The Girl You Thought I Was

by Rebecca Phillips

  “Let’s go see if we can help this lady find what she’s looking for,” Rita says as she starts in the direction of the clothing racks, where the woman is perusing a collection of baby outfits. I put on a credible smile and follow her lead.

  One hour down, twenty-nine more to go.

  Chapter Seven

  “YOU’RE DOING WHAT?” ALYSSA LOOKS AT ME LIKE she’s wondering if she heard me wrong.

  “Volunteering,” I repeat, leaning back on the couch. The four of us are lounging around in Zach’s basement, our second-favorite hangout spot after the diner. There’s a giant-screen TV, an abundance of snacks, and his mom is almost never home. “It’s no big deal.”

  Sophie presses pause on her game controller and looks over at me. “You’re doing what?”

  I sigh. Four days have passed since my first thrift shop shift, and I’ve only now gotten around to mentioning it to my friends. I wouldn’t have even bothered, but I figure they’re eventually going to start wondering why I’m never free on Saturday mornings.

  “Volunteering,” Alyssa says around a mouthful of Doritos.

  Dawson pauses his controller too and joins in on the staring. He came here straight from work and is still in his uniform, which consists of a red T-shirt with Ace Burger emblazoned across the front and a giant pin that says Ask Me About Our Bacon Belly Buster Supreme! “But what about your job?” he asks.

  “It won’t affect my job,” I say as Zach creeps into the room, five glasses balanced precariously in his arms.

  “What won’t affect your job?” he asks, depositing our drinks on the coffee table.

  Sophie unpauses her controller and goes back to shooting things up. “Morgan’s gone all altruistic on us.”

  “I’m working in a thrift shop, guys. Not sewing up wounded soldiers or nursing sick kittens back to health.”

  Zach starts singing that damn song about thrift shops. Of course. I toss a pillow at him, but my aim is off and it bounces off Dawson’s shoulder instead.

  “You’ve never shown any interest in volunteering before,” Alyssa points out. “You aren’t even on any committees at school.”

  “I just thought it might look good on my college applications next year.” I look her right in the eye as I say it, because that’s the type of person I am—the type who lies to her friends because she’s too cowardly to tell them the secrets she’s hiding and why. A small part of me has always felt separate from the four of them. Like I’m hovering at the edge of our tight circle, not quite worthy enough to truly belong. They’re all so intrinsically good, so open and honest and kind. I used to think I was good too, before Mom left. Then it was like a switch had been thrown, revealing all the damaged parts of me that were probably lurking beneath the surface all along.

  “Oh.” Alyssa nods, accepting my fib. “That’s a smart idea. Maybe I should offer to volunteer there too.”

  “No,” I say, loudly enough that Dawson glances over at us. “Uh, the owner only needs one person, so . . .”

  “Oh,” she repeats, this time with a slight frown. “Okay. It was just a thought.”

  I grab my glass of fruit punch and take a gulp, feeling Alyssa’s gaze on me. I keep my eyes on the TV, pretending to be riveted by the animated violence on-screen. A few minutes pass before I feel Lyss’s hand on my arm.

  “Is everything okay?” she asks when I meet her eyes. “I just feel . . . I don’t know. Like there’s something going on with you that you’re not telling us.” She laughs a little. “Do you have some sort of secret life we don’t know about or something?”

  I laugh too, my way of brushing aside the uncomfortable truth in her words. Alyssa used to know everything about me, right down to the smallest detail. Before this year, there was never a time when I felt I couldn’t confide in her. But I can’t seem to tell her this.

  “She’s a superhero,” Dawson says as he mashes his thumbs into the controller. “Smoothie maker by day, masked vigilante by night.”

  Alyssa ignores him and smooths her long hair into a ponytail. “Seriously,” she says, securing it with her ever-present wrist elastic. “You’d tell us if you weren’t okay, right?”

  “Of course, Lyss. Everything’s fine.” I give her a smile to prove it.

