I Was Told It Would Get Easier

by Abbi Waxman

  “It’s not a problem,” she said instead, the little traitor. “It’s not like we’re never going to see each other again, we’re going to be constantly together for seven days.” She smiled at the gate agent and added, “It’s probably a good thing.”

  Instead of being cool, I said, “Don’t you want to sit with me?” and even I could hear the telltale inflection of hurt feelings.

  Emily couldn’t, apparently, because she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh.”

  Emily started to turn away. “Mom, it’s not a big deal, I’ll see you at the other end.” Then she walked away and slid down a wall to sit on the carpet, putting in her earbuds and pulling out her phone. Already sitting separately.

  I turned back and saw the gate agent looking at me properly for the first time. Fantastic, now she thinks I’m one of those mothers who helicopters even while on an actual airplane.

  Instead the woman handed me a fistful of drink vouchers, and said, “I have a teenager, it’s delightful. Have a drink on me.”

  I smiled uncertainly, worried she was about to offer me some advice from her secure spot in the future of my life. Sometimes this advice is the best (Oh, yes, my four-year-old did that all the time, you don’t need to book a therapist, shampoo the rug) and sometimes it’s useless (Oh, you should never bribe your kids with M&M’s, they’ll get addicted to sugar and die an early death).

  However, the woman merely lowered her voice and said, “Good luck. Have a nice trip!”

  EMILY

  I was waiting in line at Starbucks when my phone started blowing up. Texts from Ruby, Sienna, Francesca . . . “Call me.”

  “What’s up?” I called Sienna first.

  “Dude,” she said, sounding stressed, which is so not her vibe. “Mrs. Bandin called Lucy’s parents and now her dad is flipping out.”

  Lucy is a junior, but she’s in a different friend group. “On a Sunday? What for? Why?”

  “No one knows. Lucy’s not saying. And I heard Bandin called Rosalie Sumner’s parents, too. What the actual frick?” She paused. “You know those girls, right?”

  I swallowed. “I’ll call you back.” I hung up and smiled at the Starbucks woman, despite the fact that I felt like throwing up. “I’ll have the Unicorn Frappuccino, please.”

  “What size?”

  I was on autopilot. “Venti, please.”

  I called Sienna back, trying to keep it together. “Hey. Yeah, I know them, we do stats together.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “No idea. Did she call anyone else?”

  “Ruby said she called Becca’s mom.” This was more serious. Becca was in an adjacent friend group. I knew Becca pretty well.

  “Wow,” I said, the sounds of the airport bending and stretching around me as I walked mechanically back to the gate. I could see my mom standing at the desk and headed towards her. Don’t say anything . . .

  “I gotta go, plane’s leaving soon. Text me.”

  “Cool.” Sienna hung up, and I reached the gate.

  Mom was pissed that we weren’t sitting together, but I was relieved. I needed time to think. I could only guess at what was going on, but my guess was pretty educated. I slid down the wall and sat there on the carpet, then distracted myself by getting a great pic of my drink superimposed on a plane so it looked like it had wings. I didn’t actually drink very much of it, but the picture was sharp.

  * * *

  • • •

  When we landed I had like three hundred snaps, forty-two texts, and even a Facebook message, which could only be my grandfather. I scanned the texts and took a deep breath. I put my phone away and waited to get off the plane.

  This is the bit of flying I hate the most. The plane lands and even though everyone’s flown before, half the passengers get to their feet and stand awkwardly waiting for the doors to open. It’s like repeatedly pressing the elevator button, totally pointless. I remember when I was younger, my mom whispered to me, People who punch elevator buttons over and over think they control the universe, and I bet land-and-stand people are button punchers all the way. They freak me out; they’re big and tall and standing between me and the door. Until this point we’ve all been civilized travelers, but now we’re revealed to be several hundred people in a highly flammable metal tube.

