Girls on Fire(54)

DEX


About a Girl



YOU’RE GOING,” MY MOTHER SAID. “We both are.”

I felt ancient, but when it came to my mother, apparently I’d never be too old for because I said so. We went. A mother-daughter pool party, awkward purgatory of small talk and cellulite that only a Drummond could dream up.

“It was lovely of them to think of us.” My mother navigated our beat-up Olds into a narrow slot between a Mazda and an Audi, tapping the bumpers of each of them once, as if for luck. Nikki’s house couldn’t have been more than a five-minute drive from mine, but it felt like we’d passed through a portal—or maybe through a TV screen, because the sidewalk maples, the colonnade-lined porches, the impeccably pruned rectangles of green all seemed too perfect to be anything but a set. Tragedy or farce, that was the only question. “And it’ll be lovely for you to spend some time with your friends.”

Okay, farce.

“How many times to do I have to tell you—”

“All right. Girls who could be your friends. If you would only give them the opportunity.”

How was it, I wondered, that the mere act of growing older precipitated radical memory loss? Here was my mother, naively expecting not only that a coven of PTA moms who’d snubbed her for a decade would spontaneously open their arms to her un-manicured charm, but also that their daughters would follow suit.

“You really want me to go to a party? After what happened the last time.” It was a mark of my desperation that I was willing to come so close to explicitly referencing it. “Aren’t you afraid of what I’ll do?”

For someone with no sense of humor, my mother had an expert wry smile. “Why do you think I came as your chaperone?”

It should have been worth something she was willing to be seen in public with me—but then she was my mother, so that was worth about as much as her telling me I was pretty.

“You can’t control what people think of you,” she said. “You can only do your best to prove them wrong.”

“Guilty until proven innocent? I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work.”

“Life isn’t LA Law, dear.” She turned off the car. We were actually doing this.

“Lacey’s gone,” I said, the last-ditch effort worth the pain of saying the words out loud. “No more bad influence. No need to sucker me into making new friends.”

She put her hand over mine—then pulled away before I could. “You know, Hannah, my issue with Lacey was never Lacey. Not entirely.”

“Is that one of those Zen things that make no sense?”

“I know how it feels,” she said. “To invest everything you have in another person. But no one’s dreams are big enough to be worth giving up yours, Hannah. If you don’t figure that out before it’s too late, you can wake up inside a life you’d never have chosen for yourself.”

“I don’t know what any of that has to do with me.”

My mother did not talk like this, and she certainly didn’t talk like this with me. We weren’t equipped for it, either of us.

“You can’t dream someone else’s dreams forever, Hannah. And when you finally stop, it’s no good for anyone.” She clapped her hands together, plastic again with a Teflon smile, as if I’d simply imagined that, for a moment, she’d somehow melted into a real person. “Let’s get going. We wouldn’t want them thinking we’re rude.”

“Who cares what they think? They treat you like crap.” I didn’t say it to hurt her; it didn’t occur to me, then, that I could hurt her.

Framed in fake gilt on my mother’s bureau was a photo of the girl she’d once been, posing at a ballet recital with her younger sister, who, unlike my mother, was actually built to be a ballerina. The two of them were frozen midpirouette, my aunt’s form perfect and her smile beaming, my mother sullen and dumpy with a familiar thicket of frizz—her hair had gone limp after pregnancy, something else to blame me for. If this had been a movie, we would have bonded over our mutual ugly-duckness; of course, in the Hollywood version, my mother would have blossomed into an intimidating swan rather than simply expanding into a slightly taller, substantially thicker duck, one who sometimes didn’t seem to like me very much. For which I couldn’t blame her: She probably didn’t enjoy the daily reminder of her yesterday any more than I wanted the glimpse into my tomorrow.

She climbed out of the car and smoothed down her bathing suit cover-up, a blue terry cloth drape I was sure looked nothing like anything the other mothers were wearing. “Just because you leave high school doesn’t mean high school leaves you.”

I had to laugh. “That may be the most depressing thing you’ve ever said to me.”

She laughed, too. “Then I suppose I’m doing my job.”

“Mother of the year.”

I could see it on her face, the moment she decided to press her luck and go for it, a mother-daughter moment. “It’s nice to see you smile, Hannah.”

“Tell me we can get back in the car and go home. I’ll smile like I’m in a toothpaste commercial.”

“Tempting,” she said, pausing just long enough for me to get my hopes up.

Then we went to the party.