by Anna Breslaw
“I’ll be honest with you; I’m not sure this is helping.”
I mute the movie, and Dawn smiles, wan. She appears to have gotten a little calmer and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffling.
“So, what happened?”
“I went on a really good date.” She sighs.
“From Match?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re crying? I don’t understand.”
“God. It’s just not gonna work out. You know?”
“Why? Is he married or something?” Or a squatter? Or a twenty-five-year-old who said he’s thirty-seven because he “likes cougars”? Or prone to saying “I know I’m not black, but . . .”? Just a couple of her old chestnuts.
“No. I mean, not that I know of. I just . . . something’s bound to be wrong with him, right? If he’s single at this age?”
“Not necessarily! You’re single at this age.”
Dawn glares at me.
“I mean, your age! Okay, sorry, you’re single at ‘an’ age.”
“That’s different. Single moms have a harder time.”
Inside, I wince with guilt. Like, she could’ve just named me Baggage Joan Epstein and then at least we’re all being honest.
“Well, I don’t know! Maybe you’re catching a break! I mean, finally, you know? You gotta climb up a mountain before you . . . I don’t know. Something!”
As she watches me, clinging to every positive word I say like a life raft, I desperately try to come up with a home run. She is a big fan of inspirational quotes, saying “morning affirmations” in the mirror and all that stuff. To my dismay, as I’m grasping for something, her face begins to squinch up again. There’s gotta be some beautiful, enlightening parable that’ll make her feel better.
I blurt, “Did you see on the news the other day, that lady in Cincinnati who found a chicken fetus in her McNugget?”
“What?” Dawn recoils. “Sweetie, ew.”
“Yeah, so, um, she ordered a six-piece McNugget, and she bit into one, and it made a weird noise, so she spit it out and saw that it was, like . . . a little unhatched chicken fetus. With, you know, breading or whatever.”
Dawn is incredibly grossed out. I’d better cut to the chase.
“So, like—maybe that lady got a defective McNugget that one time. Or maybe even, like, a few other times. Probably not, because, I mean, it’s unlikely, statistically speaking! But still so!”
I’m actually starting to work myself up with the disgusting pep talk at this point, but she still doesn’t look like she’s buying it. I soldier on.
“If that person really, really loved McNuggets, should a couple of chicken fetuses stop her from staying positive and getting right back into a McDonald’s and taking a chance on more McNuggets?” I ask passionately.
“It probably . . . um, should . . .” she says faintly.
“No! It should NOT!” I’m totally into this now.
Dawn looks perplexed. “I mean, do they keep going to the same McDonald’s? Because it seems like there are some major health violati—”
“Okay, I know, it’s not a perfect metaphor. My point is, a couple of chicken fetuses shouldn’t stop you from living your life! You see what I’m saying here?”
We both sit there sort of nodding encouragingly at each other for a couple of minutes like dashboard bobbleheads.
“I guess so.” She gains traction, her face brightening. “Yeah. I guess. I mean, right?”
“Totally!”
“Yeah. You’re right.”
“I mean, McYolo, you know?”
“Absolutely. No, you’re right. I just need to be positive.”
Satisfied that I’ve diffused the worst of this crisis, I snatch a Twizzler.
“What’s the guy’s name?” I ask, gnawing on it.
She smiles tentatively. “Brian.”
“What’s he do?”
“Accountant.”
“Has he called you yet?”
I have asked these questions so many times that I’ve developed a crisp and efficient delivery, like Mariska Hargitay on Law & Order SVU always asking the kid to point on the doll where the creepy uncle touched her.
“Yes. But I let it go to voice mail. I have to stay smart about it! I don’t want to seem like I like him too much,” Dawn says sagely. She is really into all those dating mind-game books: The Rules and Why Men Love Bitches and If You Do Something You Want to Do, You’ll Literally Ruin Everything.
I roll my eyes, like I usually do when she starts spewing this nonsense, and flick a Twizzler at her.
“Come on, who actually cares about that crap? That stupid ‘Who cares less?!’ death spiral is such a waste of time.”
Dawn shakes her head.
“Nope. I didn’t design it this way, but like I always tell you, the party with the least interest—”
“Has the most power,” I finish along with her. “God, you’ve only been saying that since I was a zygote. Whatever. Disagree.”
“I know it seems retro to you, but you’ll see the light real soon,” Dawn says confidently.
“I hope not,” I groan. “It’s so depressing.”
She unmutes Bridget Jones’s Diary right as Hugh Grant and his smirking face emerge from the elevator just as “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” starts playing.
Begrudgingly, I’m like, “Okay, that’s a really legit sound cue. Good job, movie.”
She smiles. Today’s emotional crisis is out of the red zone.
“But please, please promise me you’ll mute Colin Firth’s ‘just as you are’ speech.”
“I promise,” Dawn lies.
I finally escape to my room.
Dawn’s always been like this. Back in seventh grade, Avery had a slumber party. She, I, and a few other misfits from school that we had nothing else in common with got into sleeping bags in the Parkers’ freezing-cold basement and watched Mean Girls. When Regina George’s velour-tracksuited “not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom” started handing out virgin daiquiris, I felt all six pairs of eyes swivel toward me, starting with Had Her Period on White Pants and Nobody Told Her Leslie and ending with Legitimately Mentally Slow Jenna.
