“Try to practice self-compassion,” she said. “No one’s at her best in high school.”
“You’re just saying that because I drove you to the hospital so you have to love me,” I said.
“Speaking of which,” she said. “You need to get your license.”
“I know, I know,” I said.
“What if there’s an emergency and you have to take Beatrice somewhere?”
I’d never thought of that, but as soon as she brought it up, I was on fire to go out and get some driving practice in.
We both looked at Beatrice, who was asleep but making a vigorous sucking motion with her tiny lips. I would happily throw myself out of a moving car for her. The least I can do is master parallel parking.
Saturday, July 28
Dad took me out in the Jeep after he got back from work. It’s not like chauffeuring Miss Murphy to the hospital magically turned me into an excellent driver, but I do feel more optimistic that eventually, if I keep practicing, I’ll improve. If I can make it to the city one-handed, in a stone-cold panic, I can pass a road test someday.
“Let’s get on Route 2,” Dad said.
“OK, but I think Beatrice will wake up soon, so we shouldn’t go very far,” I said.
I didn’t look at him, but I could sense him smiling, which annoyed me. “I haven’t, like, transformed,” I said. “I’m still a bad kid.”
“Come on,” he said. “You’re not.”
“Yes, I am, and that’s normal,” I said, getting on the on-ramp. “You treated me like a criminal this winter.”
He waited while I looked over my left shoulder and then accelerated onto the highway.
“I do think I was too punitive,” he said. “I apologize.”
Hearing him admit guilt only made me madder. “You never should have let me move out,” I said.
“If I’d stopped you, you would have interpreted it as more authoritarianism,” he said.
“So?” I said. “You’d rather expose me to Mom than deal with me being bitchy?”
After a pause, he said, “You’re right.”
He should have left her years ago. She’s the scary one, but he’s the one who didn’t protect me from her.
Sunday, July 29
Mom’s coming back in a few days. She’s going to throw a fit when she sees my empty room. Maybe I’ll have Dad talk to her, so I can avoid the drama.
Monday, July 30
I asked Dad, and immediately he said he’d be happy to explain the situation to her. I should feel relieved, but I just feel cowardly.
Tuesday, July 31
It’s like Miss Murphy said: I don’t have to feel confident. I can be scared as long as I do the hard thing anyway. So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go over there and tell her to her face that I don’t want to live with her anymore. I have the strength. I watched a baby being born. I was a mean girl. I’m sure Mom will scream and cry and probably fall to her knees and beg me to stay, but I can handle all of it.
Wednesday, August 1
I figured out roughly what time Mom would arrive home after picking up her checked baggage and finding her car in long-term parking, and I arrived at the condo 10 minutes before I thought she might get there. I wound up waiting for half an hour. I tried to distract myself with my phone, but I was too nervous to get sucked into it. Finally I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and then the front door opened.
“Darling!” she said. She dropped her bags and rushed over to give me a hug. Then she stepped back and said, “You are a sight for sore eyes! Are you hungry? Let’s order food.”
“I can’t stay,” I said. “I just came over to tell you something. While you were gone, I moved back in with Dad.”
She was still holding my shoulders. She looked all over my face. Forehead, eyes, mouth. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“Oh, Chloe,” she sighed, and let go of me. “That’s probably for the best.”
She’s going to apologize, I thought. She’s going to say she’s so sorry for screaming at me all these years.
She dipped her head and smiled. “I met someone in Saint Thomas,” she said, looking back up at me. “Spencer, a fellow yogi. A genius, really—he made a fortune founding and selling four start-ups, and now he’s embarking on a new journey of self-discovery. Not that he’s gone soft. In fact, he’s found this fabulous divorce lawyer for me. She’s moving ahead quickly, and I’m all for it. On to the next chapter!”
“Moving ahead, meaning you’re really going to get divorced?”
“As soon as possible. I don’t want to jinx anything”—here she reached out and knocked on the small table by the entrance—“but I think it’s serious between Spencer and me. We’ve discussed moving in together.”
“Good thing I won’t be around to get in your way,” I said. I hated myself for sounding sarcastic, the fallback tone of every wounded teenager in history.
“I so enjoyed our time together,” she said, touching my cheek.
I ducked away from her hand. Say something, I told myself. Now is your chance. Tell her. It was almost impossible. To understand how you’re feeling, to think of the words to explain it, to find the nerve to say the words—you have to do it all so fast, and it’s so difficult.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t enjoy it.”
That was all I could manage. What I said sounded bratty and petty, not searing. But it was the best I could do, and it was something. I walked out the door before she could speak again.
Thursday, August 2
I keep wondering why I didn’t say more. I keep thinking, If I’d said THIS, she would have admitted the truth. But I don’t think it works like that. I think even if I’d talked for an hour, she wouldn’t have let herself hear me. She might have been a loser in high school, but now she’s got it down like the meanest mean girl: believe your own lies and they aren’t lies at all.
