Half of What You Hear

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  “Maybe I do!” I’d yelled, and I had meant it, but then later that night, after we’d gone to bed and Cole was asleep, I’d looked up the school’s state ranking on my phone. Draper it would be.

  * * *

  I arrive in the parking lot just before the kids will emerge from under the arched doorway of the school’s main building. I’ve spent most of the day at home, outlining ideas for my article and unpacking some of the boxes I keep putting off dealing with, and as I walk up the lawn to the spot where the students exit each day, I run my hand through my hair, wondering whether I even remembered to brush it today. Back in DC, I’d picked up the kids at five o’clock from their after-school program, even on the days I would have to go back to work after they’d eaten dinner. The other parents I saw when I arrived at the school felt like members of my tribe, all of us in the conservative suits our jobs demanded, all of us still moving at work-speed, the go-getter stride, brows knitted, arms swinging.

  This is different. I wave to the mothers I’ve chatted with at pickup, all Greyhill natives, naturally, who talk in a familiar shorthand that reveals their long ties and, by extension, seems to emphasize just how far I have to go. I’m starting to believe that I’m like Jane Goodall, cast down among the chimps, having to learn an entirely new set of customs and behaviors.

  One of them turns to me and smiles, a friendly gesture I’m so unaccustomed to that I actually feel my heart start to swell.

  “You made it in the nick of time,” she says, lifting her wrist like she’s checking her watch.

  I think she’s kidding and start to laugh, until she whips back around and smirks at the woman standing next to her, who’s dressed in full equestrian gear, like she just tied up her horse next to the cavalcade of luxury SUVs in the parking lot.

  Maybe not so friendly. Sometimes, when I’m standing at school pickup trying to make conversation—actually, just trying to make eye contact—with the other moms, I think of the irony of the sign that greets visitors at the town line: WELCOME TO GREYHILL: WIDE, OPEN SPACES. SMILING FACES.

  The doors start to open, and the kids begin spilling outside, just as a woman in the huddle of moms turns and calls my name. “I thought that was you!” she says. “I saw you walking up.”

  “Mindy!” I say, pleased to see her. “Hi, how are you?”

  “Exhausted!” she says. “Still! There’s a reason Greg and I only throw that party once a year. Have you and Cole recovered yet? I told Greg that punch was too strong. I swear, I’m still not right!”

  I think of her buffoon husband, how he grilled our bartender and was less than charming to me.

  “We had a great time,” I say, my eyes scanning the crowd for the twins. “It was really lovely.”

  “Well, good!” she says. “That means a lot, coming from you. I know you know how to throw a party.” As she winks, two of the other women turn around. To watch, I can only assume.

  “You and Cole were adorable!” Mindy says. “I told Greg we should reinstate our costume contest. You two would have won for best couple.”

  “Oh, you’re being generous,” I say. “There were a lot of great costumes.”

  “No, it’s true! You both looked so great. We should have dinner sometime! Greg and I used to double-date with Cole and Eva all the time, back in the day!” She laughs. “Sorry. I hope that’s not uncomfortable for me to say!” she says, her eyes rolling back toward the women standing behind her.

  “No, no, of course not,” I say. Tactless, maybe.

  “Of course! How silly of me! Why would it be awkward?”

  “Why would it be!” I repeat, just as—thank God—I spot Max and Livvie. I start toward them. “There are the kids.” I wave. “See you soon, Mindy.”

  The twins slump down the steps, slouching under the weight of their backpacks, their arms dangling in front of them like they’re little zombies.

  “And how was your day, dear children?” I ask, my irritation with Mindy melting off me as I reach my arms around them. Max gives me a half-hearted squeeze, but Livvie doesn’t even make an effort. She just stands there in front of me, her arms hanging at her sides like overcooked noodles. “Livvie—” I start, but she pulls away from me before I can read the expression on her face and starts toward the car.

