by Megan Abbott
For the first time, I remember thinking that in all my mom’s stories about how my dad ruined her life, she made it sound like fun. Like that was the only time she felt like she was really living this life.
That probably was the surest sign that it was time to leave, and fast.
“You’ll come home weekends,” my mom said, as if reading my mind, “sometimes. It’s only six hours on the bus.”
And we both pretended I would.
“Diane.”
I turned, and it was already happening. My mom reaching out to embrace Diane, who was exiting the drugstore. Diane, to whom I hadn’t spoken in two months but who was always there, like a ghost, haunting a different school from mine. An empty, silent one. I hadn’t spoken to her, so had Diane spoken at all?
“Hi, Mrs. Owens,” her voice came, so low and hoarse it was as if she truly hadn’t spoken in ages, her words tentative, her head bowed. “Kit.”
There was a smell about her, not her usual baby powder and Ivory soap. I spotted a slick of oil in the hair tucked behind her ear.
“You must be excited for today,” my mom enthused. Swept up in everything, her purse fat with cash from taking the swear jar to the bank, she put her rubbed-red arms around Diane again.
“We’ve missed you at the house,” she added. “But we’ll see you at graduation, right? And your grandpa?”
“Yes,” Diane said. “Well, not him. He’s in the hospital.”
Which I’d heard but wasn’t sure was true. That her grandfather had been sick. But based on the look on Diane’s face and the way her head ducked lower still, maybe it was worse.
“Oh no, sweetie,” my mom said. I saw what was going to happen and I couldn’t stop it. “Listen, honey, I have an idea.”
The salon door opened, and Rae and Reena and the shampoo girl Taffy all lifted their arms—scissors in hand, curlers, Aqua Net—in celebratory cheers. That’s when I saw it was a party—a kind of party, at least. Rae, whom my mom had known all the way back to kindergarten, had run silver streamers across the mirror tops and around the pedestal ashtrays heavy with fresh cigarette butts. A big plastic bowl of slush punch shivered by the perm station, and silver-sprayed mortarboards with tassels balanced on top of every hair-dryer hood.
It was kind of great.
“Happy graduation, superstar genius,” Rae said, swathing me in a floral smock. “I could’ve predicted this when you first caught me shortchanging you at age six!”
“Oh, well, goddamn,” my mom said, not quite crying yet. “This is harder than I thought.”
Diane’s whisper between the shampoo sinks, our heads sloshing in froth.
“Kit, I shouldn’t be here. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said, Taffy’s knuckles hard against my scalp.
The sinks were vibrating from the hair dryers and the air was dense with perm solution, hairspray, smoke, heavy perfume.
Squinting to my side, I could see my mom whispering gravely to Reena and Rae, her lips moving, I knew it was And her granddad in the hospital and Mom nowhere to be seen and did you know her dad died last year? So sudden.
And Reena and Rae clucking their tongues and Taffy, her hands lifting from the soap, turning to listen, shaking her head sorrowfully.
“Sorry about your grandfather,” I said, feeling my eyes pinch from the smells. “Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t think so,” Diane said quietly. “He had a pretty bad stroke.” Since I couldn’t turn my head, since the nozzle was spraying fitfully next to my softening ear, it sounded like her voice had come from inside me.
Neither of us said anything for a few long minutes, Taffy sticking her fingers in my ears through the towel.
“Congratulations on the scholarship,” Diane said. “I wanted to tell you.”
“Thanks,” I said. I felt my mouth filling with perfumes just by speaking. “It’s the only way I could’ve gone to State.”
“Kit, I wanted to tell you. It’s okay. All of it.”
“What?” I said, my head turning, a plash of water on my neck. “What did you say?”
“Ms. Castro, how she looks at me now. I figured it out.”
She knows. I shook my head, unable to look at her. Unable to look.
