Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Why?”

  Her fingers clattered over the keyboard as she opened up a Lyla Dare fan message board. I squinted and read the first comment: If it turns out that no-talent pink-book-writing pus-hole Candace Shapiro is writing Ly, I swear I’ll never buy another book!

  “See, the thing is, these books are supposed to be written by J. N. Locksley, and J. N. Locksley didn’t write Big Girls Don’t Cry,” she said.

  I scanned through the messages. None of them sounded too happy about the prospect of my mother writing Lyla Dare’s adventures. My father bent down to wrap his arms around my mother’s shoulders, and she made a sad little whimpering noise and leaned back.

  “Who?” she asked. “I just can’t figure out who’d want to do this to me.”

  I pulled my lunch out of the refrigerator and stood there, waiting for someone to notice that it was a school day and I needed a ride. Finally I cleared my throat.

  “Can you take a cab?” my mother asked faintly. She didn’t look at my hearing aids to make sure they were turned on. She didn’t peek into my backpack to make sure I’d remembered my lunch. She barely looked at me at all.

  I swallowed hard, wondering if she thought that I was the one who’d spilled the beans. Then I zipped up my backpack and stood in front of the door with my hand on the knob. “I’m sorry,” I said. Neither of them answered. I walked outside, realizing, with a sinking feeling, that maybe I did know what had happened, and maybe it was actually my fault.

  • • •

  I paid the cabdriver, ran through the play yard, skipped my lip gloss application/hearing aid removal, and caught up with Amber Gross on the way into homeroom. “Hey,” I said.

  She turned around with her usual smile in place. “Hi, Joy!” She had on a light blue button-down, jeans, and a narrow blue satin belt. A matching satin headband held back her smooth hair, and she had pale blue elastics in her braces. She didn’t look like a girl who’d lie or steal or tell her mom that she was babysitting when she was really at a high school party with Martin Baker, but I knew for a fact that she was that girl, that she’d done those things, and maybe worse.

  I cleared my throat. “Hey,” I said. “Did you, um, by any chance, happen to mention to anyone that my mom . . .” I chanced a look up. Amber was staring at me, eyes wide underneath their sparkly shadow, not looking guilty at all. “That she writes the StarGirl books?” I whispered.

  Amber shook her head. “Nope.”

  One-word answers, I heard her say in my head when she’d been talking to the lunch table about how to tell a lie. Don’t give them anything to hold on to.

  “Look,” I said, feeling a little panicky, remembering my mother’s white lips, the hurt on her face at the table that morning. “If you did, I won’t be mad. It’s just that . . . it’s kind of a big deal. For my mom, you know? She really has to keep it a secret.”

  Amber’s hair swished against her shirt as she shook her head no.

  “Okay,” I said, turning toward my own locker. “Okay.”

  Tamsin and Todd walked past us, heads bent together, talking quietly, Todd in a perfectly pressed shirt, Tamsin in her gray sweatshirt.

  “So listen,” said Amber. “How did it go yesterday at the mall? You seriously have to get something soon, you know.”

  “I know,” I said, easing myself away from her. “I’ll see you at lunch.” The first bell had just rung. There was time for me to catch up to Tamsin and Todd at their lockers.

  “What’s wrong?” Todd asked when he saw my face.

  I told them both while we put away our backpacks in our lockers and walked to homeroom.

  “I don’t want to be the one to say ‘I told you so,’” said Tamsin. “But Amber? Is a big fake bitch.”

  Just because she doesn’t like you, I thought.

  “She’s a big fake bitch and a gossip,” Tamsin said, flipping her hair off her cheeks. “Can we please stop sitting with her at lunch now?”

  “Seriously. I miss you,” Todd said. My throat tightened. I missed him, too. I missed the three of us together, and how easy it was for me to tell them everything. I just wasn’t sure I missed it enough to give up sitting with Amber, and with Duncan Brodkey.

  “Maybe it wasn’t Amber,” I said. “She said she didn’t do it.”

  Tamsin made a face. “Oh, please. You think she’s going to tell you the truth?” she sneered. “She lies about everything.”

  “She’s got a great look,” Todd acknowledged, smoothing the cuffs of his shirt. “But she’s kind of a bitch.”

