by Katie Henry
“You could have told me,” Mom says. “You can tell me anything. Don’t you know that?”
The knot of anger bursts open, sprouting weeds that snake up through my throat, strangling my vocal cords and all the things I want to scream at her. I can tell her anything? Doesn’t that sound so nice. And isn’t that such total bullshit.
“That’s not true.” I swallow. “You would have thought I was weak and stupid. You would have thought it was my fault—”
“What?” She looks alarmed.
“You said so yourself.”
“I would never say—”
“No, Mom.” I look her in the eyes. “You said so yourself. You’ve had friends like me. And there’s nothing you can do to help people like that.”
She gasps.
“It wasn’t Naomi?”
“It wasn’t Naomi.”
“Alex?”
“Alex.”
“Isabel,” she breathes out. “Honey, oh my God.”
“Will someone,” my dad says, “please clue me in, here?”
I stand. “Mom will.”
Mom stands, too. “Wait,” she says, reaching for me. “We need to talk about this.”
I step out of range. “I’m tired.”
“We still need to talk about it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“If he—if Alex hurt you—”
That makes my dad’s head snap up. “What?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say to Mom. “I took care of it. It’s over.”
“Oh.” The relief on her face only makes me angrier.
“You were right. You couldn’t help me, and you didn’t need to,” I say as I walk out through the door. “I didn’t need you at all.”
Chapter 24
BY THE TIME I wake up the next morning, both of my parents have left for work. No notes from my mom. No leftover breakfast waiting for me. It’s like I don’t exist, and I don’t know why I feel hurt. I already knew that, didn’t I? Why am I upset by them accepting what I already knew was true?
By the time I get to school, I’ve missed first period, and the rest of the day passes by in a blur. This is how it’s going to be forever, I think. Classes where I don’t talk to anyone. Hiding out in the study hall room or Ms. Waldman’s classroom during lunch. More classes. More silence, at home and school and everywhere else, for the rest of the one and half years I have to be here. The eighteen months before I get to leave and start my real life.
I’m relieved when the final bell rings, but that doesn’t last long. Because the moment I step outside the front doors, my heart drops into my uniform shoes.
Mo is waiting for me by the gate.
“Holy shit,” she says, her eyes scanning from the headband in my hair, to the blazer with my school crest, all the way down to the hem of my gray pleated skirt. “It’s true. It’s actually true.”
“Mo—”
“I didn’t believe them, at first,” she says, her eyes still on my clothes, my knee socks, the backpack over my shoulder. Anywhere but my face. “Jonah always said something was up, but Will and I told him he was paranoid. Turns out he was right. Do you know how insufferable Jonah is when he’s right?”
I open my mouth, but she makes a slicing motion across her neck to cut me off. “Rhetorical question. So once we knew your actual name, Will found all your social media profiles, and I found a picture of you on this place’s website”—she glances up at the school—“which looks like it should have fucking gargoyles, by the way—and here you are.”
That’s when she looks in my eyes, full-on, and I see all the hurt and confusion and anger, all bubbling under the surface.
“Please,” I say, hands out, heart dropping. “Let me explain this.”
I don’t know what I could actually explain, if she let me. It’s not a misunderstanding. I lied, and she knows, and I’m screwed.
“What’s to explain?” Mo says, as if reading my mind. “You’re a kid.”
“I’m not a kid.”
She nods at my uniform. “Either you’re on your way to film some super-gross schoolgirl porn, or you’re a kid.”
I cross my arms over my blazer. “I’m seventeen. In three months.”
“Too bad,” she says. “I was pulling for the porn explanation.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Are you serious?”
I wince. “So I guess Sean told you?”
“What, no apology?”
“No, I’m sorry, of course I’m sorry.” I rush the words out. “I only wondered if—”
“Sean didn’t tell me. Not me specifically.” She huffs. “He started bragging to people about this payout he got from some high school girl’s rich parents.”
Great. Not only did he destroy my relationship with my parents, he just had to destroy all my friendships, too.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She laughs, and it sounds horrible and wounded. “Oh my God, you really are a child.”
I wish she’d stop saying that. I’m the same person I was when she thought I was twenty. She can’t retrofit who I am just because I lied about something. A few things.
“Why are you laughing at me?” I demand. “Because I said I was sorry?”
“Because you think it’s just me who needs the apology.”
“But you just said—”
“I mean, yeah, I’m pretty pissed you lied to me from the moment we met, Izzy,” she says. “That sucks. But this isn’t some petty high school drama. I’m not weeping in the girls’ bathroom because you hurt my feelings. If you’re going to apologize to someone, try Colin, who could have lost his liquor license serving you.”
“You knew I wasn’t twenty-one!”
“I didn’t know you were in high school!” she shouts back. “There’s a difference! A big one.”
There would be a big difference if I was six, but not sixteen, I want to tell her. But she doesn’t want to hear it.
So I bite my lip and ask: “Are Will and Jonah mad at me, too?”