And those are just my friends’ reactions. Last year at the Drama Club fall potluck dinner, Dawn rushed in, tugging down the hem of her electric-blue bandage dress, with boxed Entenmann’s cookies she tossed hastily on the table with the other moms’ homemade casseroles and pies.
“Who’s the old skank?” Ashley asked Natalia, not quietly (she probably thinks sotto voce is a type of coffee), knowing perfectly well that the old skank was my mom.
Later, predictably, they sang “Take Me or Leave Me” from Rent as both sets of parents filmed it from opposite sides of the audience, because to get only one angle would have been a huge social injustice.
At worst, Dawn and I don’t get along. At best, we confuse each other. Like, she’s in a zillion Meetup groups that all have some misleading title like “Melville Museumgoers” but are just a cover for a bunch of women drinking pinot grigio in someone’s den and talking about how shitty their kids and ex-husbands are. She comes home, and I ask her something pointed like “Did you check out the Goya exhibit?” and she replies distantly, “I had a really good share today.” Then she pours white wine over some ice cubes, goes into her bedroom, shuts the door, and listens to one Macy Gray song on repeat.
Dawn thinks I should open up and be more receptive to groups. I remind her that history rarely reflects well on groups of people who bond and get carried away. “You’re more like your father every minute” is her muttered reply. Sometimes I get the feeling she wants to squash the Dad half of me like it’s a cockroach. She even tried to get me to use her maiden name for a hyphenated surname. I said the only way on Earth I’d do that is if her maiden name was Barr, which it is not.
Her most blatant attempt to “connect” with me came in the form of a trip to Disney World. We drove down, sharing a motel bed on the way. But my mother omitted one important piece of information, which was that we could only afford the vacation in the first place because some timeshare was having a promotion. In exchange for the discount rate, we had to sit through a three-hour tour of available units and get the skinny on why going in on a three-bedroom condo in Fort Lauderdale was the Best! Decision! Ever!
I knew I’d have to distract Dawn from the details of the pitch because she’s one of those people who always says “Yes!” when canvassers in New York stop us and ask if we care about starving children or if we get our hair cut. Even that time it made us twenty minutes late to see her favorite musical, which obviously is Rent.
To preoccupy her, I started whispering stories about the employees as they showed us around: “Milania and Alex commiserated about what a waste college was last week at TGI Fridays and wound up sleeping together even though he has a girlfriend.
“Devin who just offered us Diet Cokes obviously wanted to be an actor, and every time some retiree stops his pitch mid-sentence to ask a question, he hopes that they’ll request the ‘ABC’ monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross, but of course it never happens.”
She stared at me.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” she said.
“Remember what?”
“Your dad used to do that.”
I’d forgotten, but it came back to me in bits and pieces as soon as she said it. He’d tell us voyeuristic tales of the people in front of us at the DMV and make up backstories about the waitresses to keep us entertained while we waited to be seated at Perkins. At least, he’d do that in the rare instances he wasn’t locked in his bedroom working on his novel.
A lot of my memories from when I was little revolve around that closed door and Dawn taking me to get Dairy Queen or putting on a really inappropriate movie like Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction to distract me. We had even less money than we have now, so it made no sense to me when Dawn would say, “Daddy’s working.” I get it now that I’m older, but sometimes I worry, like a big old Lifetime movie child-of-divorce cliché, how much I had to do with him leaving. If I’m part of what he wanted to upgrade from.
Dawn was waiting for me to say if I remembered or not. But it’s not a time I like thinking about.
“Look.” I pointed to a pretty girl at the wheel of a Lexus, text-ing frantically. “Alex’s girlfriend just found out she’s pregnant.”
I check my phone. It’s eight twenty. We’d be well into the episode by now. I feel like I’m in detox. I decide to call my stepmom, Kira, who is an excellent person to answer what I want to ask because she’s written about pop culture for basically every highbrow magazine and blog on the planet.
“Hello, Scarlett!” Her lilting English accent is like aural Vicodin.
“Hey. Why do people like Jennifer Lawrence so much?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t think I like her, but if I tell any other American, I’m worried my citizenship will be revoked.”
Kira laughs, and I hear my baby half sister, Matilda, giggle, probably from Kira’s lap.
“Well, what don’t you like about her?”
I twist my mouth into a frown at the wall, struggling to find the words. I always want to be especially articulate for Kira.
“It’s like . . . she has such a good PR team that she knows she should pretend to have no PR team. Or she’s so overly calculated that she knows she should pretend to be uncalculated.”
“First of all, Scarlett,” says Kira, with a smile in her voice, “if you put this much thought into school, you’d be the valedictorian.”
“But seriously . . . why do people respond to that?”
There was a thoughtful pause on the other end. Then she finally said, “I’d wager people like looking at how little effort she puts into, say, late-night shows. They identify with it. It makes them feel like they can be lazy, and it’ll come off like effortless charm. Does that help at all?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“What’s this for?”
“No reason,” I mumble.