  I pretended my seatmate wasn’t looming over me, holding his carry-on six inches above my actual head, and took a picture through the window of the plane. I captioned it, added a cute location tag, and sent it. Here’s where I am, people, in case you were wondering. We’re like spacewalking astronauts, re-tethering ourselves to the mother ship by phone. Nobody wants to be that guy floating away with the reflection of the moon in his visor, right? Or the lone wildebeest on the nature documentary, stupidly eating grass while a lion creeps up on it. Our phones keep us safe in the herd, although right now I’m trying to ignore the vibrating coming from inside my bag. My English teacher Mr. Libicki would say I’m overdoing the metaphors, but he still talks about Myspace, so, you know, consider the source.

  JESSICA

  When I turned off airplane mode, a whole series of texts came buzzing in. For a moment I felt anxious, then remembered my kid was sitting somewhere on the same plane and was therefore unlikely to have been in a car accident. One was from Valentina, one from Laurel my assistant, and four were from Frances. Despite Frances’s many wonderful qualities, she is a terrible texter. She never sends one text if four are possible. She types, she hits send, she thinks of something else and sends that, and then she thinks of yet another thing and sends that. I’d asked her why she didn’t simply wait to hit send until all her thinking was done, and she was genuinely surprised and said her brain didn’t move on to the next thought until the first one had been sent. But as I’ve already noted, she makes up for it elsewhere.

  “I’ve been thinking about your new law firm . . .” read the first text.

  Then: “You can have those billboards you see all over LA, with a giant picture of you wearing a power suit in a dubious shade of blue . . .

  “And it can say: Wronged? Make those bastards feel the Burn!

  “Because your name is Burnstein, get it?”

  I grinned, then realized I was the only one still sitting in my section of the plane and scrambled to my feet. I checked the seat-back pocket, because that’s how I’ve lost several phones, then I spotted it hiding in my own hand. I need coffee.

  * * *

  • • •

  Emily was waiting for me, more or less patiently, inside the gate. She was staring at her phone, of course, but looked up and smiled as I came off the Jetway.

  “How was your flight?”

  I smiled back and said, “It was fine, how was yours?” like two normal people greeting each other. This was going to be easy. I cannot believe I thought that; had I learned nothing?

  “I watched movies, it was alright.” She turned and headed off, slinging her backpack on her shoulder. “We have to get the bags, right?”

  “Yeah.” I followed her, slipping my phone in my purse. Emily was walking and texting at the same time, which always makes me wonder if humans will develop some kind of crown-of-the-head sonar, like dolphins or bats. Maybe she already has it, because I’ve never seen her run into anyone. Bit of a disappointment, I won’t lie.

  * * *

  • • •

  The hotel was a standard chain hotel, but they’d added a lot more eagle-themed decor than would normally be advised. By focusing on eagles and flags, they’d managed to emphasize their location at the heart of American government without appearing to take sides. There were also a lot of state flags decorating the walls of the lobby, and, as always, I felt jealous of Michigan. I mean, yes, California has a bear, and that’s cool, but Michigan has a moose, an elk, an eagle, and what appears to be Sasquatch, at least in the version hanging i
n the lobby. There’s a lot going on, for a state flag.

  Up in the room, Emily immediately flipped open her laptop and connected to the Wi-Fi.

  “There’s an actual TV, you know,” I said. “Maybe we could watch a movie?”

  She looked up, surprised. “Wow, I haven’t watched an actual TV in ages.” She regarded the big box for a second, then shrugged and went back to watching the smaller screen in front of her. “I’m okay, thanks.”

  I frowned. “Okay you don’t want to watch a movie, okay you don’t want to watch TV, or okay something else?”

  She frowned at me. “Uh . . . I don’t feel like a movie. But go ahead.”

  “Won’t that bother you?”

  She waved her earbuds at me, then popped them in her ears.

  I hesitated for a second, then said, “Don’t you think it would be nice to do something together for once?”