  I follow her, and as we cross the parking lot, the sound of soccer practice starting on one of the sports fields across campus, Max catches my eye, tilts his head toward his sister, and makes a slicing motion across his neck with his hand. I raise my palms at him. What the . . . ?

  “Max, God!” Livvie screeches, catching us.

  I break into a little jog and hurry next to her. “What happened?” I say. “Livvie, what is it?”

  Her eyes stay pinned to the parking-lot asphalt. I look at Max, who immediately jerks a thumb at Livvie. “I dunno,” he says. “Maybe it’s that time of the month.”

  “Max!” I yell, my heart lurching in my chest. Livvie hasn’t had her first period yet, though—oh, no—did she get it today? Is that it?

  No, I think. Please, no.

  Livvie speeds up, marching toward the car, her arms crossed tightly over her chest like she’s holding something to it. As I’m hurrying after her, I notice Eva and Whitney across the parking lot, both of them watching us, shading their eyes with their hands over their heads like soldiers standing at attention.

  “Livvie, honey.”

  “Mom!” she wails. “Just leave me alone!” The desperation in her voice is unlike anything I’ve heard out of her before, and I’ve heard plenty, especially over the last year or so.

  “Livvie!” I stage-whisper toward her. I don’t want to make a scene—for either of our sakes, but especially Livvie’s. An old feeling I haven’t had since the kids were toddlers comes flooding back, from when they threw temper tantrums in public—at a restaurant or in the checkout line at Safeway—and my adrenaline would suddenly spike as I desperately tried to get things under control, immediately, before they completely fell apart. I look back at Max, who is ambling behind me, staring up at the sky, oblivious. After a lifetime of practice, he has no trouble tuning out his twin.

  I take a few quick hop-steps to catch up to Livvie and reach her just before we get to the car. “Honey.” I carefully touch my palm to her back, feeling the strap of her sports bra beneath her clothes. She doesn’t need to wear it, but all her classmates back in DC did, so . . .

  She jerks the door handle, waiting for me to unlock the car.

  “What happened?” I whisper, my eyes canvassing the parking lot. Fortunately, we are just boring enough that nobody’s paying attention anymore. The lot is emptying out.

  Livvie shakes her head, and her long, single braid bounces against her back. This morning, I’d watched her tie the elastic around the base as she was walking up the green into school. Her hair had still been wet from her shower, and I’d thought about all the nightly bath times I’d missed when she was a toddler because I was racing around the East Wing. I’d hear her splashing through the phone, singsonging along with Max and Cole as they recited, “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub” before they told me good night.

  I squeeze Livvie’s shoulder. “Talking about it will make you feel better,” I say.

  “Can we just go?” she says, pulling on the door handle again.

  “Of course,” I say. I punch the button on my key fob and walk soundlessly around to the driver’s seat. Before I get in, I look over the roof to Max, who’s shrugging off his backpack. “What happened?” I mouth.

  “No idea!” he mouths back.

  “Olivia, let’s talk about this,” I say once I get in the car, twisting around in my seat to face her.

  She rolls her eyes and slumps against the window. She has never been a forthcoming kid. Even in preschool, I relied on Max and one of their talkative classmates, a kid whose parents had dubbed her “Katie Couric,” to get the dish on what was happening in her classroom.

  “Honey . . .” I reach back and try to squeeze her leg, but
she jerks away.

  “Mom, would you please just . . .” She shakes her head, and then the tears start. Big, gulping sobs that suddenly come out of her in a rush, like she’s been holding them in all day. I reach into the back seat again, my chest aching for her, but she just turns more toward the window.

  Fuck! This is the one thing I didn’t want to happen here. The one thing. Livvie hadn’t had the easiest time at school the past few years in DC. She can be an idiosyncratic kid—it was her habits, her little tics, like the way she arranged her desk—and this was what we loved about her. They were the things that made her her. But kids are cruel.

