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If Nan hadn’t been there, I would have said a whole lot more to Mom than I did.
Like How can you do this to me?
And If I was a boy you’d let me.
And You of all people should understand.
The things I couldn’t say out loud with Nan in the car, I said with my eyes instead. I knew that Mom caught every one by the way she looked back at me in the rearview mirror.
“A
I felt like I was swimming through a school of jellyfish: my whole body prickled and burned. We crept along the asphalt ring road, past the enormous Coleman tents with people barbecuing, until we came to the campsite the ranger had assigned me, number fourteen. It was under some scrubby maple trees. There was a fire ring with a dirty grate propped up over it, and the half-burned remains of someone’s cardboard beer box underneath. Mom and I barely spoke as we set up the tent. Someone in a nearby campsite had a radio playing top-forty hits. Another radio was broadcasting the baseball game. As we drove the tent stakes into the ground, an unspoken I hate you sizzled between us like a coal.
“Well, I think A
“It’s not really camping,” I’d grumbled.
“And you have your own little water spout. Look at that.”
As we unrolled the camping mat and sleeping bag, Nan wandered off to meet the people in the neighboring campsite.
“Will you keep an eye on my granddaughter?” I heard her saying. “She’s camping out all by herself.”
Mom and I stood across from one another in front of the car, enveloped in bitter silence. I wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Great campsite,” I said. “Think I’ll see any stars with all those streetlights?”
“Someday we’ll go on a real camping trip.”
“I was going to go on a real camping trip this weekend.”
We didn’t say another word. We only stood there, on the packed dirt where nothing grew, while the baseball a
“A
I shot Mom a look and started dismantling the tent.
“Take me home,” I growled.
I could see on Mom’s face that there was something terrible going on inside her, but in my anger it never occurred to me that she was being anything other than selfish and unreasonable.
On the car ride home, Nan had kept patting her hand.
I didn’t know then.
I didn’t know, and now she wanted to call me her happy nature girl, and tell me to go three hundred miles away on my own, to the very place where the whole ugly mess of my life had started, without even Noe to make it okay.
32
IT FELT LIKE THE HOUSE WAS filled with paint fumes: instant migraine when you walked in the door. Mom and I avoided each other’s eyes and timed our comings and goings to avoid intersection in the kitchen or hall. My head swarmed with equal parts guilt and indignation. Guilt for shutting her out. Indignation at the suggestion that Noe was anything less than my dearest friend in the world.
One day I came home to find a box of condoms on my bed, and a pamphlet titled What Is Consent?
As I skimmed it, my cheeks burned with something I tried to convince myself was mortification, but knew to be heartbreak instead.
Mom worried about boys. The first time it emerged that I had kissed one, she made me practice shouting No! and kneeing her in the groin until we both started crying.
Personally, I have never required the knee, although God help the poor fool who incites me to deploy it.
Oliver had been a sweet and respectful person in that department, and as I sat on my bed, I wished I could break ranks for long enough to tell Mom that one thing, just that.
The worst part of fighting is the moment you realize the other person is really hurting. It’s pretty impossible to keep going after that.
33
I APOLOGIZED TO MOM.
I really ca
We spent her birthday going for a hike in the forest, like we used to do all the time when I was younger. It had rained the night before, and the woods smelled fresh and wet and cold.
Later, Uncle Dylan and Aunt Monique and Nan came over and we sat in the kitchen eating a strawberry angel food cake Nan had made. “Leslie says you’re thinking about visiting Ava at Northern,” Uncle Dylan said. “She’d love to see you.”
My uncle Dylan has a ginger mustache and grayish-blue eyes. He used to play on the E. O. James hockey team, and now he has a construction business. My aunt Monique grew up in Chippewa, and now she is a kindergarten teacher. When I was little, I spent a lot of time at their house, playing with my cousins Ava and Max and watching movies on their big TV. I had my own bed there, and the same number of presents at Christmas. Uncle Dylan came to my soccer games and school recitals with Mom so I wouldn’t have a smaller audience representation than the other kids.
I love Uncle Dylan. In some ways, it was harder to let him down than Mom.
“I’ll pay for the bus ticket,” Uncle Dylan said. “How about that?”
I nod-shrugged. My cousin Max had sold me his old Honda last summer, but it was unreliable at the best of times and even I wasn’t stubborn enough to insist on driving it all the way to Northern alone.
Uncle Dylan ruffled my hair. “Thattagirl.”
I was on the couch after di
“Leslie, she’s too ski
“She’s tall, Ma.”
“You weren’t ski
“Scott was.”
A horrible silence. Evil spirits invoked. Moments later, the industrious clanging of pots and pans, as if to drive them away. Nan came out to the living room to say good-bye, and we talked for a few minutes, stupid stuff about school and gymnastics and the TV show I was watching. Mom stayed in the kitchen, putting away the rest of the cake.
Upstairs, later, I stepped onto the old pink scale in the bathroom. I was light as a feather but heavier, heavier, heavier than the sea.
34
I WOKE UP IN THE HOLE.
This happened sometimes.
The trapdoor swung open and there was nothing I could do.
Someone had sprayed fake snow on the windows at the Burger King. The funeral parlor had a wreath of bloodred holly on its door. The cafeteria at school was still hung with fake cobwebs. Due to budget cuts it was doubling as snow.
In Business Math I was a zombie.
In Art I stared at Steven’s pencil as it wound its way around the page.
In gymnastics I couldn’t stand the harsh fluorescent lights or the chirping voices of the girls who gossiped as they did their stretches and ran through their moves on the beam. Ms. Bomtrauer was on my case about my floor routine. I found myself clamping my teeth in irritation at every reminder to point my toes or lift my chin up when I finished a round-off.
“What are you doing?” Noe said, surprising me by the bench where our backpacks were piled.
“I’m taking a break,” I said.
“Bullshit,” said Noe. “Back to the mat.”
Her “team captain” mode was not without irony, but the briskness still grated. I wasn’t used to Noe treating me like another distractable girl who needed managing, instead of the best friend that I was. I followed her across the gym. On the floor, I went through my moves halfheartedly. Since overhearing Mom and Nan in the kitchen, I’d felt haunted and shaken. That morning at breakfast, Mom had pushed a bottle of vitamin pills at me.