Good Girl Bad (14)

She slips in beside her and wraps her arms around her and wonders what else she can do to be her very best self, and make her mother happy.





12





Three-and-a-Half Months Earlier

Tabby skips home from school with more joy in her step than Genevieve has seen in a long time.

She, Genevieve, is dragging her feet. Her mother’s new friends are coming round for dinner tonight, and Genevieve doesn’t mind helping with dinner, she really doesn’t. It’s the talking that she minds. The false smiles, pretending everyone is happy. Fielding all the interested questions, having to participate. Having to get to know someone new.

Again.

Oh, Beth seems perfectly lovely. But she’s bringing her own daughters tonight, girls that Genevieve has never met, and she’ll have to be friendly, she’ll have to be attentive, she’ll have to pretend that they’re all going to be great friends, that they’ll have a future together, when surely everyone knows that is not going to happen?

Well, Beth doesn’t know. She saw the way Beth was looking at her mother last month, the fawning eyes, her feeling of sheer luck that she’d managed to befriend someone so sophisticated, so fun, so successful.

When Rebecca makes new friends, they feel like they have won the lottery.

Genevieve has seen it all before. And she’s lost friends, too, people she really actually did care about, from previous times that she’s done this dance. The Happy Family Dance, she calls it.

She’s done it enough times to give it a name.

She misses Rosie and the twins. They used to visit all the time, even go on holidays together. The twins were Gen’s age, and it was the only time Gen didn’t feel like the third wheel, following her older sister around. When the twins were there, Genevieve was the center of attention, and it wasn’t so much that she liked that, more that it made her feel carefree. Like she didn’t have to look out for Tabby, make sure Tabby wasn’t getting sick of looking after her little sister.

She doesn’t know why they stopped visiting, though she could take a pretty good guess.

Now, she drags her feet, and wonders why Tabby seems so chipper.

“Beth tonight,” she says, watching her sister from sideways eyes, and Tabby does a double take.

“Oh yeah,” she says. But her stride only dampens down for a minute or two. Then she’s skipping ahead again, a small smile playing around her lips.

“Why are you so cheerful? It’s been nearly two weeks. The clock is ticking.”

Tabby stops dead in her tracks. She turns to face her sister. Something flickers across her face.

Guilt?

“Listen, Gen,” she says, leaning down, taking her sister by the shoulders and looking earnestly into her eyes. “We’re not stuck at home forever, you know? It feels like it, when things are bad. It feels like that’s all of life. But we’re growing up. We’ll have other things, other people. Don’t forget that, okay? If, when I’m gone…” Here she trails off, and Genevieve has a moment of fear.

“Where are you going?” And when Tabby is silent, a distant look in her eyes: “Are you going somewhere, Tab?”

“No, of course not.” Tabby shakes herself, as though to get rid of her troubling thoughts. “I just mean, you know. You’ll be there without me, when I finish school. And I know it’s never been about you, and I hope it never becomes about you. And you can call me, any time, you know. Wherever I am, twenty years from now, you can call me if you need me. I just… It’s finally seeming like there’s an end in sight, you know?” And here Tabby lurches forward suddenly, hugging Genevieve to her tightly, her voice choked.

“I love you, Gen. I’ll always look out for you, you know that, right?”

Then she spins around and starts walking quickly away.

Genevieve stays where she is.

Is Tabby wiping away tears? she wonders, watching Tabby’s retreating back. She has a slightly sick feeling deep in her abdomen. There’s something Tabby isn’t telling her. And if Tabby is leaving (where would she go? To Nate’s house? To Freddy’s? Is she going to run away?), then the carefully balanced life Genevieve tiptoes around—never disrupting, never rocking the boat—seems suddenly, terrifyingly, very unbalanced and very unsafe.





When the girls walk in the front door, Rebecca greets them with a big smile and a giant pile of flowers.

“Genevieve, darling, would you work your magic on these flowers for me? You’ll meet Beth’s daughters for the first time tonight, I want to make them feel welcome, like we’re excited to see them, so they know that we’re going to some effort to welcome them into our lives.”

“Of course,” says Genevieve, reaching out to touch the stems, see what’s there. Already imagining how to fit them together. She has a knack for making things beautiful. The process itself is like a meditation, staring at the shock of color, the extravagance of nature. Taking the time to make the arrangement just so.

When she’s finished, she’ll stare at her work, stare at it and stare at it, and wish she could arrange the rest of her life just so, too.

You want to make them feel welcome, or you want to make them feel envious of your perfect life?

No one would ever guess that’s what she’s thinking beneath her calm demeanor, the eager way her hands reach toward the flowers, lovingly touching and sorting them, selecting each stem for the arrangement so that it is perfect, too. Her expression—also perfected, over the years—is one of sweetness and generosity. Rebecca would have no idea what’s underneath it.