Back in Vegas there were times when money would get tight. I’d have to reel Mom in, tell her the credit cards were steaming, remind her she didn’t need another pair of dangling crystal earrings. And she’d watch her spending and we’d be back on track in no time. When we left, I was reluctant to hand over the checkbook, relinquish that control, but she insisted. It was not fair, she said, the way she had dumped that responsibility on me. But I like it! I insisted. No, things were going to be different in Georgia.
It was really hard now, after such heartfelt proclamations, to watch her fumble. How could she have spent the emergency fund? I felt like a mother watching her child make mistakes, helplessly standing by, cringing, but unable to control the course of fate.
11
All day I felt out of sorts. I had spent the entire night replaying the scene on the couch with Max and now I couldn’t concentrate because I was all jittery with nerves about going over Mia’s to try and hypnotize her.
That afternoon I texted Max that I didn’t need a ride home since I was going over Mia’s house. Max texted back, I’d think twice before going through with this.
But I couldn’t back out now. Ever since I’d agreed, Mia had asked me to sit with her at lunch, talked to me in the hallway, and smiled her thousand-watt stage smile at me. I’m sure she needed to make a show of friendship so no one would question why I was going to her house—but still, it felt kind of nice.
At the end of the day I met Mia in the student parking lot. She pressed a button on her key chain, and the locks clicked open on a shiny new apple red Lexus IS convertible. It was sleek, pristine, and top of the line—exactly the kind of car I pictured her driving.
“Wow,” I said, climbing in the passenger side. “This is such a nice car.”
“Thanks,” she said, then asked me if it was okay to ride with the top down.
“Sure.” I smiled and she backed out of the lot with the wind whipping through our hair. She drove through town and turned left onto an unfamiliar road, driving to the north side of Worthington, close to where I remembered that my grandparents lived. She slowed the car down and pulled into a development where the homes were grand and the yards were sprawling and manicured. We continued down a long driveway and pulled into a huge three-car garage.
The kitchen was practically the size of our entire house. It was bright with sunlight streaming in through oversize windows. Adjacent to the kitchen was a dining area with a crisply ironed pale yellow tablecloth and plates and silverware set for a family of three. I noticed fancy fabric napkins artfully placed inside napkin rings delicately set atop the china plates. I thought of our kitchen table—no tablecloth, no place settings, more often strewn with magazines and DVD cases than plates. Most of our eating was done on the couch while we watched TV. And while I’ve always loved the easiness of that, for some reason, staring at that table gave me a little pang—at how much thought and preparation was displayed for the family.
Mia walked over to the counter, where there was a plate filled with slices of apples chopped into uniform bite size wedges. A small note was stuck next to the plate. Have fun today with your friend. The PTA meeting should be over by 7 p.m. Love, Mom. Mia offered an apple wedge to me and I took a bite.
“At my house,” I said, “the only snacks we have are cookies and twinkies.”
“Oh my god, I love cookies,” Mia said.“ But I can’t eat them.” She patted her flat stomach.
I looked at her tiny size-zero frame. “You’re kidding, right?”
She sighed. “I have to be careful. Mom told me when she went to college she gained the freshman fifteen—got boobs and hips. She thought it was great until she tried to do a double back tuck and crashed. Her center of gravity was all thrown off. She almost was booted as captain. She had to work really hard to hit her landings again.”
“Oh,” I said, because I really didn’t know what else to say.
Mia grabbed some water from the enormous, stainless steel fridge and indicated for me to walk with her down a long hallway toward her bedroom. On the taupe wall hung an oversize oil painting of Mia and her parents at the beach. It was a beautiful picture. Everything looked so perfect. The pristine white beach. The aqua sea in the background. The cloudless blue sky. But it was more than the setting. The family looked perfect—all three of them dressed in white linen, the breeze blowing the tall sea grass against their legs. They looked so happy. That’s what I want, I thought. No crazy divided family. No bizarre jobs and clothes. Just . . . the perfect beach photo.