  “A major bitch,” said Tamsin. She tugged her sweatshirt hood up over her head and yanked the drawstrings: first the left one, then the right. “So who’s it gonna be, Joy? Them or us?”

  My insides twisted. “That’s not fair,” I said. Tamsin and Todd were my best friends, but I wanted to go to Amber’s bat mitzvah—except Amber had blown off my friends and sold out my mother. Unless she hadn’t.

  “I don’t know,” I muttered. The second bell rang, and I sank into my seat, wondering what was going to happen, whether my mother would really lose her job, whether it was really my fault.

  • • •

  Usually, when I come home from school, the kitchen smells good. My mom makes bread, or she snips herbs from the garden and hangs them up to dry. There’s always some smell: peppermint tea, toast from breakfast, a breath of sweetness from the roses in a vase on the table where they stay until they’ve shed all their petals on the table and the floor. Today the kitchen smelled like nothing. My mother was sitting exactly where I’d left her that morning, at the kitchen table, staring at her laptop. She wore a shirt on top, but her legs were still covered in her red-and-green pajama bottoms, and her feet were bare.

  “Hi,” I said, edging toward the table.

  She lifted one hand in a halfhearted wave and said nothing. I got a glass of juice and carried it over, unsure what to do next. “Do you want some?” I finally asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry I was so out of it this morning,” she said. I took that as a sign that I could sit down at the table across from her. “It was kind of a shock. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. My publisher’s been after me to write something else, something under my own name, and I think maybe someone there decided that this”—she gestured toward the screen—“would be a push in the right direction.”

  “Oh.” I was thinking about Amber’s face, the way she’d looked at me when she’d shaken her head no. I swallowed hard as my mother stared at me.

  “You don’t know anything about how this happened, do you?”

  “No! Of course not!”

  She stared at me again, then shrugged.

  I forced myself to ask, “What happens now?”

  “I have to wait and see if anyone else picks up the story.”

  “What if they do?”

  “I’ll just say no comment, but you can only cover your tracks so well. I guess it’s all a question of how much it ends up mattering . . . how much truth people can handle about who’s been writing their science fiction.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well . . .” She shrugged and tried to smile, then pushed herself back from the table. I waited for her to ask if I wanted to make cookies or help with dinner, if I needed help with my homework, if I wanted to go for a walk or go to the bookstore. Instead, she just turned away and walked slowly down the hall, to her office, and for the first time that I could remember in my life, she closed the door behind her.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Don’t think of it,” said Lyla Dare, grinning, with the heel of her boot digging into the soldier’s filthy neck. I was midway through my latest manuscript, and Lyla was doing what Lyla did best: kicking ass and taking names. It felt, I had to confess, wonderfully cathartic to imagine the neck beneath her boot heel as belonging to whoever had betrayed me.

  The soldier twisted his head and spat at her. Lyla gave a small, untroubled smile, bent down, and swiftly disarmed him, pulling t
he taser and the curved knife from his belt. Then she yanked him to his feet, twisting his arms behind him. He lurched forward, trying to shake her off. She jerked his hands higher, her grin widening as both of his shoulders were wrenched out of their sockets with a satisfying pop.

  I grinned, my own teeth bared, leaning forward, imagining that it was me doing the damage.

  “Reconsider,” Lyla whispered, so close that her lips almost brushed his dirt-caked ear. There was blood on her teeth, he saw, as the world wavered in front of him, and he fell to his knees, moaning.

  “Mercy, sister,” he cried as tears and blood mingled with the sweat and dirt on his face. “Mercy, huntress. Are we not the same?”

  “Hardly,” I muttered as a car honked outside my window. I snapped my laptop shut, looking at the clock. Ten-fifteen A.M., which gave me an hour and forty-five minutes to get my house in order. I looked out the window. Bruce had bought yet another new car.

  “Joy!” I yelled. “It’s your . . . It’s Bruce!” The bathroom door slammed, and my daughter came clomping down the stairs, her hair gathered in a ponytail, lipstick that I wasn’t supposed to notice on her lips. I beckoned her close, and she sighed noisily. I looked in both of her ears to make sure her hearing aids were there and turned on.

  “Is it okay if we go shopping?” she asked, waving at Bruce through the window.

  “Sure,” I said. “Call if you’re going to be past four.”