  Max looks at me, a bereft expression on his face, then shifts in his seat toward his sister. That thing they say about twins? How they can feel each other’s every pain and emotion? I absolutely believe it, having seen the way my two interact. Max puts his hand out to touch Livvie’s arm, gingerly, like he’s touching a pan to see if it’s hot. “Liv, what is it?” he says. Sweet Max, I think, our eyes meeting.

  She glares at him. “It’s nothing!” she snarls. “Just . . . just stop!”

  “Livvie, it’s obviously not nothing,” I say, my voice as soothing as I can make it. I hook a finger into the top of the tissue box on the passenger seat and pass it back to her.

  Several slow, agonizing seconds pass. “Honey, please talk to us.”

  “Can we just go?” she says.

  “Honey,” I plead. “Let me help.”

  “It’s just these stupid girls, Mom,” she finally says, taking a tissue to dab at her eyes. “Nothing new. You wouldn’t get it.”

  My chest tightens, a swell of anxiety blooming in my chest. “I think I would,” I say. I know I would.

  “Was it Brittany?” Max asks.

  “Brittany?” I say. Eva’s Brittany?

  “She’s like—” Max wiggles his fingers, trying to come up with the words. “She’s like the most popular girl in school, I guess. She’s like the queen bee or whatever.”

  “Oh.” I raise an eyebrow. “I see. Livvie, is something going on with you and Brittany?”

  She scowls at me like this is the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard in her life. “No!” she says. “It’s just . . . it’s really stupid, Mom.” She takes another tissue from the box and wipes her nose.

  “It can’t be stupid if it’s upsetting you this much,” I say. “Tell me what happened.”

  She purses her lips and looks at me, her big brown eyes rimmed in red. “You know my friend Lauren?”

  “Of course,” I say. “The one you’ve told me so much about.”

  She frowns, looking out the window like she’d rather be anywhere but here.

  What did I say? I think, watching her, my heart thumping behind my ears. What should I say?

  “You promise you won’t say anything to anyone?” she finally says, her gaze still focused on the parking lot.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Brittany and her friends walked by me and Lauren this morning when we were sitting in the hall before homeroom. Brittany’s friend Margo has a locker across from ours, and they were standing there together, and they said very loudly how appropriate it was that ‘the new girl’—that’s me—would become friends with Lauren.” She starts to tear up again.

  “What do they mean?” I ask, trying to keep my voice gentle despite the frustration building just under my skin. It figures that Eva’s kid would be a jerk.

  She starts to cry again. “They called us the Outcast Society, Mom! That’s what I heard her say!”

  “Oh, honey.” Those little bitches, I think, reaching back to rub her leg again. She hides her face, as if she doesn’t want me to see her hiccuping sobs.

  “They don’t like Lauren because she . . . well, her family’s a little different. They live outside of town, not in some big fancy house like the one Brittany lives in—I know because it’s all she ever talks about. Being the ‘mayor’s daughter’ or whatever.”

  “Lauren’s an Other,” Max adds.

  “A what?” I ask.

  “An Other,” Max says innocently. “It’s what people call some of the kids who don’t live in Greyhill. The ones who are bused in from outside of town.”

  “They mean the poor kids,” Livvie says. “The scholarship ones.”

  “Oh, really?” I say, the heat starting to prickle along my ears. Others, huh?

  “Those girls are stupid,” Livvie says. “They make fun of anyone who’s not exactly like them.”

  “I see,” I say.

  “I really don’t care what they think. It’s just so . . .”

  “It’s frustrating,” I finish for her. So, so frustrating, I think. I remember it like it was yesterday.

  She nods.

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  She looks out the window, my words falling flat. Saying “sorry” has so often been my default with the kids when I don’t know what to say or do, but sorry, sincere as it may be, isn’t proactive. It doesn’t help. If anything, my wobbling sorry just puts an exclamation point on the problem. I’m sorry kids are assholes, honey. I’m sorry I have to work, honey. I’m sorry we moved here, honey, and that I didn’t have the foresight to realize that this kind of thing would only be amplified in a smaller place. That’s all the sorry says. We both know it. I think of Susannah, who was right when she told me the other day that . . . what was it . . . that people never take a woman seriously who’s always apologizing.