“But Kit, it’s okay. It’s the right thing, how it should be. Please don’t ever feel bad—”
“I never would,” I said, angry now. “I never would. You did this—”
“But if you do, just remember what I’m saying now. It was right. And you deserve it.”
My eyes, aching, filled quickly. Suddenly, I was crying; all the chemicals were making me cry.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” I blurted out, rising to my feet, my hair dripping. Taffy ran after me with towels.
Because I could feel myself sinking back into it, the feeling of Diane.
Because there we were: Valedictorian, salutatorian. Rising stars one and two. A murderer and a tattletale. Secret-keepers, both.
“Are we going to get this party started or what?” Rae shouted. My mom whisked over to the punch bowl and Taffy turned on the ancient, fuzzy stereo system that piped through every hair station.
Diane and I exchanged sneaky smiles.
The music was loud, Bob Seger, something like that. The door locked, the CLOSED sign hanging, all of us sipping punch, staining our lips magenta, as Rae and Reena hovered over our heads, the clatter of pins, curlers, rods. Taffy dancing, waving a shampoo cape like a toreador, when that old Madonna song came on.
Diane couldn’t take her eyes off my mom, who was shimmying a little and kept squeezing both our shoulders.
Wielding her comb tail like a sword, Rae talked as she sectioned Diane’s hair for curlers, making a pineapple of her head, making all of us laugh.
“Diane, are you sure you trust her?” my mom said, plastic punch ladle in one hand, reaching for Diane’s arm with the other.
“Damn,” Reena said, already through with my shorter locks, strolling from me to Diane. “Diane has magic hair. Like Cinderella, right?”
“Sleeping Beauty,” my mom said, squeezing Diane’s fingers. Patting and touching her like she did her rescue pups, her mangy pit bulls.
“Graduation fever,” I said to my mom. “That’s what you have.”
I’d never seen Diane so happy, all these women swirling about her, tending to her as she sat under the hair dryer. Taffy filling her punch cup and Reena buffing her nails and no one saying anything about anything, my mom even making me sit on her lap for a few minutes, bragging to everyone about my scholarship, my honors, the grand future before me.
“She’s never coming back, Mama Owens,” Rae said, clucking her tongue. “What’re you gonna do?”
“I have my dogs!” my mom shouted, raising her glass and laughing and everyone laughing, except then my mom was crying too and Rae and Reena both teased her mercilessly. (Poor Mommy! “Aw, shit, baby’s got a full scholarship and can’t stick around for my dog-hair soup!”)
Diane and I kept catching each other’s eye. We were circling each other from far out. We were gripped in some kind of energy, wondering about the other. We’d forgotten about blood and dead dads, or I had. Only for today. It wasn’t just the punch, not even nearly. It was graduation day and the end of high school and the end of things, and Diane was a red lick of hunger, of desperation.
“Thank you for all this,” Diane kept saying, tilting her punch glass to her mouth. Head bobbing tipsily. “I’m very grateful. I never had this.”
“Had what, honey?” my mom said, dancing to Sheena Easton and, each time she passed us, brushing stray hairs from our necks and ears.
But Diane couldn’t answer, and as we sat in our chairs, too punch-weighted and perfume-drunk to move, I felt like everything I wanted to keep inside was coming to the surface.
“Well, both of you should know how loved you are today,” my mom was saying. “And how proud your family is of you.”
“Even if your grandpa can�
�t be there,” Rae said, “he’s with you in spirit.”
“And your mom too,” Reena said, her hands on Diane’s sharp shoulders.
Adults, I thought, had this funny way of forgetting. Because if, earlier today, my mom had forgotten about everything with Diane and her own advice to me on Senior Achievement Night (You must do for you), in that moment, she remembered it. Remembered it and turned away, lashes fluttering, something in her eye, something making her busy her hands with filling more plastic cups of clouding punch. My mom feeling my gaze, her face flushing watermelon pink.
“Well, goddamn,” Reena said this time.