  She gave me a look suggesting that I’d sustained major brain damage at some point after breakfast. “I won’t be home until dinner. Bruce is dropping me off at the Ronald McDonald House. For my mitzvah project, remember?”

  “Right.” That worked out perfectly. I’d have time to clean the house, get through the home visit, then unstraighten things again. Peter and I had decided not to tell Joy anything about the possibility of a baby until we’d passed our home inspection and found a surrogate who’d work with us. I wasn’t used to keeping secrets from my daughter, but this, I figured, was for a good cause. With everything else that was going on—her moodiness, her grades, the hearing aids she couldn’t remember to turn on, the article I’d found under her mattress, her mother’s looming lack of employment—why give her something else to worry about until we knew one way or the other for sure?

  “Kiss,” I said. Joy groaned out loud but let me kiss her cheek and accidentally on purpose swipe some of her lipstick off with my sleeve. “Have fun! Be careful! Call if you need me!”

  Joy waved impatiently and ran out the door. As soon as Bruce’s brand-new car pulled away from the curb, I shut down my laptop and sprang to my feet, straightening stacks of magazines on the coffee table, stashing shoes and umbrellas in the closet, lighting candles, sliding an apple pie I’d prepared and frozen the previous weekend into the preheated oven to give our house that homey, nostalgic, cinnamon-and-nutmeg smell that spoke of solid morals and steady love—or at least regular access to homemade desserts.

  “Peter!” I called.

  My husband, still unshaven and in his weekend wear of rumpled khakis and a paint-splattered T-shirt, ambled down the stairs. “Home visit, remember?” I said.

  He grinned at me. “Bagels purchased. Fruit platter procured.”

  I followed him into the kitchen. Half a dozen bagels were perfuming the air from their bag on the counter, and he’d remembered to get low-fat and regular cream cheese, the fresh-fruit platter I’d ordered from Whole Foods, and half-and-half for the coffee. “Have I mentioned that I love you?” I asked. He nodded. “Have I mentioned that you need to shave? And can you run the vacuum over the living room rug?”

  “I’m on it.”

  I followed him into the living room. “You’re on it, or the Roomba’s on it?” Sure enough, the vacuum was still in the closet, Frenchie was cowering in the corner, and the little robot vacuum disc was whirring over the carpet. “You know I don’t trust that thing.”

  He put his hand on my neck. “Candace. We’ve had the Roomba for ten years, and it has never, quote-unquote, turned on us.”

  “That doesn’t mean it won’t.” I stared at the Roomba suspiciously. “In fact, as far as I’m concerned, that means it’s overdue.”

  “I’m going to shave,” Peter announced.

  “You do that,” I said, and went back to the kitchen to slice the bagels, brew the coffee, distribute the armful of pink and yellow tulips, lilies, and peonies between three different vases, and pour fresh orange juice into a cut-glass pitcher we’d gotten for our wedding. “Champagne?” I called. “Do we want Remy Heymsfeld to think we’re the kind of people who drink mimosas?” Peter and I hadn’t been able to determine whether Remy Heymsfeld was male or female, so we’d spent the two weeks since we’d gotten our home visit date referring to him/her simply as Remy Heymsfeld.

  “Maybe we should all do tequila shots,” Peter said as he came back downstairs ten minutes later. “It’ll be a good icebreaker.” There was a dab of soap on his earlobe and a tiny piece of toilet paper stuck to a cut in the center of his chin.

  I could use a shot, I thought. I was a nervous wreck. I poured cream into a pitcher and set it on a tray alongside cups and the sugar bowl and the silver spoons and the napkins I’d gotten up at six o’clock to iron. Once that was done, I trotted up the stairs. Hot rollers, hot rollers, where were my hot rollers? I rummaged underneath my sink: blow dryer, jumbo bottle of conditioner, dusty bag of free-with-purchase lipstick and foundation, both in the wrong colors, and nary a single hot roller. I slammed the cabinet shut and dashed into Joy’s bedroom. Her backpack was unzipped on the floor. As I passed by, I saw her math book and her English folder and, between them, a familiar flash of hot pink.

  My heart sank. I sat down on her bed, dry-mouthed and dizzy, before dipping my hand into the backpack and extracting a battered paperback copy of Big Girls Don’t Cry.