Mia noticed me staring. “My mom loves beach pictures,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “We have to pose for one every year.” She shook her head and I nodded, indulging her as if posing for pictures on the beach was such a pain in the neck. But deep down, I couldn’t suppress a tiny ache. What would my family picture look like? No dad, no grandparents. Mom kept saying this move was going to change our lives—be more conventional—but what had changed other than our address? She still dressed like a stage performer; we didn’t have dinners at a table set with real plates and fabric napkins; she wasn’t getting involved at my new school and our bank account was overdrawn. She still hadn’t gone to visit Grandma and Grandpa. She had made one hasty phone call to check in on Grandpa’s health and tell them we had arrived, but that was it. And that was not the reunion I had imagined.
“What’s wrong?” Mia asked.
“Oh, nothing.” I tried to blow it off, but Mia put her hand on my shoulder—a simple gesture, but one that seemed so unexpected. It wasn’t her thousand-watt stage smile, and it wasn’t a carefully crafted outline or bullet-point note. It seemed, maybe, a little more genuine than that.
“It’s just, I don’t know, you’re living like the perfect life. Perfect family, perfect house, the hottest boyfriend, captain of the cheerleading team, great grades. You’re always happy. You have willpower to not eat junk food and your hair is never frizzy.”
Mia sighed. And there, standing in the soft light of the hallway, again she looked more like the broken cherub from the bathroom meltdown than the perfect queen bee. “It’s hard,” she said.
I had seen her crack over a ripped skirt. “Hard to keep up the facade?” I asked gently.
She nodded and walked to her bedroom. So I followed. She sat on the silky yellow duvet cover on her huge queen-size bed and fiddled with the ends of her corn-silk hair. “Everyone expects me to be perfect. Not just my parents, but everyone—teachers, friends, neighbors, my coach. Like with such a perfect life, I have no excuse not to get straight A’s and be class secretary and nail that double back tuck.”
I looked around her huge room, at all the plaques and trophies and shiny blue and red ribbons that crowded the bookcase shelves above her desk. There were framed photographs of Mia as a toddler, then as a child, dressed in ruffled gowns, sashes across her chest. A pageant child.
“I mean,” she continued, “people would just die if I ever admitted, Hey, I don’t think I want to try that flip. Or I don’t think I can do that flip. Or what if one day I just failed a calculus test and tried to say I couldn’t study because my parents were fighting all night because Mom says Dad works too late and never makes time for us? People would never believe that, would they? And my hair is frizzy. I just spend a lot of time and money on products to make it appear like it’s not.” She looked over at the picture of her and Jake framed on her nightstand. He was decked out in his football uniform, all sweaty and muddy, and she was standing next to him, looking minuscule in her tight cheerleading uniform and sneakers. “Or what if one day I just broke up with Jake and said, You know, I can’t take it anymore. Your idea of romance is pizza and a football game. You gave me a birthday card with a fart joke inside! But people expect me to date him.” She looked down. “Everyone expects something from me,” she said quietly.
I felt bad for her. Because while I had no boyfriend, no father, no grand house with a table fully set, my mother never made me feel pressured to do anything other than ju
st be me. And suddenly I had an overwhelming urge to help her, to do for her the one thing that maybe I could do to erase her fears and help her perform that tricky tumbling pass for the cheerleading competition.
“Look,” I said, “I’ve never done this kind of hypnosis before but I read about it, not just like on the Web, but in real textbooks, and I think I can do it.”
“Really?” She brightened and sat up straighter. “Willow,” she said, looking serious, “I’ve never told anyone any of this before.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. It felt special that Mia was trusting me with this. Her insecurities and the hypnosis.
She showed me a video clip on the Web of a move called the Arabian that she wanted to do and asked me to give her the ability to calm her panic about the flip.