Rae had spun Diane’s chair around, spraying madly, and we all got to see.
Those long blond locks stroked and smooth and coaxed and curled into something like a pin-up girl’s, a movie star’s, old school.
And Diane smiled in that small way of hers, this time even showing the tiny tips of her pretty white teeth. And her lips dark from the punch, and skin that glowed like radium. Like Marie Curie might.
I guess I never saw anything quite so lovely.
“Now you’re ready to graduate,” Taffy said, running a hand just above the sheen of Diane’s hair, pretending to smooth it like a sheet. “Now you’re ready for anything.”
They made her look in the mirror, but Diane barely glanced. Instead, she kept looking all around at the women, the twinned bosomy presence of the sisters, Taffy’s chirpy energy, and my mom, laughing and wiping a steady stream of tears away with the heel of her hand.
“Like an angel,” Taffy said, touching her hair, lifting it high. “Your daddy would be so proud.”
That’s when Diane looked in the mirror, her hand on her long, long hair like it was suddenly a stolen treasure she didn’t deserve. Like it was an affliction.
She looked in the mirror as if hoping it would swallow her.
The music swelled, Taffy swirling the dial on the stereo, the speakers spitting out Fleetwood Mac. Rae and Reena danced, clicking their metal hair clips like castanets, and my mom began dutifully sweeping up the hair, singing along loudly.
As Diane and I sat beside each other, catching our breath, the city hall bell tolled. It was definitely time to go, to graduate, to leave, to never come back. Facing our mirrors, speckled with sprays and potions, our eyes landed on each other and it was me who did it. I was the one, my hand swinging like a bell clapper, reaching for her hand, red and clenched at her side. Reaching for it, pushing it open, making her surrender it to me. Her face didn’t change, but her hand gave itself to me, grabbed onto me for dear life. Our fingers locked tight and Diane’s face still and blank and everything raging and lamenting inside, and I could forget, I could. We both could.
She was Diane Fleming, and I was never going to see her again.
Acknowledgments
Deepest thanks go, foremost, to Reagan Arthur, the ne plus ultra of editors, for whom I am grateful every writing day.
And to the wondrous Sabrina Callahan and all my heroes at Little, Brown: Craig Young, Ashley Marudas, Katharine Myers, Alyssa Persons, Joseph Lee, and so many more. And my lifesavers, as ever, Peggy Freudenthal and Tracy Roe.
By the same token, I am so grateful for the wise and wonderful Francesca Main, Paul Baggeley, and Emma Bravo at Picador.
To Dan Conaway, as stalwart, steadfast, and true an agent as one could hope for, and to Taylor Templeton, Maja Nikolic and, more largely, to Writers House.
And heartiest thanks are owed to Sylvie Rabineau and Jill Gillett.
To Jessica Malberg, for her invaluable fact-checking and question answering. And to Heather MacLeod, for providing a key early assist.
And personal thanks to my dad, Philip Abbott, who inspires and encourages me with every conversation, and my mom, Patricia Abbott, whose own creative daring is a marvel to behold.
To Josh, Julie, and Kevin, whom I treasure and adore, and to the kindhearted Nases: Jeff, Ruth, Steve, Michelle, and little Marley.
To that stalwart and sneaky genius Alison Quinn, and for the eternal friendship and grand company of Darcy Lockman, Lisa Lutz, the FLs, and my beloved Oxford, MS, friends (Jack, Theresa, Ace and Angela, Bill and Katie, and Jimmy) who save my life all the time.
About the Author
Megan Abbott is the award-winning author of nine novels, including You Will Know Me, The Fever, and Dare Me. She received her PhD in English and American literature from New York University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and the Guardian. Currently, she is a staff writer on HBO’s The Deuce. She lives in New York City.
Also by Megan Abbott
You Will Know Me
The Fever
Dare Me
The End of Everything
Bury Me Deep
Queenpin
The Song Is You
Die a Little
The Street Was Mine
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