A Cheshire Cat grin split Tori’s lips, and her eyes sparkled. “Look at you. I didn’t know you knew so much about Adam Oliver.”
“I don’t,” I insisted, and played with the hem of my shirt. “But he played piano in high school, so of course I knew that about him.”
“And you know he’s in Colorado. You’re not even friends with him. So how do you know so much about Adam?”
I shrugged again, hoping I was playing it cool when I replied, “People talk. I’ve heard stuff.”
“From who? You don’t have friends.”
Her biting commentary was bordering on aggravating. “You’re really going for the jugular?” But again, she wasn’t wrong. “Okay, fine. I might’ve looked him up. Is it really that surprising, since I was once so embarrassingly lovesick for him?”
“No it’s not. But since your information is outdated, why don’t I enlighten you a bit? He’s back in town.”
My heart thudded painfully loud. “No. He’s not.”
“Yes.” Her grin spread wider and I recognized the plotting look in her eye. “He is. You can make a move, and then boom—you two are a something. No more fake boyfriend bullshit.” She winked and I took her empty wineglass from her, setting it down on the console table behind the couch.
“That’s enough wine for you. When you dissolve into ill-conceived and impossible plans, that’s how I know you’re too far gone.”
“Psh.” She rolled her eyes. “My ideas are great. You don’t need to be a wet blanket.”
Ouch. It struck a nerve to have her say that about me. It was the reason I had to make up a fake boyfriend. I was impossibly shy around guys I didn’t know, awkward and insecure. Compared to Tori, I was boring. Bland. Which was one of the reasons I gravitated to her. I had a theory that people were closest with those who possessed qualities they wished to emulate. Just not in a Single White Female kind of way. I wanted to be carefree and fun like Tori was, and maybe I thought spending time with her would make me more fun.
At my wince, Tori wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. “Sorry, that was a real dickish thing for me to say.”
“It was.” I didn’t lean into her hold for a long moment.
“I know you can’t help it. Your dad.” For the first time, Tori became aware of her surroundings, looking around like my dad was lurking, waiting to analyze our conversation. “I would just love for you to emerge from your shell, reveal the beautiful butterfly that you’re hiding.”
“Butterflies come from cocoons, not shells.”
She waved that off. “You knew what I meant, smartypants.” But it was Tori who was the smartypants, not that she rubbed it in your face. She had recently graduated college a whole year ahead of the rest of us. The difference between us was that Tori was easily bored, and finished school quickly to avoid dropping out all together. Tori brushed back my hair and smiled sadly at me before lowering her voice. “It’s your senior year, Hollis. This is the time to let everyone see you, the way the rest of us get to.”
“Which is why I’m rooming with Navy.” It was a small wedge between Tori and me at that moment. The fact that I had chosen to room with my good friend Navy, someone Tori merely tolerated for my sake. They were my two closest friends, but polar opposites in attitude.
“Ugh.” Tori slumped back against the sofa with no small amount of drama. “You and that little fairy of happiness, out on the town. When I said I wanted you to get out more, I meant to parties, not to the soup kitchen.”
“What’s wrong with the soup kitchen?”
“Nothing. But what’s wrong with parties?”
I sighed. “I like soup kitchens.”
“Of course you do, you baby angel.” She tucked my hair again, but it felt mildly patronizing so I leaned away from her. “Nothing is wrong with soup kitchens, duh. It’s selfless of you, to spend your free time—what little you get—giving back to those less fortunate. But what about you? What are you doing for you?”
“I went to Bolivia this summer. That was for me.”
“You helped rebuild an orphanage,” she deadpanned. “Come on.” She shook me. “I’m serious, Hollis. You’re going to be decked in cat sweaters and pearls before you’re thirty at this rate.”
“Wow, you have such high hopes for the next nine years of my life.” I couldn’t really disagree with her. But she didn’t understand. I had been made aware of my own privilege in high school. I couldn’t change my circumstances, my very biology. But I could change what I did with my privilege, with my education and my time. Which was why I had resolved to finish my final year of college and spend the rest of the time traveling to economically disadvantaged communities.