Friday, August 3
I guess I’ve been quiet, or weird, or something, because Miss Murphy keeps asking me if everything’s OK. Theoretically I could tell her about Mom, but I’ve never talked to anyone about it. Not Tris, not Hannah, not even Dad, really, except in an abstract way. I don’t think I could find the words. They’re not inside me. It would be like trying to make a castle out of dry sand.
Saturday, August 4
Thank God for Tris and Elliott and Hannah. It still feels like we’re getting away with something, hanging out without Noelle around. Tonight we went to a stupid superhero movie and then sat on the benches outside the theater and ripped it to shreds. Well, Tris and Elliott and I did. Hannah tried to find nice things to say about it, because she likes to be charitable even to cynical corporate cash grabs.
“I can’t wait until Grady sees it,” Elliott said. “He’ll hate it so much.”
Tris gave him the tiniest leg prod, but I saw it.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’m not going to burst into tears every time I hear Grady’s name, or something.”
“That’s great,” Elliott said. “And don’t feel like you have to say yes, but do you think you guys would mind hanging out? Not the two of you alone, I mean, but in a big group? Because now that he’s back, I wanted to—”
“Grady’s back from Canada?” I said.
“Um, yeah,” Elliott said. “He got in last night.”
I was going to attempt a cheerful remark, but then I gave up and leaned forward to rest my elbows on my knees and stare down at the pavement.
“He’s probably waiting for you to text him!” Hannah said.
“Elliott?” I said. “Is Grady waiting for me to text him?”
Elliott looked at Tris like he wished he could clear his response with him. “Maybe,” he said. “But if he is, he hasn’t mentioned it.”
I turned to Hannah and motioned toward Elliott like, There you have it.
Sunday, August 5
It seems safe to assume that Grady isn’t pining away for me, or even wondering how I’m doing. And that’s fine
. All I want to do is apologize to him. I’m not even hoping he’ll take me back. My expectations are realistic.
I mean, they’re not, and obviously I’m dying of love and will probably die for real if he doesn’t want to get back together, but I don’t WANT to feel that way.
Monday, August 6
Texted Grady after editing and reediting for about 20 minutes. This is what I finally sent.
Chloe: Hi! I heard you were in Canada. Welcome back! Would you be able to talk before work tomorrow? Meet at the pool at 9?
He texted back seconds later.
Grady: Sure see you there
No punctuation and an unclear tone. Is he angry? Uninterested? Wary? I want to text back and get him to clarify his feelings somehow, but I don’t know how I’d do that.
Nine a.m. That’ll give us an hour. If he shoots me down in the first five minutes, I’ll swim laps or hide in the concession stand or something until opening time.
God, I’m nervous.
Tuesday, August 7
I arrived at 8:50 so I’d have time to pull myself together. He got there at 9:02. When I saw him walk through the entrance, I couldn’t even look at him, I was so shy and worried and overwhelmed by the physical fact of him. His tan, his sticking-up hair, his familiar watch and swim trunks and rubber band bracelets, his good posture.
He headed toward the concession stand, and I came out to meet him. We intersected by the deep end.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
I’d practiced a speech, but I couldn’t remember any of my lines. I felt stunned, being alone with him after all these weeks.
“I heard Miss Murphy had the baby,” he said. “Congratulations.” He sounded polite but not warm.
“Thanks,” I said. “Beatrice. That’s her name.”
He nodded. “Beatrice. Pretty.”
It seemed impossible to switch from this half-fake, civilized conversation to the part where I talked with total honesty, but I had to do it anyway. I took a breath. “Grady, I’m so sorry. You were right about everything. We did stop talking for real. I did ignore you. I was obsessed with my brand. I did turn into Reese. Everything you said was true.”
He was watching me carefully, squinting the way he does when he’s really listening.
“Why did it happen?” he said.
I looked at the water. A drowned bee was floating near a filter.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t thought about that. I guess . . . I got meaner, and then a little meaner, and by the end I was doing things that would have shocked me last year, and they seemed normal.”
“But that doesn’t explain why.”
It felt like he was digging into my soul with a spoon. I didn’t want him to dig—I didn’t know what was in there myself.
“I wanted to be popular,” I said. “I don’t think it’s more complicated than that.”
He sat down at the edge of the pool, putting his feet in the water. I sat down next to him, not too close.
“I thought we were going to talk,” he said. He sounded disappointed.
“We are!” I said. “We are.” I didn’t want to talk. Not one bit. The tantrum I’d thrown on the day we broke up—I still felt like that. Let’s end this painful conversation and have sex! But it wasn’t an option. I could see that from the way he was sitting there expectantly. He wouldn’t take me back if I didn’t start telling him real stuff now, and keep doing it forever.
“I’m trying to think,” I said. “My parents—my parents getting divorced. I felt like, um, like no one wanted me.” How humiliating, to sound so pathetic and so self-pitying. Grady didn’t say anything. There was nothing to do but keep dragging the words out of myself. I hated it; I had to force myself to do it. It felt like staying underwater when you’re dying for a breath. “And my mom. She’s mean to me. Like, really mean. I hate it, obviously. But the thing I hate most is that I always forgive her. It makes me feel spineless. When I got popular . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Go on,” Grady said.