So I did. I took the same familiar steps of deep breathing and counting to achieve muscle relaxation to put her under hypnosis. I was relieved when I saw the telltale sign of her shoulders slumping and her head dropping. I pulled my handwritten notes out of my pocket and began to speak in a low, calming voice, telling her that she could take her fear out of her mind and place it on a shelf. I held up my hand and rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. “Can you do that?” I asked.
Mia copied the simple gesture.
“Whenever you get scared,” I said, “I want you to discreetly rub your fingers together like that and it will remind you to take that fear and remove it. This movement will calm you and put you back in control of your thoughts.”
A small smile played on her lips and I felt a zing of hope course through me. I brought her back to a normal state and Mia stretched her arms over her head.
“Wow! I feel amazing!” she said. “So relaxed, like I just had the best nap ever. Thank you!”
“Well, thank me after we know it works,” I said.
“Seriously, Willow, thank you.” She smiled, and I think we both knew it was about more than just the hypnosis.
Mia dropped me off at home. When I opened the front door, I felt a wave of humid heat envelop me like I had just opened the door to an oven set at five hundred degrees. Only there was no smell of roasting turkey or baking pies—just the smell of thick humidity and possibly the smell of my skin singeing just a little. A large box fan was plugged into an outlet in the family room and spinning on high. Oompa was sprawled on the floor in front of the circulating air, his pointy ears shimmying in the welcome breeze.
I headed into my room to tackle some homework. Just as I sat down at my desk, there was a tapping at my window, followed by the creak of the windowpane sliding up, and Max crawled in, toting my overnight bag on his shoulder.
“Your mom forgot this when she left this morning,” he said and hurled it onto the floor. “What do you have in there, a dead body?”
“Anti-frizz products,” I said. “They add up. We do have a front door, you know.”
He smiled. “Yeah, but this way is more fun.” The smile vanished quickly. He looked at my open calculus book on my desk. “Okay, I’ll go and let you study.” He headed back toward the window. He had acted strange all day. Was this still about his opposition to hypnotizing Mia? Or was it about what happened at his house?
“Geez, it’s like a thousand degrees in here,” he said. “Do you want to stay over again?”
My heart fluttered at the invitation, but his voice seemed flat. I couldn’t read him. Was he offering out of obligation? “Well, Mom said the AC guy would be here tomorrow. . . .”
“Oh, okay. Well, good night then.”
Had I said no?
He walked toward the window. His hands were on the windowsill, ready to climb through.
I wanted to cry, Wait! Beg me to come! Want to spend time with me!
“Wait!” It slipped out.
He turned and looked at me.
“Um . . .” My heart ticked uncontrollably. I was certain I was having a heart attack. I wanted an opportunity to talk to him more and try and understand what was going on between us. I rifled through my brain for something to say. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have our fathers around?” I asked.
He pulled his leg off the windowsill and faced me with his forehead all wrinkled up. “Sometimes.” He walked over toward me. “Why?”
I shrugged, willing my mouth not to spout all the feelings that had ricocheted around in my head earlier. I thought about the beach photo—the perfect family. “I don’t know. Sometimes I just wonder what it would be like, you know—to have a normal family.”
It was real quiet for a minute, and the weight of silence made me fear I was going to crumble. “It’s just, you know, Mom said she was going to reconcile with Grandma and Grandpa, but I guess that’s not going to happen anytime soon. I really just wanted some semblance of a family.”
“You and your mom are a family,” Max said softly.
My eyes welled. I nodded. He was right. Why was I always trying to fix things?
“When my dad was around, it was always so stressful—he and Mom were always fighting. So I don’t know, of course I miss him, sure, but I kind of like having the peace.”
I nodded again, agreeing that peace was good. I’d never lived with parents fighting because by the time I was born, they’d already split up. But I remembered what it was like when Mom and Grandma and Grandpa were always at odds.
Max knew the history—my mom pregnant at sixteen; the guy, my father, quickly shipped off to college, his parents handing my mother a check as if a little bit of money would absolve him of his involvement. It wasn’t his decision, Mom always told me, defending him. He didn’t leave us, she insisted. His parents pushed him away. He was seventeen. I don’t blame him and you shouldn’t either, she said. Mom was always open about who he was, where he lived, like I could go seek him out and create this beautiful bonding moment. But I kind of always wished that he’d seek me out first.
