Seven Days in June(48)

And it stung, because Eva was her best friend. Of course, Audre adored her dad and his big, bustling extended family in California. On Sunday, she was flying out to spend the summer in Dadifornia—and she already knew it’d be a blast. Her dad was vacation, though. Eva was home.

It had been only the two of them forever. Girling about, creating inane rituals for the hell of it. Taking adventure walks every Saturday. Watching midcentury musicals on Wednesday nights. Collaging vision boards to manifest Oscar wins. Attending drag-queen bingo every Easter. Ordering the entire menu at their June brunch at Ladurée (steak au poivre, macarons, chocolate éclairs, lavender tea, and a Pepto Bismol chaser!) each year before Audre’s flight to California.

Tweens were supposed to hate their moms, because most mothers had forgotten how confusing it was to be twelve, thirteen, fourteen. How pointless and powerless you felt. But Eva got her. She validated her thoughts, her opinions. Besides, she wasn’t like other moms. She was like the young, quirky aunt on a network sitcom. The one you ran to when your actual mom was too uptight to discuss Plan B.

Audre idolized her.

When Audre was four, she’d tried to hop into the shadow that Eva cast on the walls. What she wouldn’t have given to try her on.

On her sixth Christmas, she’d asked Santa to make Eva the same age as her so they could be BFFs.

In second grade, she’d snuck up on a napping Eva and colored her entire forearm with a highlighter. Because she was “important.”

On days when Eva was too busy to notice, she snuck her special ring out of her room and wore it. To be like her and to feel protected by mommy magic.

And to this day, insomniac Audre still crawled into bed with her, every night around 3:00 a.m. And Eva, usually balancing an ice pack on her head, big-spooned her back to sleep, her warm hand cupping her cheek. Her sheets always smelled of the peppermint and lavender oils she rubbed on her head at night. Audre loved sinking into this scent. And if Eva wasn’t in too much pain, she’d sing her an old lullaby.

Dors, dors, p’tit bébé

’Coutes le rivière

’Coutes le riviere couler



Eva didn’t speak Creole, so she sang it in a bastardized, phonetic way. Dough-dough, tee-bay-bay. Neither one of them knew what the song meant, but it didn’t matter. This was when the good sleep started. The peppermint-and-lavender, dough-dough sleep.

Audre’s thoughts slowly ratcheted up from miserable to indignant. She thinks I’m a burden.

As if it were so easy being Eva’s daughter. A babysitter for a twelve-year-old? Constant check-ins, even if she was just walking to a friend’s house? And then there was the whole Cursed thing. When Atticus Seidman texted the entire class a gross scene from book six of Cursed, Audre had to play along, when all the while her soul was cringing.

The sex itself didn’t freak her out. Audre was raised by a mom who used the correct words for private parts, was consistently honest about where babies came from, and championed masturbation (“Self-love is paramount!”). Sex was natural, but her mom writing about it wasn’t. Gross. She was so asexual! She was just…Mommy. Cuddly and cute. It was like imagining Pikachu writing porn.

Earlier that year, Ophelia Grey’s mom had forbidden her to attend Audre’s birthday party, because Eva was a “smut peddler.” Audre, despite her embarrassment, would defend Eva to the death. She told Ophelia that her mom was repressed, and suggested she try a dildo called the Quarterback, which she’d read about on BitchMedia.org. Eva had been furious with her. But after bedtime, Audre had heard her repeating the story to Auntie Cece and giggling till she cried.

Audre was proud of her mom, unconditionally. But because of one mistake, Eva was no longer proud of Audre.

What else could she do to please that woman? She was a model student. She’d never kissed a boy. Yes, she’d tried a Juul at Brooklyn Bowl’s teen night, but she’d barely even felt anything—until she went home and ate her entire bag of Halloween candy during the span of a six-minute YouTube cheek-contouring tutorial.

Eva didn’t know how lucky she was, having a daughter like her. If Audre couldn’t make her happy, nothing would. If living a dry, dateless life was good enough for her, then fine. But it wasn’t Audre’s fault. She hadn’t asked to be born. She’d learned this lesson from a powerful codependency-themed episode of Iyanla: Fix My Life.

Plus, the threat of being expelled wasn’t the end of the world. Audre was having second thoughts about her private school anyway. It just wasn’t real. She was secretly dying to go to public school, to experience true oppression. There, she could effect the most change.

How can I say I’m a plugged-in cultural force, when I’m surrounded by so much useless affluence? she thought. Private school is a dated, classist concept.

She was stifled at Cheshire Prep. And maybe that was the difference between Eva and Audre. Eva accepted being stifled. But Audre wanted to taste life, feel it, do stuff, go places. Be an adventurous woman. Like Auntie Cece! Or Grandma Lizette.

Audre wished she knew Grandma Lizette better. They FaceTimed on birthdays and holidays, but she’d visited Brooklyn only a couple of times. Eva said Lizette had a fear of flying—plus, they were always too busy with school and work to travel much—but Audre always wondered why Grandma Lizette wasn’t in their lives more.

In Eva’s stories, Lizette sounded divine. Too beautiful, too unique, too powerful for the world. When Audre’s Contemporary Art teacher assigned their final project, to paint a feminist icon—she knew she’d paint her grandmother. Lizette, who’d won a zillion titles in the notoriously racist, misogynist pageant industry and, with no education or resources, launched a career as a model and traveled the globe with her daughter. Eva was always talking about the years she’d spent in Switzerland. All that, and then Grandma Lizette had managed to send her daughter to Princeton, too! What couldn’t she do?