Back underwater. I would do it for him. “I was awful. I was SO awful! And that was a relief. It’s easier to feel cruel and strong than scared and weak.”
Grady nodded.
“I’m not making excuses,” I said. “I know other kids have it way worse. Maybe my mother has nothing to do with this year. I don’t know why I do the things I do.”
He put his hand over mine and squeezed it tightly. What did that mean? Maybe just that he felt sorry for me.
“My stepdad calls me a useless piece of shit,” Grady said.
“My mom calls me an ungrateful fucking brat!” I said, like we’d discovered we both love the same obscure candy.
“Is every name she’s called you burned in your brain?” he asked.
“Yes! When I’m trying to fall asleep at night, I hear her voice in my head telling me I’m nothing.”
“You’re not nothing.”
“Neither are you.”
Grady was looking at me intently. “You know they were like us when they were kids, right? Their parents treated them like this.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Yeah, and they thought the way you did. They got mean because they didn’t want to feel weak, and look what they turned into.”
I gripped the side of the pool hard. “I’m not popular anymore. I fired myself. I refuse to turn into my mother.”
He was still holding my hand. “They call us names because they’re disappointed with their own lives and they’re scared we’ll be happy and successful.”
“You will be. You’ll be a famous artist.”
He laughed. “No, I won’t. I love painting, but it’s a hobby. I don’t have the talent to get big. I’m going into finance. I want to make so much money I can take a helicopter from Manhattan to visit my mom. I’ll land it right on that asshole’s archery range.”
“Finance?” I said, shocked.
“What about you? What are you doing after school?”
I was embarrassed to realize I’d never thought about it, not for real. Freshman year, I wanted to be an actress, but that was never a plan; it was a fantasy. “I’m not sure,” I said.
“Like you said, college isn’t that far away,” he said. “Don’t let your mother trick you into aiming low.”
“Oh, man,” I said. “I missed talking to you.”
“Don’t start crying,” he said. “You’re going to make me cry too.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry I ran away to Canada.”
“Do you still love me?” I said.
“So much. Do you still love me?”
“So much,” I said, and then we were kissing, thank God, thank God, thank you, God.
Wednesday, August 8
We didn’t talk about our parents again yesterday, and we didn’t today, either. Instead we had crazy fast sex in the concession stand (I wish I could tell Noelle!), during which we knocked over both stools and the jar of lollipops, and then we stayed after closing and had sex a million more times on the grass, and didn’t get caught, and lay on Grady’s striped towel staring into each other’s eyes and then kissing and staring some more.
I know my mother is more than awful, and I know I don’t understand her or what she’s done to me or how she’s messed up my life. I don’t want to understand yet. Even writing these words makes me feel sick. There’s a wardrobe in my mind, the door is mostly shut, and on the other side is a vast land full of witches. I could open the door and go poking around in there, and maybe someday I will, but not yet.
Thursday, August 9
Beatrice wouldn’t stop crying tonight. I shoosh-shooshed her. Dad walked her all around the house, in the carrier and out of it. Miss Murphy breastfed her every 20 minutes for two hours. No dice. “She needs someone to talk to her,” Miss Murphy said. She sounded exhausted.
“I’ll do it,” I said. I took her up to her room and sat in the glider. “It’s OK, baby,” I said. Sh
e screamed. “I know!” I said. “I know, I know, I know, I know. You’re so right. It’s a hard life. And I can’t lie to you: Things will go wrong. You’ll make mistakes. People you love will hurt you. You’ll hurt yourself, and disappoint yourself too.” She was still sobbing. “But it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK. You won’t shatter. You’re a little lump of steel. Yes, you are, baby. You can go into the fire, and the world can smash you with a hammer, and it’ll feel terrible, but it’ll shape you into your adult Beatrice self.” She was a little quieter now. “You don’t need me or anyone else to tell you about it. You’ll figure it out, baby. You’ll turn into a strong woman all on your own.” I could feel her falling asleep, getting heavier in my arms. I was late to meet Grady, and I knew I had to leave soon, but for a few more minutes I held my little sister, listening to her breathe, looking at her glowing skin, smelling her sweet, pure scent. She’s a sister, she’s a daughter, she’s a granddaughter, she’s a niece, and maybe someday she’ll be a wife, but she’s more than any of those things. She’s herself. She’s a person. She exists.
Acknowledgments
Jesseca Salky, you do everything for me. Thank you for your energy, kindness, and patience. Carrie Hannigan, I’ll never forget that conference call with the terrible connection and all the nice things you said. Liesa Abrams, you are right about everything, always. Thank you for improving my work and saving me from myself over and over again.
Melissa Albert, I hope one day I can be half the writer you are. Emily Winter, you work so hard and you’re so funny and you inspire me. Lauren Passell, thank you for boosting my morale and my books. Susanne Grabowski, I can’t wait to see that draft and then brag to the rest of the world that I got to read it when it was still a Microsoft Word doc. Suzi Pacaut, thank you for writing hilarious and observant letters to me for almost thirty years. You’re a much better friend than Chloe. Also funnier.
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