The only kink in my plan was that my parents didn’t know that. And couldn’t, if I wanted to see a penny of the trust fund they’d set aside for me, like my two sisters before me. “Let me get to graduation and figure that out,” I told her simply.
“Are you applying to law schools?”
I looked over my shoulder. “No. But I haven’t broken the news yet.”
“You get that sack of cash upon graduation, don’t you?”
“It’s not a sack of cash, per se,” I said with a laugh. “But yes.”
“Are you gonna pull an Angie and Layla and get the hell out of dodge?”
“That’s the plan.” Freedom was a mere nine months away, so close that I could practically taste it.
“Well, don’t spend every day until then serving everybody but my girl, okay?”
“Hollis.” The voice was so jarring that I jumped, turning to look at my dad over my shoulder.
“Dad, hi.”
He nodded at Tori once, his first time acknowledging her presence. Which was better than he treated most anyone I brought around, so I knew Tori didn’t take it as a slight. “Come meet some people,” he said, more of a command than a request.
I stood from the couch and followed his already retreating steps, playing the dutiful daughter. He paused only momentarily at the door to the patio where his guests had congregated, waiting for me to catch up, and leaned down.
“You will behave,” he whispered in my ear, his words soft. As if the feel of his words could disguise the venom lying behind them. I knew the venom, I understood the threat. In the tense-ness of his jawline, the tightness in his hand that clamped on my shoulder. No, my dad was an actor and I was his supporting cast. And he expected me to win an Oscar today.
“Elodie,” he said, his smile stretched in a way that made my own cheeks hurt as I tempted to mimic it. Shaking the hand of David DeBier’s mom, my dad launched into accolades and praises for her husband—his employee—but they were thinly veiled insults to my ears. “…Always arrives to work right on time,” he said and internally I heard, but not a moment early. Punctuality was important to my father, but being early was even better. And after punctuality, good manners followed, which was why he still held my shoulder as he introduced me and squeezed a bit harder when my limp handshake invariably caught his line of sight. “This is my daughter, Hollis. I believe you met her at the Christmas party last year,” he said and turned to me. “Hollis, this is Mrs. DeBier.” He then tried to list my accomplishments—of which, in his eyes, there were few—and my attention waned until I felt Elodie DeBier’s eyes turn to me.
“Oh, and what are you studying?” Elodie asked, face pinched and flushed. My dad had that effect: charismatic to a fault, but still intimidating to the wife of an employee who surely was desperate to keep his job.
I ran my tongue over my teeth, thinking about what I would’ve liked to say: I want to eventually become a social worker, but not before traveling the world and studying other cultures, but instead I opened my mouth and said the lines I had rehearsed a dozen times before. “Cultural anthropology,” I said and braced myself for my dad’s follow-up which came less than two seconds later.
“She’s preparing for law school and this degree is one we mutually agreed on, before she goes to law school, inevitab
ly.”
Inevitably: one of my dad’s favorite words. I could get it tattooed on myself if he didn’t hate tattoos so much. Which was one of the reasons I should get it tattooed, if we were being honest. Which we were.
Inevitably, Hollis will ace all her high school classes, including the A.P. ones that she only signed up for under duress.
Inevitably, Hollis will remember to smile in our annual fall portraits, so our family’s Christmas card won’t look like some sad Jane Austen story, with a family full of spinster daughters.
Inevitably, Hollis will be accepted into the college we’ve hand-picked for her.
Inevitably, Hollis will graduate with her fluff degree and go onto law school and become someone her father doesn’t need to interrupt at parties in order to make her sound more accomplished than she obviously is.
If we were being honest—which, again, we were—I had only managed to reach those first three and only one of them—the first one—had I actually accomplished. So, I was really rating high for dad right then. I was 1 for 3, sinking faster than the Titanic as I slapped mosquitos away from my face at my father’s vacation home in St. George, Utah, for his end-of-summer company retreat.
