Two Truths and a Lie

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Peter would be proud of you,” Rebecca said now.

  “For what? My parking? It’s just a driveway, Mom. Morgan could park here.”

  “Well, your parking, to start with. But a lot of other things besides.”

  Alexa winced. There was a moment where Rebecca thought Alexa might hug her, or that she might even cry. But: “Thanks,” she said softly, not meeting Rebecca’s eyes, hopping out of the Jeep, landing softly on her illegal bare feet.

  16.

  Alexa

  One day close to the end of June, Alexa locked the door and readied herself for the camera. She surveyed the contents of her closet and consulted her list of what she’d worn in previous videos.

  Alexa kept her online outfits in the back of her closet, behind her winter coats, just in case anyone ever came snooping. She selected her Diane Von Furstenberg Julian silk jersey mini wrap dress in Sussex stripe hydrangea; she found that when she wore vertical stripes her viewers took her more seriously. She could tell by the comments. In the bathroom, she employed her hair straightener to tame the curated beachy look she wore at the Cottage and, finally, she used her Tom Ford eye color, which cost eighty-eight dollars at Sephora. Alexa believed this to be a silly amount of money to spend on four shades of eyeshadow, but she also believed in looking the part, and she further believed that when you had money you should spend it on quality items.

  She tested the microphone by reciting the first stanza of “The Raven,” which she’d had to memorize in eighth grade and had never forgotten. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” she began.

  A knock at the door. She sighed and turned off the camera. Suddenly there came a tapping, she thought. “Yes?”

  “Alexa?” Morgan.

  “What’s up, Morgs? I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Who’s in there?”

  “No one’s in here.”

  “I thought you were talking to someone.”

  Come on, thought Alexa. She just wanted to make her video and get on with her day. “It was just an audiobook,” she said. Alexa had never listened to an audiobook in her life, nor did she plan to.

  “Can I come in?”

  “No.” Too sharp, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m doing something important. Where’s Mom?”

  “I don’t know.” Morgan’s voice was plaintive. “She’s not home. She didn’t leave a note.”

  “Text her.”

  “I did. She didn’t answer yet.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine for a little while.” Alexa couldn’t help the note of exasperation that crept into her voice.

  From outside the door came Morgan’s irritated little huff. “Why can’t you be nicer, Alexa? Like you used to be?”

  Alexa winced. “I’m nice!” she told the door. “I’m nice all the time.”

  “No you’re not. Not anymore.”

  The truth was, Alexa hadn’t been all that nice to Morgan lately, really not since Peter died. Morgan’s grief had seemed so separate from her own—in many ways so much cleaner, so much more deserved and allowed, that Alexa felt herself bumping up against it again and again. Unable to help herself.

  “I’ll be down in a few,” she added, more softly. Picturing Morgan’s sad little face, hearing her raspy, innocent voice, brought to the forefront an uncomfortable question.

  Alexa’s biological father was “no longer in the picture”—a euphemism employed by Alexa’s mother and adopted by Alexa herself, even though she knew that the truth behind those words was darker and more ominous. A raging alcoholic. Incapable of or unwilling to seek rehabilitation. A danger to himself and others. No longer in the picture. Never to be in the picture again.

  So Alexa couldn’t help but wonder. If Morgan’s essential goodness came half from Rebecca and half from Peter, where did that leave Alexa? Only half good. Half at the most.

  “Give me ten minutes, okay?” She kept most of her videos to under four minutes, because she’d found that that was the sweet spot for holding people’s attention. She always sat in the same chair. She crossed her legs demurely at the ankle, and she aimed the camera so it focused mostly on her face.

  “Welcome to Silk Stockings,” she said. “Today we’re going to learn about toxic assets: what they are, and what to do if you find yourself in possession of them.”