  I flipped through the pages slowly, my dismay giving way to confusion. Sentences, paragraphs, entire pages had been inked over in black. Every curse word and sex scene had been redacted. The pages bristled with Post-it notes. Ask Elle? read one. No way, said another. A third said simply, Amsterdam. On the inside cover was the address of Princeton’s website, a phone number with an area code I didn’t recognize, and a string of words like haiku: Horses. Mama. Fiction. No big deal.

  “Cannie?” I jumped off the bed as if I’d been electrocuted, and shoved the book into Joy’s bag. Then I wobbled to the staircase. Peter was staring up at me from the foyer. “You’re not dressed yet?”

  My voice was faint. “We may have a problem.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Joy . . .” I shook my head. There was no time. I’d have to deal with this later. “Never mind. I’ll be down in a minute.” I ran back to the bedroom for the skirt I’d collected from the dry cleaner’s the day before, along with a pink cashmere twinset and Samantha’s strand of pearls.

  Five minutes later, I was back in the kitchen, standing in front of Peter for his inspection. “Well?” I asked. “Do I look young and vital?” Peter, in khakis and a crisp blue cotton shirt, looked perfect now that his face had stopped bleeding. I’d helped him pick out his clothes the night before, after Joy had gone to sleep: the pants, I thought, said, I will take a child to the playground without even having to be asked, while the shirt proclaimed, Gainfully employed with good health insurance.

  He looked me over. “I’d say either the necklace or the heels. Not both.”

  “Too much?”

  “You look like it’s a costume party and you’re going as June Cleaver.”

  I slipped the pearls into my apron pocket and smoothed my hair. The pie smelled delicious, and the coffee was perking. On the mantel above the fireplace in the living room were a charming array of freshly dusted family photographs in frames of silver and polished wood. My sullen thirteen-year-old would be out of the house for hours, and I had the rest of the night to talk to her about what she’d read. It wouldn’t get better than this.

  • • •


  Remy Heymsfeld, it turned out, was a twenty-five-year-old male social worker (“Remy is short for Jeremy”), enthusiastic as a golden retriever puppy, with fresh comb tracks in his damp brown hair and pinchable pink cheeks. He devoured two bagels slathered with cream cheese, spooned sugar into his coffee, admired my garden, petted Frenchelle, and asked how we liked Philadelphia. Then he opened a folder (our names, I saw, were typed very officially on the tab) and started asking us page after page of questions. How long had we known each other? How had we met? How would we describe our marriage? (I said “stable.” Peter said “fun.”) How would we characterize our relationship with Joy? (I thought “fraught” but crossed my fingers behind my back and said “warm and open.” Peter said “loving.”) Remy wrote it all down. I let myself wonder briefly whether there was any couple in the world who couldn’t feign normalcy for the duration of a home visit. Even if your true intentions were to keep the child in a chicken-wire cage in the basement before selling her kidneys on eBay, you could probably keep it together long enough to impress a stranger for an hour or two.

  “Would you mind showing me around?” Remy asked. We got to our feet. Our instructions from the agency had told us that this would be part of the deal. The week before, Peter and I had relocated the treadmill from the office to the basement and given the walls a fresh coat of buttermilk-colored paint. When Joy had asked what was up, I’d told her a version of the truth: that I needed to keep busy until my work situation was resolved. When she was in school, I’d gone up to the attic, opening the cedar boxes labeled INFANT/WINTER and TODDLER/SUMMER and BLANKETS and TOYS. I hadn’t gone so far as to retrieve my old rocker from the basement, or put any of the blankets or tiny knitted sweaters in the dresser, but I’d washed them all, using Dreft and the gentle cycle, and folded them carefully back into their boxes, just in case.

  Remy pulled out a digital camera. He took pictures and measurements to see how far the theoretical baby’s room would be from ours, from the bathroom, from the stairs. He noted the number of bathrooms, photographed the fire alarms, and listened to our lengthy reassurances that Frenchelle was so placid and well trained that she’d barely notice a new baby in the house, let alone attack one. Then he ate a slice of apple pie and lingered in my office, taking in the stacks of StarGirl books and the top shelf, with all of its versions of Big Girls Don’t Cry.