“Cultural anthropology,” Elodie said with a widening of her eyes. I could feel my dad stiffen beside me at the interest in her voice. “Why, I’ve never heard of that. Could you explain it?”
Cultural anthropology rated really low on Dad’s approval scale, which was not the reason I loved it as much as I did, but it certainly didn’t hurt my own enthusiasm for it. “Oh, yes,” I said, “it’s really fascinating. In simple terms, it’s the study of human cultures, obviously, their practices and beliefs and values but deeper than that it’s about studying the diversity between cultures and understanding the causes of diversity. Last year, I wrote a paper about marriage rituals for two different indigenous tribes, continents apart, and how—even though they were uninfluenced by one another—they were similar in their beliefs and traditions.”
My dad’s hand dropped from my shoulder as he turned to listen to someone else—someone more interesting than me. I wanted to shrug, but I didn’t. Elodie’s smile widened. “That’s incredible work. Or it sounds like it must be.”
“It was. I was able to go to Bolivia this summer as part of a humanitarian effort, studying indigenous politics while doing really rewarding work.” It was a bone of contention between my father and me—the fact that I was so much like my older sisters and willingly put myself thousands of miles away, so I was glad that my dad’s attention was directed away from me for the moment.
“That sounds scary,” Elodie said, and her tone changed. With my father’s attention away from her, I could only presume she felt less like she was under a microscope. “I can’t imagine my David going away that far.”
In thinking of it, I couldn’t imagine it either. David DeBier, who tried to get in my pants at the last Christmas party? David DeBier, who bragged about stealing some wine from his parents and did I want some? No, David, thanks though.
Keep your tongue and your penis and your mom’s boxed wine to yourself, were precisely the words Tori had used.
No, I couldn’t imagine David going that far away from his mom either.
Thankfully, Elodie’s husband pulled her away before I could answer her follow-up, Have you met my David? question, so I was free to roam the appetizers and disappear into the kitchen for the diet soda I had smuggled in. David and I were alike in our preference of contraband beverages, but where we differed was in the fact that I rarely drink alcohol.
I was cracking open the first of hopefully many cans when my mother walked into the kitchen. I didn’t see her, but I heard the tsk leave her perfectly painted lips and I nodded in acknowledgement. “Hollis, really?”
She had the disdain down, but she wasn’t intimidating. Which was why I could speak to her more frankly than I could my father. “Yes, really, mom. I’ve been here for an hour. That’s longer than Layla or Angie would’ve lasted without some kind of their preferred beverage. At least mine is non-alcoholic.”
My mom sighed and fanned herself with her hand for a moment as she leaned against the white marble-topped island. Not a single white hair on her head was out of place, all tucked away dutifully with some kind of mom-magic only she possessed. My mom wasn’t naturally white-haired, no it was more out of fashion than out of respecting her persistent black roots. Like me, she had dark hair before it started going an apparently undesirable shade of gray so she started going lighter and lighter—blonde then platinum then white—and with her twice-a-month salon visits, one would never know that she hadn’t gone white gracefully. Coupled with her dark brown eyebrows, it was chic, lending itself to her image of a put-together mother of three grown young women, married to an incredibly successful founder of one of the nation’s leading tech companies. Mom was a volunteer at several local women’s groups and found time to be on the board of three well-regarded nonprofits in the greater Salt Lake City area, hours from our home in Idaho. As my dad liked to say, she was a professional volunteer. It sounded demeaning coming from him, but even as much as my father and I disagreed, I knew he didn’t mean it in an offensive way. Mom’s work made his look good, especially because the donations came on behalf of his tech company and our last name—Vinke—was uncommon enough that people who didn’t know her personally still knew she was a part of my dad’s empire.