  She’d been doing Silk Stockings for just about a year now. The seed first sprouted before that, in that dark time after Peter’s death. Those were confusing, unsettling days, when her mother drank a lot of red wine, and Morgan curled up in the living room and reread Harry Potter for the zillionth time. At meals, instead of sitting down and eating something her mother had cooked, as they had in the past, they each foraged in the kitchen and ate standing at the island, or trailed cracker crumbs or shreds of cheese to the television or a corner in which to nurse their melancholy. For her part Alexa found herself watching a lot of YouTube alone in her room.

  There were so many videos! And she knew that some of these people were making money from them. She started to pay closer attention. There were videos of people opening boxes and people putting other people to sleep with ASMR whispering; there were people training their dogs and people putting on makeup and taking off makeup and putting makeup on their well-trained dogs and curling hair and straightening hair and baking, sawing, grilling, singing, strumming, arranging, knitting, organizing.

  For a while Alexa was intrigued by Hannah Hart, who cooked drunk, but Alexa didn’t like to cook. She definitely didn’t like to cook drunk. (She didn’t even like to eat drunk.) It was around that time that she was taking an Intro to the Stock Market at the high school that she’d chosen as an elective because the teacher, Mr. Bennett, was supposedly an easy grader.

  One day she was listening to him talk about bull markets versus bear markets, and idly thinking about how much easier it was to learn from good-looking people, which may be prejudiced or whatever but it was still totally true (Mr. Bennett, for an old person, was not terrible on the eyes), and then it hit her. This could be her entry into YouTube. She could be the pretty girl talking about the stock market.

  She made a few videos, explaining terms she’d learned either in class or in Stock Investing for Dummies. Price-to-earnings ratio, bears and bulls, diversification. When she was confident enough in the format, and in her hair, she started posting them to her own channel. Viewers and subscribers followed—more quickly than she’d anticipated. It was sort of embarrassing, how fast and furious they came. Soon she had enough subscribers to apply to the YouTube Partner Program, where advertisers paid to appear on certain channels. She got accepted, and she started earning.

  What she made was not insane money by YouTube standards. But it was way more than she made scooping ice cream at the Cottage. It paid for her clothes, which were not cheap, and it allowed her to tuck away a sizable amount each month. For her future.

  Not long before Peter died—halfway through Alexa’s junior year—she told him she might want to take a gap year. She thought she might want to live in California for a while. Her class was suffering from collective stress and anxiety; people were having contests about how little sleep they could get by on; it was a particularly long, gray New England winter, where time and time again they opened the door for Bernice to go outside and do her business and they all swore she shook her head and backed away.

  Peter didn’t say, You can’t do that. He didn’t say, That’s not in the plan. He said, “Let’s do this. Let’s do your college visits, and you take your standardized tests, and you do your applications. Just to cover your bases. And when the time comes to decide, we’ll have a conversation about it with your mom.”

  Alexa didn’t understand how Peter could be so reasonable and so patient all the time. She had only seen him get truly angry twice, once when somebody keyed his car in the North End in Boston while they were all having dinner at Carmelina’s, and in 2018 when the Patriots lost
to the Eagles in the Super Bowl.

  Then Peter was gone. Poof. She thought that if Peter were here he’d be proud of what she’d built, and somehow his imaginary approval got intertwined with her efforts too. Later, after her fight with Caitlin and Destiny, after months and months of feeling removed from her mother’s and Morgan’s grief, her desire for a new life, a faraway life, got braided in as well. And now here she was, sixteen thousand subscribers strong.

  Neither she nor her mother brought up the college visits: nobody had the time or the energy to make them happen. She visited and applied only to Colby, her mother’s alma mater, and to UMass, and got into both. As Silk Stockings gained steam, her interest in college narrowed and narrowed until it was the size of a pinhole. In May she had taken a deep breath, called Colby, and given up her spot. Come September, she would head to Los Angeles, where Silk Stockings would be but the first step in making Alexa Thornhill a brand.

  She had a few things to sort out, such as, where would she live in L.A.? How much money did she actually need to get started? When would she tell her mother that she wasn’t going to Colby? She’d confided rather ill-advisedly in Tyler, but she’d sworn him to secrecy. And she’d begun to mention her plans to move to L.A. casually in the occasional video (the one about understanding current market conditions, for example), aware, as any rising YouTuber was, of the possibility of the eyeballs of a talent scout coming to rest on her channel.