She has to go shortly after, profusely apologizing because she and my dad are late for a dinner party.
Dawn’s acted even more psycho since Dad married Kira, a gorgeous black Englishwoman who looks immaculate in Google image search, even as far back as page fifteen of the search results. She’s thirty, smart, and pedigreed as hell—she got six figures for her debut novel, which came out last year. She is one of those women who doesn’t eat any bread at restaurants but would never judge you for eating it. Whereas Dawn’s and my motto is basically “Can we get some more bread for the table?” in Latin. It makes way more sense for Dad to be married to Kira. I asked him once why he married my mom. He thought about it for a minute, then finally said, “She was fun.”
Not lately. Dawn hates when I geek out with Kira over books—the very first time we met, we immediately discovered our shared love of The Secret History. And Dawn really hated, before they got married and Kira’s book came out, how impressed and flattered I was that Kira used to talk to me about the editing process like I was a grown-up, an actual writer.
Now that the Lycanthrope cast photo is gone, a photo of Matilda is the only one wedged in the rusty outside door of my locker. She’s like the most perfect baby ever, good-natured and smiley with deep dimples, like a babyGap model. She may be my half sister, but she’ll grow up in a totally different world—even her name evokes intellect and specialness—which I try not to think about too much or I get jealous. It’s one thing to be jealous of Ashley Parker but a whole other thing to be jealous of a prehuman who doesn’t even know what her own feet are.
They live in a gorgeous, airy loft in Brooklyn. It makes sense with Matilda and Kira’s book and everything that they don’t really have much time to invite me over and why my dad doesn’t call as much as he used to. He’s probably really stressed out—I’m a lot like him, so I can tell. Last year I tried to persuade Dawn to let me move in with them, and she flipped out. If I’m so horrible and he’s so great, why doesn’t he ever come to see you? Why aren’t his checks ever on time?
It doesn’t have anything to do with me. She just doesn’t want to live alone. And more than that, she doesn’t want Kira and my dad to win.
I try my best to go to New York all the time. Avery and I go see Upright Citizens Brigade, then run to catch the last New Jersey Transit express from Penn Station back to Melville at one A.M. While we’re sitting on the train and Ave’s napping next to me, I look out the window at the pinpricks of twinkling lights receding in the darkness and think about living in New York. It’s like the closest thing to a John St. Clair show there is in real life, where everybody’s like my dad and Kira—smart and articulate and creative—and I’d never feel alone.
When I started writing fics, they were mostly about Connor and Becca. They’re not the most popular pairing—one-third of the Gillian love triangle, and Gillian’s sarcastic plus-size best friend—so it took me a while to figure out why people liked my fanfics as much as they did. I guess I’m funny, something I seem to be the last to know about. I never thought about it until last year at the mall when I made this girl pee her pants. I didn’t know her that well—Avery met her in their accelerated-genius Princeton math class and invited her along without asking me.
I don’t even remember what I said to make her laugh so hard; I just remember going on compulsively for, like, five minutes until she was squeezing her legs crossed in front of the clearance rack in Wet Seal and breathlessly begging me to stop. It’s mostly useless—a party trick, like being double-jointed. No decent college would accept someone with a 2.9 GPA just because she once made some girl have to run to the food court bathroom and stick her 7 jeans under the hand dryer.
Scarface: What’d I miss?
xLoupxGaroux: WELL. We’ve been talking about doing one last fic challenge. It didn’t really end. And the fix-its are okay, but they’re getting hammered. Every time someone uses the canon characters, people flip out on them about whatever ending they made up.
Scarface: What about the next matriculating class at Pembrooke?
xLoupxGaroux: Like, a number of years later, you mean?
Scarface: Yeah. All OFCs and OMCs. Blank slate, same world, same rules.
WillianShipper2000: ugh idk if i even WANT to make up my own, we could just switch to a diff show
xLoupxGaroux: TRAITOR
DavidaTheDeadly: actually . . . scarface, that’s not a bad idea.
Scarface: Willian, think about it: You can write your own couple to ship! And Loup, you’re always complaining there’s too much het fic. This would be a make-your-own.
xLoupxGaroux: OK. Hold up.
Loup is our de facto snarky leader. He doesn’t suffer fools, but his deepest, darkest secret is that he’s essentially a nice person. Otherwise he’d never tolerate Willian’s basicness—the Lycanthrope fandom can be snobby about that stuff.
xLoupxGaroux: There’s got to be a checks-and-balances system . . . one of us writes a bunch of installments, and the rest of us give feedback. Because when left unchecked, OFCs can be really goddamn irritating.
DavidaTheDeadly: calm down dude, i think we’ve all proven we’re above mary sues here.
DavidaTheDeadly: alright. so. installments?
I admit, my motive here is to keep us all together as long as possible. But I think theirs is too. Even if they don’t say it.
DavidaTheDeadly: scarface, it was your idea, so you first.
Scarface: Haha. Goddammit. OK.
xLoupxGaroux: Are you gonna cry again?
Scarface: Shut up.
xLoupxGaroux: Tell you what. If you kick us off with some original characters—who are not annoying—we can take it from there.
