Jan used to take me to “socialize” with her children—it was healthy, she told my mom. It was a step. A safe step. She brought me around to birthday parties, or out on excursions, for years. Until I turned fourteen and I wasn’t just a girl his mom made them hang out with anymore. There were probably rules against this, with Jan.
He’d told me he liked my freckles and I told him I’d had them forever, hadn’t he noticed? He’d shrugged. He’d kissed me. A month later, Jan found out and told Cole to put an end to it, and when I confronted him about it, he shrugged again, and that was the end of that. At first, I’d thought he was a coward, not standing up to his mom. Then I realized he probably didn’t care. He shrugged. The end.
I have since come to loathe all boys who shrug.
Rumor had it that he broke up with his last girlfriend through a text, and that he forgot to break up with the one before that at all before moving on. So, honestly, I guess it could’ve been worse.
An unfortunate by-product of the Cole breakup was that Emma eventually became ex-best-friend Emma, as well. Sadly, never to be replaced. My neighbor Annika was probably the closest thing I had to one now—when she wasn’t away at boarding school.
Cole, at least, had let me know in no uncertain terms that whatever we had was over. The shrug. With Emma, it was more of a drifting. There was no big falling-out; she just stopped answering her phone. Our friendship just kind of fizzled, like a sparkler burning down to your fingers. By the time you realize you were being burned, it was too late—the damage done, the spark already extinguished.
She’d gone on to become someone else—new friends, different crowd—while I remained left behind, painfully the same. A work in progress, Jan called me. Always in progress.
I assumed Jan had had a Talk with her children about privacy and such, because as far as I knew, neither had told anyone about my mother. And last year, when I found myself wandering the school halls for the first time, their faces were the only ones I recognized—their eyes momentarily meeting my own, then sliding quickly away. Three years later, and it was as if we’d never known each other at all.
Still, both of them were metaphorical bombs, as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t make eye contact without seeing myself reflected in their eyes—in their mother’s dinnertime conversation, in her papers. I did not like what I saw.
Cole was the one to speak first. “Mom’s taking a night course. And our dad’s away at work. So here we are.”
“Thanks,” I said. First word spoken in over three years. Not too hard. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.
But then he shrugged. No big deal. Whatever. We’re done. Take your pick.
Cole had my medical consent forms, the ones that Jan had used before to get me treated. The ones she needed to get me released. Because I was seventeen, and therefore not capable of making decisions for myself.
Emma was sixteen, had grown into her wide-set eyes, had also developed curves and a mean streak, if rumors were to be believed. Cole had only gotten taller, had filled out from football and lacrosse, and had his pick of girls, which he rotated through at an alarming pace.
“What’s Ryan Baker doing here?” Emma asked, like we were still friends—as if she hadn’t systematically ignored me until I stopped trying. And then, when Ryan turned at his name, she leaned into her hip and cocked her head—a study in flirtation—and said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just a few stitches,” he said.
“How much longer?” Cole asked the doctor, not making eye contact with me.
“Thank you for bringing the papers. But I have a ride,” I said.
“My mom said—”
“Ryan’s driving me.” I liked this version of me a lot better. The girl who got rides home from people she vaguely knew, who did not need to rely on the generosity of ex-friends. Resourceful. Resilient.
“Okay, fine.” Cole let the papers drop into my lap, his hands held up like he was relieving himself of some great responsibility. “I do have better things to do, you know.”
I wondered what Cole had been doing before his mom sent him here, because his aggravation at me seemed a little stronger than a one-month relationship more than three years earlier should warrant—especially one that ended with a shrug.
“Blame your mother,” I said, because that hurt.
“Or yours,” he said, which hurt even more, because he was right.
The ticking bomb. They knew the truth. I know, I know, I know who you are.
Who am I? Usually, I’m nothing. A student in your math class. Kelsey Thomas? A shrug. A girl in a sea of faces, passing unremarkably in the hall. Most of the time, I’m fine. Steady hands, steady course, X-ing out the boxes of the calendar—a string of days that blur together in typical fashion.
Other times, out of nowhere, I become afraid, like her. So afraid that I cannot move. Sometimes, for no reason that I can understand, I do nothing but lie in bed, like my mother does, needing the four walls and the silence. I sometimes become so paralyzed that I pretend to be physically ill, just so I can remain, unmoving, in the safety of my room. To know, at any moment, at every moment, that I am okay. I am safe.
But that’s nothing compared to my mother.
I’m the daughter of a woman completely ruled by fear. We live on a very fine line.
And they know.
—
After the papers were processed and the doctor released me to go home, leaving me with a pamphlet on how to watch out for signs of an internal head injury, I unwound the bandages from my hands and quickly looked myself over in the mirror. Nothing visible for my mother to worry over unnecessarily. I slid off the bed and joined Ryan at the front desk, where he was working his way through a bowl of lollipops. People kept smiling at him as they passed, like they couldn’t help themselves.
“Those your friends?” he asked, his tongue unnaturally red from the candy.
“No,” I said. “Their mom had paperwork the hospital needed. Long story.”
“Is she your guardian or something?”
“Not exactly,” I said, following him out into the parking lot. Jan wasn’t something I wanted to elaborate on, or explain.
“But your mom’s sick, right?” My shoulders stiffened on impulse, and he visibly cringed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to just say that.”
I guess there was some sort of talk, if Ryan had heard that. “Yes, she is.” It was the truth, but not in the way he meant it. Not cancer or something terminal. But it was an illness. Simpler to let them assume it was something physical in nature. Something they could understand.
Seeing Jan was part of my mother’s deal to keep me. Jan was assigned by the state. I’ve come to rely on her, but I also don’t totally trust her, because she reports to someone else, who decides my fate. My mother relies on her even more, and trusts her even less.
Especially since that article she wrote, that was decidedly about me.
My fear.
There was this study, before, that she referred to in the paper, on epigenetics and fear. How scientists repeatedly scared mice with specific odors—fear conditioning, it’s called—and then watched as their future offspring seemed to be scared of those same scents. They did it with cherry blossoms—I could not imagine being scared of cherry blossoms, but to each their own, I guess. Anyway, this was the basis of her article. Evolution in progress. A sign that gene expression can be altered. That fear can be passed down, conditioned, woven into the very core of us, down to the expression of our DNA.
Her article became the subject of a peer review discussion. Were my fears the product of my childhood? Was I fed them as an infant, held to my mother’s chest? Did the tension leech from her body into mine? Did I absorb some physical cues from her? Did she weave them into bedtime stories, whispered to me in the dark? Or—and this is Jan—was there something tying mine to hers, that goes deeper, all the way to my DNA?
On the one hand, I wasn’t a mouse.