  She turned off the camera and checked the comments and likes on her last video, about cryptocurrency, one of her more challenging endeavors. A few hundred comments, including the usual: people who liked her dress, people who didn’t like her dress, someone who thought there was too much of a glare coming in through the window, someone who saw fit to bash the person who complained about the glare, and so on and so forth. Not too many people had much to say about the actual content. Never mind: YouTube empires had been founded on less. She scrolled down until her eyes snagged on a comment from jt76. This person had been popping up more and more in the comments, and always had something kind to say.

  She thought of jt76 as a he, but of course it could be a lovesick lesbian or a transitioning teenager or a masquerading Mom Squad member. Maybe jt76 wasn’t even kind! Maybe he (or she) was from the SEC and was going to arrest her for some sort of violation she didn’t even know she’d committed.

  This time it was: Really succinct explanation, I’ve never really understood this topic before! Thank you for condensing it so well!

  At least somebody thought she was good at something. Even if nobody thought she was nice.

  17.

  The Squad

  We’re not sure where you heard this, but honestly. Somebody told you Esther would be the homecoming queen? No. Sorry. You’ve been misinformed. Esther was more like that girl who manages the boys’ teams instead of playing her own sport. You know that girl, right? Always walking around with a clipboard, telling people where they needed to be and what time the bus was leaving. That was Esther. Homecoming queen? Please.

  18.

  Sherri

  Sherri’s counselor had done a lot of legwork to help them settle into their new lives, greasing the wheels in important and invisible ways. Apparently the surf camp at the beginning of the summer was nearly impossible to get into without a lot of prior planning! And Katie had secured a spot. Now Katie was enrolled in a series of one-week camps through the Youth Services program in town (this week’s was Knitting for Preteens; Sherri had never learned to knit herself and was in awe of the collections of stitches Katie had been bringing home each day) and Sherri, also with the counselor’s help, had a job interview. Here she was at Derma-You, a medical spa in Danvers, interviewing with the office manager, a woman named Jan. Sherri was carrying her fake resumé in a new bag she’d bought for $29.99 at Marshalls. She thought it looked like it cost quite a bit more than that, though.

  It had been a long time since Sherri had held a job. She’d stopped working after she and Bobby got married. She hadn’t exactly been changing the world; she’d been working as a receptionist at a hair salon and frankly had been happy to give it up and concentrate on getting pregnant, which took longer than she thought it would. Now, the prospect of a job interview filled her with equal parts terror and feverish, trembling excitement. She, Sherri Griffin, was going to reenter the work force!

  When Sherri walked into Derma-You’s waiting room she found it busy, full of women, most of them bent over clipboards and casting furtive glances around at the rest of the patients. She was shown by one of the smooth, ageless front desk employees to a small room in the back to meet Jan.

  “We need someone to answer the phones, that sort of thing,” said Jan, launching right in. Apparently they weren’t going to sit around and engage in small talk. That was all right with Sherri. Small talk made her nervous, because she didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Jan could be in her fifties or in her thirties or her forties depending on how many of Derma-You’s services she had availed herself of. It was really hard to tell. Sherri tried to listen to her without staring too hard at her puffy lips.

  “A lot of the job is answering phones,” said Jan. “Being the first face the patient sees, that sort of thing.”

  “I’ve got a really good phone voice,” said Sherri, trying not to sound too eager.

  “Eventually you’ll need to be trained in the billing system, which is sort of complicated.” Jan rustled the fake resumé, which had Sherri having had a number of clerical jobs in and around Columbus, Ohio. She furrowed her unfurrowable brow. “Have you ever worked in a medical office before?”

  “Not specifically,” said Sherri. “But I’m a very fast learner.” That’s what the counselor had told her to say, and in fact it was true.