  “She’s fine,” Zach bellows over the grunts and gunshots on the screen. “This is Morgan we’re talking about. She’s tough as nails. Hey, toss those Doritos over here, would you?”

  Alyssa ignores him too, keeping her eyes on my face until, finally, I look away. The thing about best friends is that they usually know when you’re telling only part of the story.

  I’m not grounded anymore, but I do still have a strict nightly curfew of eleven thirty. When I arrive home at eleven twenty-five, I find Dad watching a cooking show in the living room. For someone who survives on takeout and cereal, he’s been watching the Food Network a lot lately. Maybe we need to get back to Breaking Bad, which sort of fell by the wayside these past couple of weeks.

  “Hey,” he says as I pass by him on my way to the kitchen. “There’s some Thai food in the fridge for you.”

  I grab a glass from the still-steaming dishwasher and fill it at the sink. “Thanks,” I say, raising my voice a little to be heard over the loud chopping on TV. Our apartment is open concept, and pretty small, so we can easily communicate from different rooms. “I’m kind of full, though. Ate a lot of junk at Zach’s.”

  Fergus strides into the kitchen and weaves his body around my legs. I glance at his dish and see that it’s empty. Either Dad forgot to feed him or he ate already and wants more. In any case, I dump a scoop of dry food into his bowl for a late-night snack. I leave him there, crunching, and return to the living room.

  “Good night,” I say, trying to inject some warmth into my voice. Since the Incident, our exchanges have been loaded with awkward tension. It’s like we’re both trying too hard to be normal again, or whatever passed for normal for us before. Regardless of what happened to get us here, we’d settled into some form of routine over the past year, even if that routine was catching up over slices of pizza, watching Walter White cook meth, and bickering about whose turn it was to scoop the kitty litter. But now, it’s like we’ve regressed to my first few days here, when we circled each other cautiously, unsure how to deal with this new dynamic.

  My father acts like he doesn’t hear me. “This looks pretty easy.”

  I follow his gaze to the TV, where a bald guy is pounding chicken breasts with a mallet. “What?”

  “This dish. It doesn’t look very hard to make. I bet I could do it.”

  I look back at him and frown. Mom was the cook in our family; Dad’s culinary skills, like mine, are mostly limited to opening cans and ordering in. “Do you even have time to make stuff like that?”

  “Maybe I should make time.” His voice takes on an edge. “Maybe if we sat down together every night for a healthy, home-cooked meal, you wouldn’t have felt compelled to go to the mall and steal a pair of two-hundred-dollar sunglasses.”

  My throat goes dry. He can’t possibly blame himself for what I did. My dad does the best he can under the circumstances. So what if he doesn’t cook me dinner and spend a lot of time with me? It’s always been like that, even before Mom left. There’s a reason I used to always draw him in a suit and tie when I was little—because I rarely saw him in anything else. He worked late most nights and didn’t get home after bedtime, so to me, he mostly existed as the dad who sat across from me at breakfast each morning before we left for school and work. He made the most of the time he did have with us, but Mom was always the star in our lives while he was more of a supporting character.

  I guess that’s why he was so surprised when Rachel and I opted to stay with him instead of moving away with our mother, like she wanted. Are you sure? he kept asking, like he was afraid we were only choosing him to spite Mom. And maybe that was part of it, at least for me. But after having my life completely upended by the person I trusted most, it was nice to have control ov
er something.

  So no, Dad didn’t have to take me on along with all the debt and devastation my mother’s actions caused him. He did it because he loved me and wanted me around. Because he understood why I couldn’t live with Mom and her boyfriend, the two people who ripped our lives apart and then left us to clean up the mess.

  None of this is even remotely his fault.

  “Dad, come on.” I sit next to him on the couch and set my water on the end table. “Me stealing sunglasses has nothing to do with you. Okay? It was just . . . I don’t know why I did it, but it was my fault. Mine. You don’t need to rearrange your whole life just because you think it’ll make you a better parent or whatever. You’re doing fine.”