  She didn’t hear me.

  “Em? Emily?”

  “What?” She pulled out a single earbud and glared at me. “Why do you talk to me when you can see I’m not listening?” The human voice is capable of many subtleties, but she wasn’t employing any of them.

  I shot back, “Why don’t you listen when you can see I’m talking to you?”

  She sat up a bit. “Alright, what is it?”

  I sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Clearly it does. What? Is it about the trip?”

  “No, I was saying it might be nice to do something together.”

  She waved her hand around at the room. “We are doing something together. We’re spending a week looking at colleges and stressing out about my lack of future. Isn’t that enough?” She paused. “It sure is for me.”

  That hurt a bit. I knew I should let it go, but I don’t know . . . I was tired, I had expectations I shouldn’t have had, and I was hungry.

  “Well, I’m sorry being around me is so exhausting.” I knew as soon as the words were out that I had just put myself in the wrong, which is an incredibly galling realization. It’s one thing to be irritated, it’s another to express it, and it’s a third to relinquish the high ground with your first salvo.

  I know Emily so well I could literally read her thought process. A minute widening of the eyes—she wanted to fire back. A breath—she knew she shouldn’t, because right now I was the one who owed an apology. And then her mouth opened and clearly her hormones had come crashing around the corner of her mind and told her to fire on all cylinders.

  “It’s not exhausting, being with you. It’s . . . stressful.” Her tone was calm. Then she stuck in the knife. “It’s not like I get to do it all that much so, you know . . .”

  Somewhere she has a list of my buttons, I swear. There’s probably an app for it. “Well, you have me all to yourself for a week now.”

  “Do I?” She sounded scornful. “Did you leave your phone at home?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Did you even put a vacation bounce on your email?”

  I said nothing, because I hadn’t. This is the problem with being able to work from anywhere . . . you end up working from everywhere.

  She regarded me coolly for another moment, then sighed and turned back to her screen, putting her earbuds back in so she didn’t hear my sigh.

  I went to take a shower. When I stepped in I felt like crying, but managed to wash that away with everything else.

  When I came out of the bathroom, she was asleep. Or pretending to be asleep. It’s a funny thing; at home she never goes to sleep before I do, but right now she was sacked out at 9:00 p.m. Which wasn’t even 9:00 p.m. for us, seeing as we had just arrived from the other coast. At home she wouldn’t even have started her homework.

  But I climbed into bed and turned out my light, too. Two can play at that game.

  Monday

  Washington, DC

  8:00 a.m.: Warm-up breakfast

  10:00 a.m.: Georgetown University

  12:00 p.m.: Lunch near the White House

  2:00 p.m.: George Washington University

  3:00–6:00 p.m.: Optional Ford’s Theatre visit or tour of the Mall (included in your package)

  7:00 p.m.: Dinner and dancing at El Presidente—wear comfortable shoes! (three-course meal included, drinks extra)

  Overnight in Washington

  4

  JESSICA

  In the $2 billion industry that is college admissions consulting, Excelsior Educational Excursions—or E3, as they’ve recently rebranded themselves—is a pretty big player. They certainly rule the Los Angeles market and when parents say, about college tours, “Oh, we’re E3-ing the whole thing,” it’s a quick way to identify themselves as the kind of parent I like to call Private Helicopter Parent. They aren’t bad people, necessarily—I mean, here I am, doing it myself—but they enjoy ostentatiously subcontracting their parenting, whereas I’m mildly anxious about it. They love to drop phrases like our Latin tutor, our tennis coach, our college admissions professional. I would like to think it’s because they’re as freaked out as I am by the responsibility of successfully launching a brand-new boat into a perilous ocean, but I think it’s because they’re dicks who like spending money and showing off about it.

  E3 offers a highly personalized, custom tour itinerary, and yet manages to book ten kids with accompanying parents on every tour. I guess they’re all individual in exactly the same way. The woman in charge had set up a “meet and greet breakfast and information session” in a small conference room at the hotel. Our arrival was not auspicious.