  “Well, we’re extremely short-staffed right now,” said Jan. “We’re opening another branch in Woburn, and half of our front desk staff has had to go over there, so we’re scrambling. You can consider yourself hired.”

  “Really?” It was that easy, to get a job?

  “Really,” said Jan. She peered at Sherri’s face.

  “What?” asked Sherri, putting a hand self-consciously to her cheek. The light was extremely bright in this office.

  “You should stay out of the sun. You’ve got sunspots here”—Jan touched Sherri’s cheek along the top of her cheekbones—“and here.” The edge of her forehead. Sherri reared back; something had activated her “fight or flight” instinct.

  “Sorry,” said Jan, lowering her hand. “I was just going to say, the lasers can do wonders with that. I didn’t mean to spook you.”

  “You didn’t spook me,” said Sherri untruthfully.

  “There’s no shame in wanting to improve yourself,” Jan said firmly. “That’s the most important thing you need to understand if you are going to work at Derma-You.”

  “No! No, of course not,” said Sherri. “Of course there isn’t any shame in wanting to improve yourself.” If anybody in the place understood that, it was Sherri. If only there was a laser for the heart, thought Sherri. A filler for the soul.

  They went over some specifics. Jan preferred to train new hires in the evening, when it was a bit quieter in the office. “Not that it’s ever really quiet,” she said, both proudly and ruefully. The office was open until nine three nights a week. Could Sherri come at six p.m. on the sixth of July, which was next Monday?

  Yes, Sherri could come at six p.m. “How long will I stay that night?” she asked.

  “A couple of hours,” said Jan. “Maybe longer.”

  Sherri thought of Katie in the corner of the bedroom. Her heart started to beat faster. But she couldn’t not take the job. They had to eat; they had to pay the rent. “I’ll see you on the sixth,” she told Jan.

  She made her way through the thrum of women seeking self-improvement: the women who felt no shame about their bodies and the women who obviously felt lots of shame. Once she was in her car she allowed herself a little whoop of joy. She had a job! She would
get a paycheck and discounts on the lasering of sunspots! She, Sherri Griffin, would be a contributor to the economic wheels that powered the great state of Massachusetts.

  Sherri decided she’d bring some sort of treat home for Katie to celebrate. Maybe some of those Angry Donuts from the shop on Winter Street. She hadn’t tried Angry Donuts yet—she didn’t know what the doughnuts were quite so angry about—but one of the moms had told her they were very good.

  She found a parking spot near the shop, and when she got out of the car such a funny, unexpected thing happened. She wasn’t far from the river, and some of the scent had wafted her way. A pair of seagulls circled, letting out a mournful, delirious cry. From where she stood she could see the foot traffic and the bike traffic on the rail trail. It was all still so foreign to Sherri, the smells and the sounds and the very particular air of a New England summer. And at the same time, in some inexplicable way, she was starting to feel like she was home.

  As it turned out, Angry Donuts sold out early most days and nothing was left for Sherri to buy. So after she picked Katie up at the knitting camp she took her to Mad Martha’s. They would celebrate Sherri’s new job!

  Mad Martha’s was nothing more than a little cottage on Plum Island, really almost a shack, with just a few tables, the bigger of which patrons shared with other patrons whether they knew each other or not. Katie and Sherri were seated with a family of five on vacation from Durango, Colorado. The food was delectable, and the community table lent the whole experience a jolly, festive air. The Colorado family was chatty. Durango sounded lovely, with a famous railroad that wound through canyons and a national forest. Sherri put it immediately on her mental wish list of places to visit. The list was long and included India and Africa too. Realistically she probably wouldn’t get to any of those. Her pay at Derma-You was twenty dollars an hour, and she wasn’t even working full-time. The waiter was young and nice-looking, with beachy hair, a good tan, an easy smile. Sherri could tell that Katie was smitten, blushing faintly when she placed her order. Watch out for the good-looking ones, Sherri imagined telling her when she was a little older, in a few years’ time. I went for a good-looking one, and look what that got us.