“God, why do you care?” Mo spits out. “Why is that all you want to know, whether people are mad at you? I don’t know how to explain to you that this isn’t about your feelings.”
“I just wanted to know whether—”
“You know what your problem is, Izzy?” Mo says. “You are so fundamentally selfish.”
I open my mouth, but Mo isn’t done.
“All of us went out of our way to support you, to help you. We walked you through your set step-by-step, we taught you everything we knew, we gave you feedback every time, and you never once returned the favor.”
“I didn’t think you needed my help.”
“That isn’t the point.” She grits her teeth. “You think you’re the only actual person in the world, don’t you?”
“Mo—”
“Did you ever see us as real people? Not just tools to get whatever you wanted? That alone should have clued me in. Kids can’t see past themselves.”
“That’s such bullshit.”
She narrows her eyes. “Oh, really?”
“If you’re mad at me, just be mad at me, but don’t pretend it’s all justified because I’m sixteen.”
“I walked you through every little thing in your life. And it wasn’t even your real life! You just took and took and you didn’t care enough to give us anything back.” She throws her hands up. “You didn’t care enough to give us the truth.”
I stare at the ground and say nothing. Mo sighs.
“It would have changed things,” she admits, “but you still should have told us the truth.”
“I know.”
“There were so many times you could have told us,” she says. Her voice wavers. “Or me. Just me.”
“I didn’t want you to be mad.”
“Well, I’m mad now!”
“I know it wasn’t a good idea,” I tell her. “I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. And I’m sorry.”
She shake
s her head. “I know you’re a kid and that means you’re still learning this basic shit, but—”
“Would you stop calling me a kid?” I cut in.
“You are a kid!”
“I don’t want to be!” Tears are filling up my eyes, which I know only makes me look younger. “Okay? I don’t want to be sixteen. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being stuck at this school, I’m sick of not having any real choices, I’m sick of waiting for my actual life to start. Because this isn’t it. God, this can’t be it.”
I might be imagining it, but Mo’s face seems to soften. Her tight jaw loosens. Just a notch.
“But I didn’t feel that way when I was with you,” I say, rushing to keep her here, in this moment, where she might hate me just a little bit less. “And Will, and Jonah. I felt older, sure, but I also felt young. I know that doesn’t make sense, but for the first time in my life, I actually felt young.”
I’m half talking, half crying now, unable to stop the flood of words or the flood of tears. I feel ridiculous and hysterical and the most honest I’ve ever been, all at once. I’m feeling all the things I haven’t wanted to, and a few I didn’t know I needed, all at once. Everything all at once, in a single excruciating, liberating moment.
“I want that all the time,” I say, and I don’t know if I mean feeling young or feeling this, whatever it is. Maybe they’re the same, somehow. “I want to feel that way every single second. I want to live in a dorm with a roommate I’ll probably hate, I want to choose my own meals in a dining hall, I want to choose my own classes. I want to start being in charge of my own future.
“I want to make friends with people I didn’t grow up with, who lived different kinds of lives from me, I want to stay awake with them on a Tuesday night talking about Shakespeare or philosophy or nothing at all until the sun comes up. I want all of it. And I don’t want to wait.”
I heave a giant breath in, feeling suddenly rubber-legged and light-headed, like I’ve run a marathon without any training. Mo stares at me, unblinking. She slowly unfolds her arms.
“I don’t know what eighties movies you’ve been watching, but the truth is, lots of people don’t like being sixteen,” Mo says. “Lots of people think high school is a gigantic waste of their time. Lots of people can’t wait to turn eighteen and get the fuck out of whatever shitty town or shitty family or shitty circumstances they were born into.”
Mo looks away from me, into the crowd of my classmates, with their uniforms and backpacks.
“But not everybody gets this, you know? Some people have to grow up fast,” she says. “I don’t get why you want to give it up so badly.”
When her eyes meet mine again, they’re brimming. So are mine. She shakes it off.
“But you know, what? Fine. Pretend all you want, I guess. We’re not going to rat you out to Loyola.”
Loyola? “What do you—”
“We’re going to be there, but it’s to support the rest of them. Not you. Just so you know.”
“Mo, what are you talking about?”
She blinks in surprise. “Have you not looked at your email?”
My school one, yeah, but not the separate one I set up for Izzy. I start to dig my phone out of my bag, but maybe Mo wants one last knife turn, because she spoils it. “You’re in the All-College Showcase,” she says. “The only one of us who is.”
My hands are shaking as I pull up the email, and my heart jumps into my throat when I see my name under Performers. Or . . . someone’s name. Izzy V.
And all the way at the end, under Alternates, is Mo.
“Congrats, Izzy,” she says. “I hope it was worth it.”
And then she leaves, without looking back.
Chapter 25
I DON’T CARE how many times my alarm goes off. I don’t care if I get kicked out of school for truancy, if I have to eat all my plants for sustenance, if I literally congeal into my bed. I’m never leaving my room again.
Not for a fire, not for a flood. Not even to let my mom in when she knocks, even though it’s the first time she’s spoken to me in two days. So she lets herself in, and I regret not shoving my desk chair up against the doorknob when I had the chance.