  “Crap,” said Emily, pausing as soon as we stepped into the room. “It’s Alice.”

  Alice Ackerman was a girl in her grade, and her mother was supposedly a friend of mine.

  Damn it.

  EMILY

  I was severely non-stoked to see Alice Ackerman and her crazy mother. Usually my friend group knows everything about everyone all the time, so how did this actually useful information get missed? I wonder if they knew and didn’t tell me. Great, now I’m anxious-er than ever. More anxious. Whatever.

  Alice is the kind of girl we’re all supposed to be, but I don’t even want to want to be her, if you get me. Just seeing her gives me a level of cognitive dissonance my teenage prefrontal cortex can’t even handle (AP Psychology, just saying). I get a jumping nerve in my eye and a pain in my butt. Here’s the thing I do envy about Alice: She doesn’t give a shit. She didn’t go to middle school with any of us; she arrived on the first day of ninth grade and assumed control ten days later. Even seniors talk to her. Perhaps instead of middle school she’d gone to some kind of underground training facility, where alpha girls are hatched from pods. Her father is something important at a studio; she goes to a lot of premieres, and shops all the time. She got her license recently—I heard her parents hired a driving teacher who taught her two hours a day and took the written for her—and then received an adorable little electric car and it was, you know, perfect. The car has its own hashtag.

  She and I were friends at the beginning. I guess she saw I was mildly popular and kind of funny (I’m not saying that, my friends say that), so she hung out with my friend group for a while. But after a few golden weeks of total focus, she shut down on me like an eclipse, and for the last two years she’s left me alone, out here in the penumbra (see, I did pay attention in Physics).

  But that’s what she’s like. She spins at the center of the high school universe and her gravity pulls people in, but she spins so fast that most of them get flung back into the outer rings. (Dude, I am killing this outer space metaphor; Mr. Libicki would be stoked.) Now she has a core group of sycophants friends she likes to tease, torment, and favor, plus a long tail of lesser kids who watch out for crumbs, like those little fish that follow sharks.

  Of all the kids at school who could have been on this tour, she’s the one. FML, right?

  And her mother is a total freaking nig
htmare. My mom is never mean about other people, and she once said that Mrs. Ackerman was not a nice person. That’s strong stuff, for Mom.

  JESSICA

  Daniella—Call me Dani—Ackerman is not the kind of mother I want to be, but I think she’s the kind of mother I’m supposed to want to be. Back at the beginning of ninth grade, her kid and mine were friendly for a bit, so I invited her for coffee. It made me want to blow my brains out, not even joking, and I hang out with lawyers all day. She’s one of those women who are on top of their own game, their daughter’s game, the school’s game, and anyone else’s game that was available for topping. She knew where the school stood in relation to every other school in Los Angeles, she knew where the students matriculated, she knew what subjects her kid was going to take for the next four years and what her SAT and AP scores were going to be, more or less (this was years in advance, don’t forget). She knew which extracurriculars Alice was going to take, what sports she was going to do—nothing too common, something useful at application time . . . javelin? Something where the college would have a team but not enough players.

  As Dani had laid out her four-year plan for Alice, I stirred my coffee into coldness and tried not to burst into hysterical tears. Honestly, at that point I was pleased Em seemed happy at school and ate her lunch and did her homework before midnight. I had started thinking maybe I could work from home Friday afternoons so I could see a bit more of my kid (not that Emily is ever home on a Friday night, but this was before all that started), and hadn’t realized I was supposed to be marshaling my forces for college already. Thank GOD the girls drifted apart so I hadn’t ever had to hang out with Dani again. We smiled and cheek-kissed at school events and made empty promises to have coffee or lunch or take an exercise class together, but we both knew these were social-grooming promises and were never actually going to happen. Like I have time to take an exercise class.