“That’s because your sisters are alcoholics,” my mom said lamely and reached for my can of soda, taking one good swallow before handing it back. It was to illustrate a point to me. That anything in moderation was okay—one sip should suffice. But caffeine helped my focus, something she couldn’t understand.
“Alcoholics, really?” I asked and finished the can before getting a new one. “Indulging in a beverage or two while in dad’s company does not an alcoholic make.” My sisters, Angie and Layla, were older by eight and eleven years, respectively, and even with that much time to develop coping skills for dealing with our dad, they still visited rarely and lived the furthest away they could. Which meant shindigs like this one, seven hours south of my parents’ fall home—and my home too—was still too far for them to make it.
“Fine, alcoholic is a stretch.” She sighed again and rubbed an invisible wrinkle between her brows. “They don’t exactly make it easier on your dad.”
That much I could agree with. Angie, the middle and wild child of the family, was the antithesis of my father. Angie was combative and imaginative and lived off the grid in some modern kind of commune in Alaska. Well, in her words, it was an intentional community of hunters and gatherers and gardeners who coexisted on several hundred-plus acres of communal land. We saw her once a year, if we were lucky.
Layla, on the other hand, studied sharks in South Africa. She was eleven when I was born, and already making an exit strategy when I was entering kindergarten so between my two sisters, I knew her the least. She was secretive, quiet, and preferred animals to humans. We saw her live, in the flesh, once every few years. I hadn’t seen her the entire three years I had been in college.
Neither of my sisters were married, much to my parents’ growing dismay. And since they’d entered their sixties, the lack of grandchildren was starting to affect them. Hence the spinster Christmas cards they sent every year, using photos they’d stolen off of their daughters’ social accounts because we were hardly ever all under the same roof.
“Dad doesn’t make it easier on them, either.” I sipped from my second can until she took it from me and poured it down the drain.
“That stuff will kill you. Full of chemicals.”
“So is acetaminophen.”
Mom wondered why my sisters always hit the wine early into Dad’s parties, and as much as it was probably thanks to my dad’s unmeetable expectations, my mom didn’t exactly help with how overbearing she could be.
“Yes, well, I hardly consume that.”
“And your hair dye?”
She leveled m
e with a look to stop testing her. “What has gotten into you? I think you left part of yourself in Bolivia.”
“Or maybe I just found a part there.” It was only partly true. Tori’s presence had lightened the grip on my tongue. She always spoke so freely, like the censor most people possessed was more or less a hindrance for her. But Bolivia had given me a purpose that my parents couldn’t buy. A sense of understanding about the world and my place in it that college alone couldn’t enlighten me to.
“Well, that is one souvenir that you could have left behind.” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out the remaining few cans I had stashed in there. “I saw you speaking to Mrs. DeBier. You remember her son, David, don’t you?”
If her back wasn’t to me, she’d have seen the silent groan I made. I knew where this was going. “Yes. Please don’t throw those away, mom.”
She popped the cap on one and, while maintaining eye contact, poured it down the drain. “Everything in moderation, Hollis. Anyway, David spent the summer in Florida but I hear he’s back home in Amber Lake now. Maybe you could meet up for coffee.”
My mother was just as bad as my dad in many ways, but the difference was her process. My dad went in for the kill. My mom tip-toed along the line, to ease you with her. In this case, I think I preferred my dad’s method. “I am dating someone.”
Her eyelashes fluttered in the briefest of eye rolls. “Right. Your boyfriend. Who you refuse to bring around your family.”
Here we go. I slid my phone out of my pocket and tapped a quick message to Tori to rescue me from the inquisition. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said, sliding it back into my jeans. “We are dating, though.”
“You’ve been dating him for, what, two years?”
It was pretty implausible. To casually date someone for two years. But it’d worked for me, so far. “If he was my boyfriend, I would bring him around.”
“Are you being safe?”
This time, I audibly groaned. “No, Mom. I’m being reckless. Might be knocked up, who knows.”
One Little Lie: a hate to love rom-com Page 5