  Livvie looks down at her lap, picking at her fingernails the way she does when she’s upset.

  “Honey, you know what we’ve always said when people are mean, right?”

  “Kids act mean when they don’t feel good about themselves,” Max says.

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “But,” Livvie swallows. “Brittany doesn’t feel bad about herself. I’m sure of that. She’s a total bragger.”

  “Yeah, well.” So is her mother, I think.

  “Can we please just go?” Livvie says. “I really don’t want to be here anymore today.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

  I turn around and start the car. Why can’t things be as easy as they were when they were little, when the things that hurt them could be fixed with a Band-Aid and a kiss and the promise of a cookie? What are the words that will make this all better? I look at Livvie’s face through the rearview mirror.

  “There’s nothing to say, Mom,” Livvie says, as if reading my mind. “It just is what it is.”

  The car is silent, both kids staring out their windows, and I get a sinking sense in my stomach that feels remarkably like regret. What’s going on in there? I think, watching Livvie stare blankly out the window. What are you thinking?

  * * *

  We are just pulling into the driveway when out of the corner of my eye, I see Diane and Bradley’s front door fly open. My mother-in-law emerges from the house, waving her hands.

  She has such a knack for showing up at the most inopportune moments that it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that she’s put a GPS tracker under my Subaru.

  “Max?” Livvie’s voice finally punctures the heavy silence that accompanied our ride home.

  “Huh?” I hear the soft thump of him closing his book, a huge hardcover compilation of Far Side cartoons that he’s been carrying around everywhere lately.

  “Do you want to play Xbox later?” she says, her voice back to its normal timbre. I look at her in the rearview mirror as I turn off the car. She seems . . . fine-ish? I sit back in my seat. “After we finish our homework?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he says, opening the car door.

  “Hell-o-ooh!” I hear Diane’s greeting, cheery and light, the voice she reserves for Cole and the kids.

  “Hi, Grandma,” the kids call out.

  When I get out of the car, she walks right past me. A more generous person would say that she’s just so excited to see the kids, but I know better.

  “Hi, Diane,” I say.

  “Livvie!�
� Diane says, looking up at her on the front stoop. “Honey, are you coming down with something? Your face is all red.”

  Shit.

  “No, Grandma, I’m . . .”

  I see her face start to crumple.

  “Excuse me, Diane.” I hurry up the front steps and stick my key in the lock, then push open the door so the kids can escape.

  “Is she okay?” Diane calls after me.

  “She’s fine,” I say. “Normal tween drama.”

  “Are you sure about that, Elizabeth?” she asks. “What happened?”

  “I have it under control,” I say, putting my hand on the doorknob to indicate that I’m done.

  She lowers her chin, nodding like she’s deigning to give her permission. “Okay,” she says. “Fair enough.”

  I take a step into the house.

  “Listen, I just wanted to tell you . . . ,” she says. “The crows . . . they can get really bad this time of year, and they love to get into the garbage. Go to Perkins and pick up a few bungee cords to secure the lids to the trash cans before you pull them out to the street. Remember, the trash collectors come every Monday.”

  “Got it,” I say, waving as I start closing the door. We’ve been pulling the trash cans to the curb every week with no problem, I think. Don’t exactly need the reminder, thank you very much.

  “And by the way,” she says, starting down the driveway. “You might be the only person in Greyhill who locks their door when they leave the house, do you know that?” She chuckles. “What is it you have in there that’s so valuable?”

  “Your grandchildren,” I say, and take another step inside before I can be tempted to tell her that she’s the real reason I lock the door. “Have a good evening, Diane.”

  “You do the same, Elizabeth,” she says.