“It’s not really about my dad,” I said honestly. It was about Mom, Grandma, and Grandpa, and it was about Max. In my mind I had built up this beach-photo-perfect depiction of how life would be once we moved to Georgia, and so far, things weren’t turning out as planned.
Max’s legs swung back and forth, draped in front of my desk. “I think it’s kind of cool that we both are raised by single, strong, independent mothers,” he said.
And I smiled, agreeing with him. Because there it was, another thing that bonded us. And everything else just fell away.
12
Friday morning I woke up to a rusty grumble from the vent above my bed, followed by a welcome blast of frosty air. I lay there for a few minutes letting the cool wind saturate my sweltering skin. When I emerged, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with a young guy, probably in his twenties, eating lemon pound cake, drinking coffee, and discussing the tattoo on his left forearm.
“Yeah, so it’s a symbol for me,” the guy said between bites of the breakfast cake, “of my life before.”
“That’s so interesting,” Mom said with her innate ability to have complete strangers want to open up and divulge their life stories. “I’m doing that too,” she added, conspiratorially, like they were on the same team. “I’m starting over too.”
The AC repair guy smiled. “Looks like you’re doing a great job.”
I cleared my throat and they both looked my way, startled.
The AC guy was closer to my age actually than Mom’s. “Well, I better get going,” he said. “I’ve got a ton of service calls. This heat wave is doing a number on all the units around town.”
Mom thanked him again and closed the door behind him. “Hallelujah, I can breathe again!” she said, gesturing to the blowing vent above her. She sat back down at the table and I joined her. She broke off a sheet from the paper towel roll and passed me the store-bought cake. “So,” Mom said. “We’re going over to Grandma and Grandpa’s tonight for dinner.”
“Oh,” I said. I looked at her stirring the three teaspoons of sugar into her coffee and wondered if the AC repair had anything
to do with our sudden plans—if the money came from somewhere other than our account.
“It’s time,” Mom said with no mention of money. So I would never know if she called them and asked for help or if she finally just felt ready to face them.
I nodded. “When?”
“Seven.”
We both glanced over at the clock.
All along I’d been wishing and waiting for our reconciliation with my grandparents, so now that it was finally happening, why did I feel more nervous than excited?
After school, I asked Max if he could drive me into town to a clothing store.
“Sure,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”
“Someplace your mom shops.”
“Okay.” He hooked an illegal U-turn and pulled up next to the curb in front of a store called Angie’s. Max stayed in the car while I walked inside. It was small and intimate, with twenty or so racks of sweaters and pants. A middle-aged woman came over and asked if she could help me.
“Mom and I are going to a nice dinner tonight,” I explained. “And she asked me to pick up an outfit for her.”
“Oh, how nice,” the saleswoman said. Together we picked out a pair of straight-leg black pants and a light blue button-down top. It was fitted, with a little bit of spandex, so Mom couldn’t say it was old-ladyish, but it wasn’t low-cut or cropped. It didn’t have any sequins or rhinestones. It was perfect.
The sales lady rang up the bill, but when she slid the credit card through the reader, she grimaced. “I’m sorry, hon, it’s saying the card is declined. Maybe she gave you the wrong one?” she asked kindly.
“Um, yeah. Probably.” I backed out quickly and raced toward Max’s truck.
“Didn’t find anything?” he asked, turning down the volume of the radio.
I shook my head. “Let’s just go home.”
He nodded and drove away, not asking any more questions. Back at the house, I rummaged through Mom’s closet, trying desperately to find something she could wear that would not provoke Grandma. As each minute ticked closer to 7 p.m., my nerves frayed. I didn’t know what to expect. After everything with Max, I was learning that words on paper or the computer screen or even the phone didn’t always translate into the relationship I’d built up in my mind.
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