  “Am I?” he mutters, as though talking to himself. He lets out a sigh and looks at me, his eyes heavy with doubt and sadness. “I spoke to your sister earlier.”

  My heart thumps, and my first thought is He told her. He told her about the shoplifting and the charges and she’s going to hate me for making things more difficult for Dad.

  “Did she tell you she’s coming home?” he goes on, and my body loosens with relief. He didn’t tell her.

  “Yeah, at the end of August.”

  “Right. She said . . .” He pauses to click off the TV, then clears his throat. “She said she plans on visiting your mother while she’s here.”

  Fergus jumps up on the couch between us and proceeds to bathe himself, but his presence barely registers. My head is too busy spinning with the words your mother and visit.

  “What? Why?” I ask. Rachel feels the same way I do about Mom, namely that she’s a selfish home wrecker who broke our dad and then left without looking back. Why the hell would she want to go see her?

  “Because she’s your mother,” Dad says simply. “Rachel says she wants to spend the day with her and check out her new house.”

  New house. My blood boils at that, since I still think about our old house, all the time. We used to live right in the city in a cute, modernized duplex near the park. Rachel and I grew up there. But after Mom ran away with Gary, taking her income with her, Dad had no choice but to sell and move here, a new development in the outskirts of town, where each apartment building has a view of another apartment building. And suddenly my childhood home was just a memory, like so many other things.

  So no, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the new house Mom and Gary bought together. It’s not like it’ll last, anyway. One of them will probably cheat again, or they’ll eventually discover that their relationship isn’t so exciting when they’re not sneaking around behind everyone’s backs.

  “I think you should go with her, Morgan,” my father tells me. “It might be good for you.”

  I sit up straight, almost displacing Fergus. His ears flatten in annoyance. “You’re joking, right? How can seeing her possibly be good for me?”

  “Because she’s your mother,” he says again, like that should be enough. Like I’m supposed to forgive her everything just because she gave birth to me. “And because you haven’t seen her since Rachel’s graduation last June. You’ve barely even talked to her.”

  Rachel’s graduation. I remember it well, and not just because it was the last time I laid eyes on my mother. The day was loaded with tension. My mother’s affair had been uncovered just three weeks before, and she’d been staying with a friend nearby because Dad didn’t want her in the house. But that day, they decided to put aside their differences for a few hours so they could both watch their older daughter graduate. For a moment I considered not joining them, but my love for my sister overrode the still-raw anger I felt for our mom.

  My parents didn’t speak during the ceremony. I sat between them, my body coiled tight, wishing I were somewhere, anywhere, else. Every so often, Rachel turned to smile at me from her seat up front, reminding me why I was there. She was pissed at Mom too, but like Dad, she was willing to pretend we were a normal family again, just for one day. I wasn’t so willing.

  Afterward, we went to a restaurant to celebrate with a few of Rachel’s friends and their families. It was loud and chaotic enough that I could avoid my mother without everyone noticing. Well, everyone except for her. Shortly after the cake was cut, she started making excuses to duck out. She hugged Rachel first, whose graduation high had softened her enough to hug back. Then my mother turned to me.

  “We’ll talk soon?” she said, her voice soft and hopeful. I stood perfectly still as she embraced me, then quickly backed out of her arms. Just before turning away, I saw her face sag, like the full magnitude of the damage she’d caused had suddenly hit her.

  A week later, she was gone. The day she packed up her things and left, I hid out at Alyssa’s house, unwilling to even say good-bye. I haven’t seen her since.

  “She hasn’t talked to me either,” I remind my father.

  “She tried, at first. Remember? She wanted to apologize to you and explain her side. She called you almost every day. She even came back to see you a couple of weeks after she left, but you refused to even let her in the apartment. You wanted nothing to do with her, so she stopped trying.”

  “That’s right, she stopped trying.” My voice breaks and I pause for a moment, collecting myself. “What kind of parent just gives up on her kid like that? She’s the one who did something wrong, not me. Why should it be me who makes the effort? And why are you defending her?”

