like your house in the woods.”

Iris examined Suzanne’s profile for signs she was joking, although Iris couldn’t remember Suzanne ever making a joke. If she was serious, it meant the families were very large. She wondered if this was part of the overpopulation and damage to the earth her parents had warned her about. Iris understood exponential growth and limited resources. She understood the earth was a beautiful, precious, finite space. She understood she was part of a deeply interdependent natural system that could be thrown out of balance or destroyed entirely by greed and carelessness. Iris hadn’t thought about this in a long time because she had been too occupied with surviving on her own, but her comprehension of the world as a whole and her responsibility to it was a given, like gravity, or the seasons. Now she absorbed what she was seeing in light of what she knew. Curiously, there was little sign of overpopulation, or any population at all. A man was getting into a car. A woman walked beside the road holding the hand of a small boy. When her mother talked about overpopulation, Iris had imagined people shoulder to shoulder with barely enough room to turn around, like a brood of nestlings tucked into a nest.