“Hi there,” she says. Just because she’s in here doesn’t mean we have to talk. I pull the covers over my head, so whatever she says next is all muffled. Her fingers dig into the fabric and drag, ruining my cocoon.
“Come on,” she says briskly. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Isabel, sweetheart”—she throws the covers back—“I gave you space. I gave you time. But we need to talk, even if you don’t want to. This is happening.”
When she uses that tone of voice, I know resistance is useless. One time, when Peter’s seventh-grade teacher told him he was stupid in front of the whole class, my mom went down to the school and stood outside the principal’s office—stood—until he agreed to reassign Peter to a new teacher.
I sit up, fold my arms across my chest, and wait for her to say something.
“What happened?” she asks.
“I kind of think we covered that,” I say. “I got up and did a real bad set—”
“I mean,” she interrupts, “what happened to us?”
That’s a way more complicated answer.
“Start from the beginning,” she says. “Tell me how we got here.”
I tell her the shortest version I can, but it still ends up being pretty long. From the moment I hid from Alex and stumbled my way into stand-up comedy. I try to keep it linear, but it seems like every story requires another story to explain it. She listens to every word, without interrupting to ask questions, even when I can tell she has them. When I tell her about That Night on the train platform, she grabs my hand and holds it tight.
I finish up with Mo blowing up at me yesterday.
“Do you think she’s right?” I ask Mom. “That I’m selfish?”
“You’re a teenager. You aren’t anything yet.”
“Of course I am things. I’m a teenager, not a . . . toaster.”
“I don’t mean it negatively. But there’s a reason we don’t classify people as sociopaths until they’re adults.”
God, yeah, how could I possibly interpret that negatively? I stare at her. She laughs, seeming to realize how bad it sounded. “I only mean, you aren’t anything for certain yet.”
“So you do think I’m selfish,” I say.
“I think you’re self-centered.”
“That’s the same thing!”
“‘Selfish’ implies you don’t care about other people, and I think you do,” she says. “But I also think you put yourself in the center of the universe too often, and there’s no one that hurts more than you.”
How many times has Mo told me that? That’s not your job.
It wasn’t my job to make sure that heckler had a good time. It was okay if he didn’t like me.
It wasn’t my job to anticipate or somehow prevent what Mitch did. He was responsible for his own actions.
It wasn’t my job to take care of Alex or manage his feelings. He was responsible for his own actions, too.
And for my mom—
“You are not to blame for me getting put on the mommy track,” she says.
I want to believe that, but I’m not sure it’s true. “If you hadn’t had me—”
“Could I have gone further, without a second maternity leave in two years? Maybe. Who knows? Even if it’s true, you aren’t to blame. I’m sorry you’ve carried guilt for that, because you shouldn’t. I love you, Isabel. More than you can possibly imagine.” She hesitates. “But you aren’t the center of my universe.”
I try to glance away, my eyes stinging, but Mom shifts so I’m still looking at her.
“I know that makes you feel bad. Sometimes it makes me feel bad, too.” Her eyes well up. “When you’re pregnant, everyone says, ‘Oh, your kids will be your whole life. Being a mother is the most important job in the world. You’ll never want t
o leave them.’” She swallows. “I loved all three of you. Unimaginably. But there was still a world outside you.”
I’m not the center of my dad’s universe, and that’s always seemed—not fine, exactly, but unremarkable. I’ve asked so much more of my mother than my father. And that’s not fair.
“What is the center of your universe?” I ask her. “If it’s not us. Is it Dad? Is it work?”
“My universe doesn’t look like that. It’s not like the real universe, with the sun in the center and everything revolving around it. It’s like—I’ve got all these things that matter to me. You kids. Dad. My job, my friends, my family, my . . . self, too. They’re all important. I wouldn’t be me without all of them. They’re not planets. They’re all part of a whole. They’re like—” She struggles for it. “Like—”
“Flower petals.”
“Yes,” she says. “Like flower petals.”
It feels so good, to give someone words for what they feel. Maybe that’s why I like comedy. Because someone can get up on stage and give you words for things you didn’t even know you felt, and make you laugh until you cry.
“But something is wrong, here,” Mom continues. “Something terrible was happening in your life, and you didn’t think you could talk to me about it. Not only that, but I didn’t notice it was happening.”
“You’re not a mind reader.”
Her face crumples. “I’m your mother.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I’m so sorry about what I said about Naomi. Not Naomi. You.”
“Mom, it’s okay.”
“Jesus, Isabel!” The fierceness catches me off guard. “No. It’s not okay, all right? It’s not okay!”
“But I—” I falter. “I don’t want you to feel bad.”
“Not everything has to be okay all the time. And you need to stop pretending things are fine when they aren’t.” She lists examples off on her fingers. “You didn’t want me to feel bad, so you didn’t tell me about Alex. And you didn’t tell me about stand-up. And most of all, you didn’t tell me how neglected and unwanted you felt. You thought you were doing me a favor.”