  “I’m not defending her, Morgan,” he says with a tired sigh. “I just think it might help if you put the past behind you and tried building a relationship with her again.”

  “Help who? Me? Or her?” I cough out a laugh and stand up. “Sorry, but I don’t think I owe her a damn thing. And neither do you.”

  “Morgan—”

  “No, Dad. My answer is no.”

  Before he can say anything else, I gather up Fergus and take us both to my room.

  Chapter Eight

  I TEXT RACHEL THREE TIMES OVER THE NEXT COUPLE of days, asking her to call me, but she doesn’t get back to me. Finally, as I’m scarfing down some cereal on Saturday morning, my phone beeps with a response.

  Sorry, sis. I’ve been really busy with work.

  Right. More like she’s been really busy avoiding me because she knows Dad talked to me about this Mom visit and she doesn’t want to face my wrath. I put down my spoon and type back, Call me.

  Five minutes pass. Then ten. Finally, thirteen endless minutes later, as I’m rinsing my breakfast dishes, my phone rings. I dry my hands and answer it.

  “What the fuck, Rach?”

  My sister and I have always been blunt with each other. We unapologetically call each other out on our shit. It’s how we operate. Or at least it was.

  “What?” she says, playing dumb. “Sorry it took me so long to call. I was just getting in the shower—”

  “That’s not what I mean.” I lean my hip against the counter and pick up a discarded bread tag that’s resting near the sink. Dad’s always losing these. “Are you seriously going to visit Mom while you’re here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I just decided a few days ago. I wanted to tell Dad before I discussed it with you.”

  “But—”

  Now it’s her turn to cut me off. “Morgan.”

  I bend the bread tag between my fingers and it snaps in two, the edges digging into my fingertip. “What?”

  “It’s been a year. I think this silent treatment has gone on long enough.” She sighs. “Look, I’m not going to force you to go with me, but I think it would be good. For all of us. I know how hard this has been on you. It’s been hard on me too, but I want to at least try to work things out. She’s our mother. You think losing us hasn’t been tough on her too?”

  God. She sounds like Dad. “So? That doesn’t mean I want to go hang out with her like nothing’s happened. Is there a rule that says we must have a relationship with every person we’re related to, no matter how awful they are?”

  “She’s still the same mom who raised us, Morgan,�
� she says quietly. “She did an awful thing, but she’s not an awful person.”

  A flash of memory hits me. Rachel and me, ages nine and seven, stretched out on our parents’ bed as Mom read us a chapter from a Harry Potter book, which she did almost every night for months. We could both read on our own, but we liked the way she did it, her voice changing for each character. Our favorite was when she did Voldemort. Her tone got deep, almost gravelly, just the way we imagined a guy like him would sound.

  “I wish I could live at Hogwarts,” Rachel said when the chapter was over. I immediately chimed in with a “Me too,” as I often did when Rachel said she wanted something.

  “Are you kidding?” Mom closed the book and put it on the nightstand. “I’d never send you to that school. Something terrible happens there every year. Besides,” she added, dropping a kiss on each of our foreheads, “I could never be separated from my girls for that long. I’d miss you way too much.”

  We begged for another chapter, but Mom said it was getting late and tucked us into our own beds. I fell asleep quickly, secure in the knowledge that she’d be there in the morning, standing at the stove in her purple bathrobe and making us heart-shaped pancakes for breakfast.

  I push the memory away. Rachel is wrong. If she were still the same mom who raised us, she wouldn’t have done what she did. Or maybe she was never the devoted mother I remember. Not really. Maybe she was just pretending, going through the motions, and my warm childhood memories of her are all built on lies.

  “I’m just saying . . .” Rachel stops talking, and I hear a man’s voice. Then her again, murmuring about needing a second. “I’m just saying,” she repeats, with emphasis, “I’d like to try. Besides, I was never really mad at her. I mean, I was, but not like you. I was mostly hurt, I think, and in shock. I just couldn’t believe she’d do something like that. Not just the cheating, but how she acted after she was caught.”